Justin.MadIrish.net

I recently purchased a 2GB SanDisk Sansa Clip MP3 player. It showed up and looked great. Problem was I plugged it into my XP laptop and it was recognized as a new USB device, but it wouldn't show up in my 'My Computer' menu. I purchased this particular model MP3 player precisely because it didn't need any extra synchronization software - you just drag mp3 files onto the device drive and they load on the player (supposedly).

After searching online for some time I finally found the solution to my problem at http://www.fixya.com/support/t479435-computer_doesn_t_see_mp3. I'll repost the fix here in case anyone else has trouble finding a solution to this problem.

I finally got my PSC 1315 working (scanning *and* printing) after many hours of toil. Only by following the directions at http://hplip.sourceforge.net/install/manual/distros/mandriva.html was I ever able to get the thing working. Don't try and use the Mandriva drivers and RPMs or you'll never get the scanning part to work. Be sure to follow all the directions exactly and you should have success!

It snowed, heavily, here in Philadelphia over the last weekend. It was a nasty mix of slush, sleet and snow too. All in all it made conditions pretty gnarly. So I wasn't at all surprised when, while walking around the neighborhood I spotted one of the old style iPod Shuffles stuck in the snow under a thin layer of ice. The white Shuffle was nearly invisible in the snow, and I honestly don't know how I even saw it. What I was surprised by, was that after chipping the device out of the ice (it was buried so well that I couldn't wrench the headphones out of the ice layer they had frozen in) it looked relatively intact. I had to abandon the headphones though. So after taking the device home I figured I had nothing to lose and plugged it into my computer. Lo and behold - it still worked!

Ok, so buying bleeding edge hardware is not exactly smart when you want to run a Linux box. I recently purchased a bunch of new parts, among them an Intel dg965wh motherboard, a new dual core Pentium processor, and an XFX Nvidia 7300 graphics card. I should have known better when installing Windows XP on top of this hardware was problematic, and that was *with* manufacturer provided drivers.

Installing Linux was next to impossible. I tried Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10 and even Ubunto 7.04, all with no success. I finally got Mandriva 2007 working by adding the additional parameters:

all-generic-ide pci=nommconf

To the install options. Even this though isn't enough. You have to set your BIOS drive settings to 'AHCI' from 'IDE' to even get this working. Then after the install you have to make sure to modify the lilo boot so that the above parameters are provided.

Whoa! What a crazy freakin' weekend. I hate to blog about "regular life" because I find it to be incredibly mundane, but nobody reads this blog anyway so what the heck. Several things occurred to me over the weekend.

I've given a lot of thought to my (less than) trusty PDA of late. I've finally decided that PDA's simply aren't worth it. I have several reasons for this decision, but I think the bottom line is that tomorrow I'm going to go out and buy a small bound book to replace my PDA.

1. Size - My Tungsten E2, along with it's titanium case, is about the size of a small soft cover novel. It weighs a couple of pounds and won't fit comfortably in any of my pockets. This means that I have to carry a bag wherever I go, often times simply for my PDA. I take one look at my wife's iPod Nano and wonder why my device, which has a tenth of the storage space is so huge and clunky.

2. Reliability - My PDA always crashes. Not very often, but over time it always does. Sometimes I don't lose any of my data, sometimes I lose all of it. Regardless it is always a hassle to recover the data.

There is an enduring problem with PDA’s that plagues pretty much all electronic organization devices - half life. I’ve been using a PDA pretty much since they first showed up on the market. I’d rave and rave about how wonderful they made my life, the ability to organize my schedule and keep track of phone numbers was amazing. The problem was, no matter how well I documented material, and no matter how religiously I synchronized my device, the data would be destroyed at some point. I began to think of this as the PDA half life. Over time the volatility of the data seemed to increase until it reached a boiling point at which it would blow up. This half life is up to about a year now, which in my estimation is quite a long time, but losing a year’s worth of data sucks.

I recently upgraded my keyboard to a new Microsoft Natural Elite 4000. Now, there was a time when Microsoft reigned supreme in the geek pantheon of respected companies. Times have changed, for me at least, and these days I’m hard pressed to say good things about Microsoft. I have to say, though, that I’m really impressed with this keyboard.