LinLog

Clip Zip annoyance

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

OK, I partially take back my comments from yesterday. I found another thing about my new Sansa Clip Zip that's annoying.

Yesterday I tried upgrading the Clip Zip firmware. It came with firmware version 01.01.12, but the current release is 01.01.18, so I figured I'd get up to date. The firmware upgrade process itself was actually totally painless. You can use Sandisk's upgrade utility or just copy the file into the root of your device and disconnect it from the PC to start the upgrade. Nice and simple.

The problem is with the new firmware. As far as I can tell, there were no major bug fixes or improvements that I care that much about, but there is one major bug. In the 01.01.12 firmware version, the media refresh will pick up M3U files and add them to the device's list of playlists. The file paths need to be relative, of course, or else you end up with an empty playlist, but it's actually a very nice feature.

Well guess what's missing in firmware version 01.01.18 - no playlists. They don't even show up. A thread on the official Sansa forum suggests that this problem is actually shared by all the newer firmware versions, not just the latest. So nice going, Sandisk! Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

On the up side, reverting to the 01.01.12 firmware was dead simple. Just download the appropriate archive and follow the normal upgrade instructions. Once I did that, my playlists were back...after the hideously long media refresh.

New MP3 Player - Sansa Clip Zip

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I got myself a little treat for the new year - a new MP3 player. I'd been thinking about it for a while, and a combination of my Christmas bonus and the fact that my old Sansa e280 would no long connect to my computer finally motivated me to take the plunge.

This time, I decided to go minimal. As I mentioned, my last MP3 player was a Sansa e280, which isn't exactly the Cadillac of MP3 players, but has a pretty decent feature set. It was certainly one heck of an improvement over the one I had previously - an old Digitalway MPIO with a whopping 256MB of internal storage and a massive 3-line monochrome display. The Sansa e280, on the other hand, has 8GB of internal storage, a decent sized screen, and can display pictures and videos. With the RockBox open-source firmware, it also has some simple games and apps, as well as microSDHC support (the Sandisk firmware only goes up to 2GB microSD cards).

The thing is...I never really used any of that. Granted, the microSD slot is a God-send, and I used to occasionally play games on it. But I never had more than a couple of pictures of videos on it and really only used it for listening to music and podcasts. And for videos or games, I now have a CAANOO. So why not get something a bit smaller that just does the one thing I really care about?

So this time I went with the Sansa Clip line. In particular, the new Clip Zip, successor to the Sansa Clip+, which I was originally considering.

The Clip Zip has a lot of things going for it. First, there's the form factor. It's tiny - only 2.25" by 1.42", about the same size as the pouch I use for my headphones. Second, it's cheap. The Clip Zip comes in both 4GB and 8GB models and starts at $50. I got a 4GB model on sale for $40, which is about what you'd pay for a 4GB no-name MP3 player. Third is the storage capacity. Of course, there's nothing impressive about the internal storage, but it doesn't matter because the Clip Zip has a microSDHC slot. So for another $30, I added a 32GB microSD card to my order, giving the Clip Zip a total capacity of 36GB. Not bad for a $70 investment.

So far, I really like the Clip Zip. I was initially disappointed that RockBox didn't have a stable port for it yet, but it turns out that the Sandisk firmware is actually pretty nice. The menu system is easy to use and looks nice, as does the "playing" screen with background cover art turned on. The firmware automatically sorts by artist, album, genre, etc., and separates podcasts and audio books into a separate menu item, which is kind of nice. It also includes the option to let you browse the actual folder structure on disk rather than using the database, which is something I always wanted in the Sandisk firmware on the e280.

The only thing I don't like about the firmware is the media refresh. As with the e280, the Clip Zip will do a "media refresh" every time you write data to the disk when it's connected to a computer or when you insert a microSD card (even if it's the same card you just removed and nothing has changed on it). This normally wouldn't be a huge deal, except that with a large media collection the refresh can take a very long time. I have a little over 20GB of audio on my microSD card, and the refresh was initially taking between 12 and 15 minutes. With some adjustments to the ID3 tags on my files, I was able to knock it down to about 8 minutes - still a long time, but not as bad. (For future reference, I used Mp3tag to tag everything as ID3v2.4 UTF-8, removing all other tag versions and blanking the comments field.)

As far as the hardware goes, I have no real complaints. I must confess that the Clip Zip does feel a bit flimsy compared to my e280, probably because the casing is all plastic as opposed to the metal backing on the e280. However, it seems to be reasonably well made. The controls are easy to use and I've found myself using the clip on the back far more than I ever thought I would. And I have to say the that the micro USB charging port is a welcome change from the proprietary port that the e280 used. With the Clip Zip, I don't even have to bring a dedicated cable with me when I travel - I can just use the same one I use for my cell phone or Kindle.

