Windows 8.1 upgrade on Virtual box

Wanted to update the Windows 8 VM I keep handy on my MacBook Air to Windows 8.1 but:

The more info being:

OK sounds easy - first tried turning on PAE and NX in the virtual box settings, rebooted and retried. But the same error occurs.

Quick google later and discovered it's connected to this Bug 11899 - CMPXCHG16B instruction is disabled by default. Enabled it for this VM:

vboxmanage setextradata "win8" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1

Also needed to enable 3D on the graphics card:

And then sucessfully installed the update:

Shredded Beef for Tacos

Shredded Beef for Tacos

Serves 8

Ingredients

• 1.2Kg pack flank steak (Costco) or 2-3lb of lean braising/stewing steak
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 4-5 cloves garlic
• 2-3 red chilies
• 1-2 tsp dried oregano
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 2 tsp smoked paprika
• good pinch ground white pepper
• good pinch salt
• 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp black treacle

Method

Sear the beef pieces, place in a pan with a good fitting lid or slow cooker with the other ingredients. give it all a good swish round to mix. 

Cook for around 6-8 hours until the beef easily falls apart. then with a fork shred the beef (the onions etc will be very soft by now too).

Serving

Serve with warmed crispy tacos, sour cream, sliced peppers salad and cheese & fresh coriander.

Supermarket mini salsa/guacamole/sour cream combo is hard to beat for value.

Storage

Once cooled this freezes very well.

Fix the Mac OS printer setup to work with a network Samsung printer 2013

We use a Samsung CLP-6220 network printer from a variety of PC and Mac hardware. It's a great printer - does double sided A4 colour which is just what I need for printed reports. Just one problem - more often than not when printing from one of the Macs it just doesn't work. The Mac spends ages searching for it on the network and can never find it. The Windows and Linux computers have no problems.
If you follow the help on one of Apple's forums, you can 'reset the printer system'. This just deletes all your printers (!), but once you add the printer again it works. OK - so I thought maybe the printer's IP address has changed (because the network uses DHCP), so the mac can't find it any more. So I went into my router control panel and fixed that by adding an Address Reservation so it always gets the same one.

But nope. It doesn't fix it. After living with it for a bit (delete/add the printer sort of works around it although its painful) I had another look. In /etc/cups/printers.conf is the address of the printer. Theres a line in there that specifies the URL for the printer

<Printer Samsung_CLX_6220_Series__SEC001599494557_>UUID urn:uuid:6893396a-3732-3c37-6762-23d7856fdb44Info Samsung CLX-6220 Series (SEC001599494557)MakeModel Samsung CLX-6220 Series PSDeviceURI dnssd://Samsung%20CLX-6220%20Series%20(SEC001599494557)._printer._tcp.local./

It looks like it uses some sort of zeroconf setup so that it should be able to find the printer automatically. It'd be nice if that works!! But it clearly doesn't for my network setup.

So I tweaked it using the 'lpadmin' tool as root so that its permanently on my fixed IP for the printer

sudo lpadmin -p Samsung_CLX_6220_Series__SEC001599494557_ -v socket://192.168.0.11:9100/

So far, it's worked just fine.