Daily Battles: Volume Control Stops Working in Windows 10 After Windows Update

Before I begin, I must say that this is working! Writing and venting about all these daily battles I endure is actually making me feel happier!! Of course, I hope all you readers out there also felt happier too, whether because now you know how to fight your battles, or simply because you felt your life is better after witnessing my struggles. 😜

Since I was on the topic of windows update breaking things for me in my previous post, let me describe another battle I had to fight, again because of Terrible Windows Updates! This event actually happened a while back. But because of the amount of time I had to spend fixing it, it for sure will linger in my mind for an extended time.

As I mentioned before, one of the many existences of Philip, my virtual smart home butler, is on this super old Windows 10 desktop machine that my boss, ehh, I mean my wife, threw away over 10 years ago. I connected a BlueTooth receiver to this box and then hooked up my whole home speaker system to the receiver. This way Philip has a way to speak to everyone no matter where he/she is in the house. Through this set up, Philip can also manage tasks such as music playing, greeting the King (only the King, not the Queen or anyone else) when he comes home, announcements on visitors/lurkers/intruders detected etc., and mundane things such as telling the young masters to practice piano, do homework, clean room, go to bed, yada yada yada. So on that day when Philip started yelling at everybody on top of his lung throughout the day, I knew something had gone terribly wrong.

When everyone is unhappy with Philip, guess what, Lanny has to troubleshoot right away. Philip controls the volume of his voice through Window's built in volume mixer as shown below. The BlueTooth receiver shows up as a headphone in the volume mixer, and when volume of the System Sounds changes, the volume of the headphone also changes at the same time. However, that no longer behaved the same way. Even though the volume slider of the headphone moves together with the system sounds slider, the volume did not change and remained maximum.

Restarting windows didn't help. Restarting the BlueTooth receiver was useless. Deleting the BlueTooth device and reconnect didn't make a difference.

Since I am one of the first few to notice this problem (it is pretty hard to ignore everyone yelling at you, Philip, the Queen, the young masters), there wasn't much resources online on how to resolve the problem. After hours of troubleshooting, I finally nailed the culprit. YES, AGAIN, IT IS WINDOWS UPDATE BREAKING THINGS THAT USED TO WORK JUST FINE.

What I had to do to resolve the issue was to uninstall the automatically installed Windows Update, disable Windows Auto Update, and then search for an older version of the BlueTooth driver to replace the one on my computer.

Of course, many, many people's ears also suffered and complained and begged for help such as here and here and here.

In case you are still suffering from this problem and your ears are still hurting everyday, the best solution is:

1.    Open Windows Registry (regedit.exe).
2.    Jump to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Bluetooth\Audio\AVRCP\CT
3.    Create REG_DWORD DisableAbsoluteVolume and set its value to 1.
4.    Restart Windows.

Just another daily battle I had to fight, and another interesting episode of living with Philip, my virtual smart home butler, together with a few non-voluntary human test subjects...

Ciao!

Listen to one of Philip's favorite radio stations on Pandora:

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Task Scheduler Error - The specified account name is not valid

Microsoft Windows systems have a built in utility called Task Scheduler that can be actually quite handy when you need to schedule things to run on a fixed schedule with some flexibility in conditions. It is probably used more by system admins on the Windows Server family of products to schedule maintenance work or kick off certain routine jobs.

I use Task Scheduler mainly for scheduling routine work for Philip Jane, my home-brewed Smart Home Assistant, such as reminding my kids that they are going to be late for school, or it is time to go to bed. By the way, the name Philip comes from the book The Outcast by Maoni and Jane comes from the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, both I highly recommend. I used to write my own scheduler, until one day I realized that I could just use this existing utility and save myself a bunch of work. So I incorporated this as part of the Philip Jane microservice ecosystem. It has been working great for many years, until this morning.

School season has just started, so I was turning some expired tasks back on, so Philip Jane can dutifully provide friendly reminders to my kids (so I don't have to). As I was saving the changes, I got an error message saying The specified account name is not valid.

Mind you that the system has been working for years and I had never ran into this problem. As an expert in Windows system (I used to make a living as a system admin), I sincerely rebooted the physical machine (one of Philip's many existences) that hosted Philip's scheduler functionalities, hoping that would resolve the problem, which it didn't. Now the research began. Sure enough, I am not the only one who suffered.