So I would definitely recommend the Clip Zip. It's simple, inexpensive, does its job well, and is surprisingly full-featured for the price and size.

Fixing MediaMonkey playlists in RockBox

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Yesterday I tried creating a playlist in MediaMonkey and synchronizing it with my Sansa e280 running RockBox. I never really bothered with trying to sync playlists to my MP3 player before, because syncing, well, anything that's not an iPod using third-party software is a little iffy. Needless to say, my fears were well founded.

While MediaMonkey's syncing feature is nice, I ran into several problems. First, and most obvious, MediaMonkey didn't like the layout of my media directory. You see, I have a main "Music" folder which contains a bunch of artist and album sub-folders, but also a bunch of miscellaneous MP3s at the top-level. MediaMonkey didn't see those MP3s for some reason. After the sync, they just weren't there - I had to copy them over manually.

My other problem was a combination of the playlists themselves, how RockBox on the Sansa works, and where I'm putting my music on the Sansa. A couple of weeks ago, I "upgraded" my Sansa by buying a 16GB microSDHC card for it to complement the 8GB of internal flash storage. This resulted in a change of organization - I now keep all my actual music on the microSD card and put podcasts and other spoken material on the internal storage. Turns out that this messes with MediaMonkey's assumptions about playlists.

There are several issues here. The first is that when MediaMonkey syncs to the microSD card, it sees it as a separate device and creates the playlists accordingly. The result is that the playlists use absolute paths within the microSD card. However, the real absolute path for files on the microSD card starts with the device path, i.e. <microSD1>. So, basically, the paths in the playlist are wrong for RockBox.

The second issue is that the playlists get synced onto the microSD card. This isn't really a problem, just now what I want. I want the files synced to the main RockBox playlist folder on the Sansa's internal storage.

The third issue was with those assorted MP3s in my root "Music" directory. Even though I set the sync path to <Path:2> in MediaMonkey's sync configuration, which should mirror the directory structure on my hard drive, when I ran the sync, the assorted files on my playlist got copied into a "Music" folder on the microSD card. I'm not sure why. But as long as that's the case, I decided to "solve" that problem by just moving the rest of the assorted files there too. They weren't being synced anyway, so why not.

I decided to solve the playlist path and location problems with a simple Powershell script. You can download a copy here. It simply reads your playlists, adjusts the paths, and moves them to the main device storage. The code is below:
$source = "MUSICSD" $device = "Sansa e280" $listDir = "Playlists"

function findDriveByLabel { $drives = [System.Io.DriveInfo]::GetDrives() foreach ($drv in $drives) { if ($args[0] -eq $drv.VolumeLabel) { return $drv.RootDirectory } } }

$sd = findDriveByLabel $source $dev = findDriveByLabel $device $sdDir = [System.Io.Path]::Combine($sd, $listDir) $devDir = [System.Io.Path]::Combine($dev, $listDir)

$lists = ls $sdDir

foreach ($lst in $lists) { $outFile = [System.Io.Path]::Combine($devDir, $lst.Name) $outFile Get-Content $lst.FullName | ForEach-Object { "/<microSD1>" + $_.Replace("\", "/") } | Out-File -Encoding utf8 -Width 1000 $outFile rm $lst.FullName }

$remLists = ls $sdDir if ($remLists -eq $Null) { rmdir $sdDir }

So far, this part is working fine. I'm still not 100% happy with the sync experience, though. The missing files is the part that really bugs me. I'll have to do a little experimenting at some point and see if I can make it work. Only problem is that it takes a while to write 16GB of data to the device....

Post-upgrade fixes

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

It's that time again - time to fix things after upgrading!

This time, I did something unusual for me - rather than copying my existing Ubuntu install over to the new drive, I just did a fresh install. This was partly because I'd been carrying around that same install for at least 3 years (probably more like 5) and partly because it was the 32-bit version, and I wanted to use the x86_64 version, what with the new CPU and all. Of course, I did copy across my home directory, so I'm probably going to see some config problems there, but that's just how these things go.

My first two problems were a little unexpected. The first was that the numeric keypad on my keyboard didn't work. I mean, it worked, in the sense that certain keys responded in approximately the desired way, but it didn't actually type any numbers. Fortunately, a little Googling turned up this post, which had a very quick fix - turn off the "mouse keys" in the keyboard config dialog. Not something I would have expected to be on by default.

The second problem took a few minutes for me to figure out, probably because it's still early. When I fired up Thunderbird and opened Lightning, none of my calendars were there. And I couldn't add them back - the dialog just didn't respond. The solution dawned on me when I tried to install the newer version of Lightning. The install bombed out, complaining that the package didn't support x86_64. Duh! I was still running the old x86 pre-upgrade Lightning binaries that were in my profile directory. Unfortunately, the main Lightning page didn't have any x64 binaries linked, so I had to go hunting. Turns out you can grab them from the contrib directory, so that was an easy fix too.

