Last year July I wrote about how I connected some internet services to help my dad make it easier to get access to his electronic news paper and magazine subscriptions. Over that last year his memory has been slowly getting worse making it even harder for him to remember making very minor computer related hiccup an unsurpassable hurdle for him.

Over the last 12 months the process detailed in the post ‘Helping out the old man’ has been working fine for most of the time. Occasionally I had a re-authorize IFTTT again for Google Mail and Dropbox, but nothing serious. But for the last couple weeks things started to break down and I haven;t been able to fix it using the services used (IFTT combined with Google Mail and Dropbox). For some reason saving attachments stopped working, by either not saving anything at all or saving and image instead of the attachment.

Since moving to an SSD drive space is a limited resource. For several development tasks I am using a virtual machine whose disk image (dynamically allocated storage) has grown to approximately 45.5 GB. To free up some space quickly (relative term) I decided to shrink this particular disk image.

At the time of this writing the VirtualBox tool ‘modifyhd’ of VBoxManage only supports the disk format ‘VDI’.

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