Turned out once again (and again and again and again), the culprit is a recent Windows Update. The update now requires local user name to explicitly include the server name. Even though I am not running a Windows server, the same restriction applies to all Windows 10 systems that had the latest update. So instead of using Lanny as the login name, now I have to explicitly use Philip\Lanny as the login name.

If this is what Microsoft wants, then why still default to the local user name when task scheduler prompts for a login is beyond me. But at least this allowed me to proceed.

Here's a discussion of the exact problem on TechNet, under Windows Server 2019 support. TechNet is the big knowledge repo for all Microsoft related support docs.

TechNet Discussion

But I want to go back to the real culprit again. This is a Windows 10 update forced upon me by Microsoft. And every time when I install Windows Update, I am always under the fear that something used to work will break. That is just not a great user experience. But hey, I am not the only one complaining, and I don't think complaining works when it comes to Microsoft.

For those of you that also ran into this problem, hope this blog post helps!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Google Hangouts Sending Messages To Yourself

Google Hangouts (used to be called Google Talk) is a free chat app provided by Google that supports WiFi calls, video conferencing in addition to the basic text messaging capabilities. It is the main way of communication between my teenage daughter and me when she is at school and I am at work, because I am a GOOD parent and held my ground firm and still refuse to give her a smart phone (which makes her kind of unique in her social groups).

Recently, whenever I send her a Google Hangout message, I would also get the notification on my phone for that message I just sent her. And this is becoming really annoying!!

Searched online but couldn't find much useful info. Then it just dawned on me. In my recent troubleshooting with Google Home setup, I had to add my daughter's Google account to my Google Home set up in order to properly grant permissions for different users. Could this be the problem?

By the way, if you don't already know, Google Home is a Google-made smart speaker/voice assistant like Amazon's Echo, which can be used to control smart home devices, translate, perform knowledge look up, play music, and used as a timer.

Upon removing my daughter's Google Account from within the Google Home app, sure enough, the notification stopped when I messaged her once gain in Google Hangouts app. Mystery solved! The underline problem is that Google Hangouts and Google Home apps both use the Android underneath Google Account(s) set up to determine what's the proper action to take. But since Google is NOTORIOUS for one project group not caring about another project group's work, end users ended up having a bad experience and had to troubleshoot by themselves.

This reminds me of the fight I had with Google Home Mini not working with Google Mesh WiFi, and the fight I had with Google Home multiple account/owner issues earlier. But those would be the contents of another Daily Battles blog post.

Happy Fighting!

Video of the Day:

This video of Kangaroos Hopping in Snow somehow 
is really bringing peace to my mind!!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

A great summary article on what happened inside Google for the last three years

Sharing a good read, an article on WIRED summarizing all the events happened inside Google for the last three years. WIRED talked with 47 current and former Google employees and then produced a great story explaining the bumpy road Google had to take in the last three years. The article was written by NITASHA TIKU, a senior writer at WIRED.

THREE YEARS OF MISERY INSIDE GOOGLE, THE HAPPIEST COMPANY IN TECH

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Everything About End-to-End Sprinkler Repair

A typical yearly routine for an American suburban family during spring time is to fix their sprinkler system. It always amazes me that the sprinkler system can't just stay functional and would always require some form of repair after each winter. Is this something the sprinkler parts manufactures conspired together to make more money from consumers while making their life miserable on a fixed schedule?

This year, I had to go through some extended effort to restore my sprinkler system back to normal. Here I share some knowledge I learned so you know what to do if this happens to you.

First, the Easy and Normal Stuff 

If all you have to do is to twist off the leaking sprinkler head, or event better, just the top part  (with the hole where water comes out) above ground, you are in luck! These parts are general very cheap at the local hardware store. The only hassles you have to go through are to locate the leak, make a trip to the store, and then replace them.

If a connecting pipe is leaking or broken, dig down around the sprinkler head so you can get to the broken part is pretty much the only extra work you have to do. Special tools (to untwist the broken part by grabbing into the plastic part in the opposite direction) might be needed.

If an underground PVC pipe is leaking, you might need to do some extra digging to expose the troubling section. Then just cut the broken section with a cable saw (so you don't have to dig a much bigger trench), then replace it with extendable PVC joints you can easily get at the local hardware store. You can glue it on, or get the more expensive twist on parts.


