Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.

On my new Windows 10 desktop I wanted an on-screen display (OSD) of system performance overlay while gaming - similar those benchmarking videos one finds on YouTube. While I don’t overclock my CPU or GPU, I still do want to know the utilization and temperatures, as these give me a hint as to whether the system is thermal throttled or bottlenecked.

I found that Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 was running very slowly on my brand new Windows 10 PC.

Initially I thought it was to do with VirtualBox, e.g. insufficient cores or memory, the display controller (VBoxSVGA), insufficient video memory, etc. And then I thought it might be an AMD thing, so had a look at BIOS, e.g. nested AMD-V, etc.

We will remember 2020 for all the wrong reasons, but on a lighter note, 2020 has been quite the year… for silicon!

• The incredible performance of Apple’s M1 and A14 (@ 5m).
• AMD crushing Intel with its Ryzen 5000 series CPUs (@ 7nm).
• The neck-and-neck race between the AMD Radeon (@ 7nm) and Nvidia RTX.
• The launch of next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony.

I just got myself a new desktop PC! I am not much of a Windows user, but am looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077! I have never built a PC before, so I did the research and learnt a lot. Here is what I bought and why.

Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either:

• Launch WebEx for the contact from the Contacts App share sheet,
• Or just run the shortcut to select email to launch WebEx.