Tag: tech

April 21st, 2008

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.

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

I gave up on windows. Between the old Compaq laptop not liking the reinstall disc, and XP d ing a d sc n ct e ery f w s conds on the wireless… I gave it the boot. Currently running Xubuntu 6.06 (zoo boon too) on the desktop and I’m going to put Edubuntu on the laptop. The other laptop still has XP and Allison has her work macbook.

I chose Xubuntu because the Ubuntu user forums are fantastic, and I didn’t want all the bloat etc that comes on Ubuntu or Kubuntu. (Although Kubuntu is very nice and I used that for a while) Xubuntu uses a desktop manager called XFCE and it’s very lightweigh and bloat-free. It’s not quite as configurabale as KDE on Kububtu but it’s good enough for me.

Linux definately takes some learning. But that was always my complaints about macs… they assume that everyone wants a function to work the same way. That and one-button-mouse issues… I’ve actually reformatted this HDD several times with different linux “distros” (flavors) and redone ubuntu a couple times as well.

at the moment, I’m taking a break from installing MythTV on this box. MythTV acts like a digital video recorder on the computer. I run the TV cable through a card on the computer and record the shows I want to watch later. Like TiVO without the monthly fees. The idea is to record shows down here, then burn them to a DVD and watch them upstairs or whatever, but I’ve got to get it running first. I’ve thought about reviving the other desktop on the floor and using knoppmyth on a dedicated box, but I’d rather just run it in a background session on this machine and refurbish the other one later.
Doing things like “compiling source code” still makes no sense to me. It’s kind of like copying off someone else’s chemistry test… the answers are there and I have no frigg’n clue what it means, but it seems to get the results I’m looking for.

and on.

pb