phillbecker

I picked up a new mp3 player the other day. It had good reviews at newegg, 2gig flash memory and a 1 gig microSD all for under $30.

To sum up the review so you can get on with life … it’s a piece of crap. Don’t get it.

First of all, it seems to be of a new generation of media device that is recognized as a media device and only lets you transfer music through Napster or the Microsoft player .. whatever it’s called. I don’t use either and could not figure how to just drag music over on the the player, unplug and play.

Ubuntu recognized the device and let me move files over. Then when I unplugged it would get stuck (as it is now) on a screen that says “Refresh Database” and stay there. Tech support had me connect the device by

1. Power down device
2. Slide “hold” button to right (on)
3. Hold left search key (previous)
4. Connect to USB

Now windows recognizes it as a USB device. Then he tells me to reformat the drive in FAT32 (it was FAT16). Now it works. great. I’m happy.

So I load up almost 3gigs worth of songs and take it to work for an 8 hour shift driving around. And hear “Crisis” and “Corruption Inc.” over and over and over again. It looks like the device only recognized 86 songs to play. (they both have myspace pages I refuse to link to)

Feck.

So I take it home, reformat the device and the microSD. Great it boots again. Load music. great it’s happy still. Load up the device, disconnect … “Refresh Database.”

DAMMIT

I’m just going to call Sansa and tell them to send me something better, or the version 1 of the device so at least I can load Rockbox on it (oh yeah. I tried that too. turns out V2 is incompatible at the moment.)

At least my ipod is handy as a paperweight. This one is complete crap. OH! and the screen got scratched before I even took it out of the house to listen to it. Just sitting around on my desk it got scratched!

Like I said at the beginning. Don’t get it, it’s a waste of time.

I’m not a fan of computer hardware that behaves the wants to, rather than the way I tell it to. My wife thinks it’s a control issue. She’ probably right.

I was getting peeved that the music on my (gifted) iPod wasn’t readable by anything that couldn’t decode the iTunes database structure. Well, the music is readable, but you can’t tell what song you’re clicking on unless you memorize the length and size of every song. The names are replaced with things like FWOX.mp3 in folders of similar names with dissimilar tracks (not of the same album). Plus you couldn’t copy (decoded) music from the iPod to another computer unless you purchased it through iTunes and were transferring it to one of your five approved machines. And you couldn’t play open-source music formats (ogg, flac, etc)

Well, I fixed that.
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Well, I got the onboard wireless card to work on this laptop. It’s a compaq presario v2000 and the wireless chipset is a Broadcom.
I tried using ndiswrapper and had a heck of a time finding the right M$oft drivers. Then it didn’t work. (more…)

Dad got us a couple sandisk usb drives as gifts. Nice. Except they come pre-loaded with an autoinstalling menu driver called U3. It automatically makes a symbolic CD drive and runs programs and the launcher from that.

Now, if you have never used a floppy disk or liked flashy graphics to tell you how to do simple computer actions in a specified way, you might like it.

If you’re like me and want to uninstall all the crap and just use it like a portable hard drive, go here

http://www.u3.com/uninstall/

Tell U3 what you think, download the program, insert you drive, run the uninstaller and reclaim your drive.

Make sure you don’t have any important info on there first. It will be destroyed.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer.. you deserve the viruses and spyware you are plagued with. The better alternative has been Firefox for quite some time. But you knew that. So I thought I’d just post my tweaks.

I run Firefox off linux at home and off my iPod using the PortableApps version when I’m at a windows machine.

Essential plugins:
Foxmarks - allows you to synchronize bookmarks across different computers
Tab X 0.9.2 - adds a “close tab” X to browser tabs
Adblock with FilterSetG (not plus) - stops advertisements before you see them whith a customizable black list.
FoxyTunes - controls your media player from your browser window. No floaties or system trays to mess with. Mine is set to control dBpowerAMP, which also runs off my iPod (very cool)
Gmail Manager - allows you to check and manage multiple Google Mail accounts.
Brushed (Theme) - cool silver theme for Firefox

Just FYI. And also so I can find them all again if I need to.