Next, the Sprinkler Controller

You should be able to find a sprinkler controller box somewhere in your house, most likely in your garage. This controller box lets you schedule the start time and watering duration of the various stations (zones) of your sprinkler system.

Typically, the control box is directly plugged into an outlet for power while also have a battery inside. So in case there's a power outage, you don't lose all your settings in the control box.

Turned out that the battery is a crucial part of the system, and I learned it the hard way. After hours of troubleshooting different part of my entire sprinkler system, I finally identified the problem. My controller wouldn't turn on the water stations (plus all kinds of weird stuff) even though it is plugged into a power outlet all because the 9V battery inside was low on juice. After replacing the battery, things started working again! So always check your battery as a first step of troubleshooting your sprinkler system.


Moving On to the Sprinkler Valve Box

When I tested the different stations, one station simply does not have any water coming out of the sprinkler heads. Another station would generate a lot of clicking sounds and all the sprinkler heads would shoot water straight up like a geyser periodically. After researching and consulting experts at the local HomeDepot, I found out that the problem could be related to the solenoid and diaphragms inside.

Solenoid is the black device inside the sprinkler valve box in charge of turning on and off a water station (zone). First thing to try is to take the solenoid apart and wash the diaphragm. Debris or sand in dirty diaphragm could cause the solenoid to malfunction.

I cleaned my two diaphragms for the two problematic water stations, and they remained problematic.

The next thing to try is to replace the problematic solenoid. It is important that you get the right brand of solenoid because different brands could have different sizes. I ended up buying my solenoids from a specialty store, because HomeDepot and Lowe's didn't carry the brand of solenoid I needed to replace mine.

After I replaced my two solenoids for the two problematic water stations, one started working while the other one kept shooting out periodic geysers with clicking sounds just like before. To understand things better, I swapped the two solenoids. Still, the station that got fixed remained fixed while the one shooting out geysers kept shooting out geysers. This was a good indication that the problem with the station shooting out geysers had nothing to do with the solenoid. In other words, I didn't really have to replace that one. Well! At least I fixed one bad station. That's progress.


Back to the Sprinkler Controller

In the sprinkler controller box, I found a station without any wire connected to the screw and a loose wire not connected to any station. In the valve box, I also found a wire not connected to any of my solenoids. So I connected the remaining bad water station solenoid to this wire and connected the loose wire to the extra station. After turning the station on, no clicking sound and no periodic geyser now. In fact, nothing happened.

To make sure I was not going crazy, I disconnected the solenoid from the extra station and then simply swapped wires between the two stations I worked on. As soon as I did the swap, the station that had the clicking sounds and periodic geysers started working correctly, and the station that I had fixed before now stopped working. I was completely bewildered.

Not until I consulted a friend who had much deeper knowledge about sprinkler systems did I find out that for the same sprinkler controller box, individual stations can go bad on their own. So having most stations working correctly with a controller doesn't mean all stations will work correctly. Also the wires are actually color coded, so I should make sure the wire I connect in the control box should match the color of the wire I am connecting in the valve box. No wonder I couldn't get the extra station to work, because I AM COLORBLIND!!

Now understanding things much better, I simply rewired the problematic water station wire to the extra station. And voila, water came out of sprinkler heads horizontally instead of vertically, and there's no more clicking sound. Turned out this station is a good station.

So really the problems I had was a bad control station in the control box and a bad solenoid for another station. I got unlucky because I replaced a perfectly fine solenoid. I also got real lucky because I had an extra functioning station I could swap to.


The Bonus

As I was troubleshooting the entire sprinkler system, I noticed that the water station labels and the actually wiring didn't match. I actually have a non-labeled, but wired station. Turning on this station for a quick test revealed that this is actually for a dripping system for some of my trees in the front yard. Turned out that for the five years I have lived in this house, I have never turned this station on and never watered those trees. No wonder those poor trees are getting weaker and weaker (wife mentioned about color change of these trees, but of course, I couldn't tell, because I AM COLORBLIND!).

Anyway, all the mystery have been solved. And I have another year minus two months of peace before I have to mess with sprinkler system repairs again. And now that I know much more about the system, something else that I don't know will break next time.

Hope you enjoyed reading this for whatever reason you came to my blog! 😌 At least now you are equipped with more knowledge of sprinkler system repairs, so when your sprinkler system breaks, it's probably from something I didn't write about in my blog post. 😜 Just kidding!


BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com