We'll see what else is broken over the next few days. Hopefully I won't hit too many more snags.

Upgrade time! Yay!

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Hooray! Sarah agreed to let me order an upgrade for my desktop!

This is the first big, i.e. multi-component, upgrade I've had in 5 years. I got all the parts on Wednesday, installed them on Thursday, did the trouble-shooting on Friday and this morning, and am not posting this from my fully upgraded machine. And boy is it fast! Or, rather, it's fast compared to my pre-upgrade machine and the piece of crap laptop they gave me to use at work.

My pretext for this upgrade was actually a previous upgrade. For my birthday, I got a $50 Newegg gift certificate, which I used to order a new 1TB Samsung hard drive, because my 750GB Western Digital drive was down to about 20GB free. The up side is that between the gift card and a sale, I only paid $10 for the new drive. The down side was that I forgot to do my homework, so it turned out that the drive only supported 3Gb/s SATA II. Which was great, except that my old motherboard only did 1.5Gb/s SATA. So it was either upgrade, or buy a SATA II controller, which seemed like a waste of money.

So this upgrade was basically replacing the guts of the system - motherboard and CPU. I ordered myself an ASUS M4N68T-M microATX socket AM3 board, with integrated audio and NVIDIA GeForce 7025 video. I might have gotten something a little better, except that I had to set aside $25 of my budget for a new power supply, because my old one was making some troubling noises. For the CPU, I splurged a bit and got a 2.8GHz Athlon II X4 quad-core processor. I topped that off with 4GB of Crucial RAM (because 8GB was outside my price range).

So now I've got a quad-core with decent RAM, a modern video card (even if it is integrated) to replace the 64MB Radeon 7000 I'd been using, which didn't even support Compiz, and a bit under 2TB of total storage. Plus I can use the old 160GB hard drive I took out of my system in another old box which I intend to hook up to one of my TVs a low-end digital video player.

And for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu flies on my system!

Annoying mtools inconsistency

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I hate upgrading Ubuntu, because every time I upgrade, something breaks. Sometimes it's small things, sometimes not so small. For instance, the last time I tried upgrading to a newer version of KDE 4, I ended up irreparably borking the installation and just switching to GNOME. (And by "irreparably", I mean messing it up bad enough that I had neither the time nor inclination to repair it.) Interestingly, the change was much less disruptive than I thought. Apparently I just don't care that much about desktop integration anymore. Chalk it up to switching back and forth between platforms all the time.

Anyway, this time the breakage was in the permission fixing script for my Sansa e280 MP3 player. The short version is that when the script ran mattrib -h to clear the "hidden" attrbiute on a directory, it just printed out the mattrib usage message, despite the fact that there was no error in the command syntax. After all, the same script had been working flawlessly for over a year in Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.

Well, after an hour or two of messing around and fruitless Googling, I finally stumbled upon the answer. It turns out that in the build of mtools 4.0.10 that ships with Ubuntu 9.10, the option to remove the hidden attribute has changed from -h to -H. Of course, the usage message still says -h and the man page still says -h, but it's -H that actually works. So, basically, I lost an hour of my life because somebody, whether in upstream of the package maintainer in universe, screwed up and forgot to update the documentation.

Anyway, I did my duty and filed a bug report. We'll see if anything comes of it. I'm sure it's not a high priority, though - if the Google results are any indication, I'm about the only person in the world who uses mattrib on a regular basis anymore.

Sansa repair

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I finally got around to fixing my MP3 player this weekend. I have a Sandisk Sansa e280 running the Rockbox open-source firmware replacement. Despite being a little light on capacity (8GB internal flash plus 2GB for the non-HC microSD slot), I like it a lot. However, recently the headphone jack had gotten very loose. If I jiggled the jack a little, the sound would cut in and out. After a while, it reached the point where I had to pull the cord at just the right angle to maintain enough contact to listen to anything.

Fortunately, this turned out to be relatively easy to fix. I found some instructions on the abi forum, along with links to pictures. It took a little time, but I got the headphone jack working like new again.

The main problem I had was prying up the plastic headphone jack. The plastic part is only held to the board by the metal contacts, which are soldered on. So you can just lift it off to get to the contacts themselves. However, I didn't want to use too much force to pry up the plastic, lest I break one of the contacts or crack the board. After fiddling around with it for a while, I decided to try the opposite route, taking advantage of the fact that you can see the top of the contact poking through the plastic. So, rather than pulling on the plastic, I held onto the plastic part and held the board up off the table. Then, I pushed down on the top of the contacts with a pin and they slid out without too much effort. So I bent the contacts in a bit and put small pieces of a rubber band behind the to try to prevent them from bending in the future. Then, to get the plastic back over them, I gently pushed on the top of the contacts with a straight screwdriver to guide them back into the channels in the jack.

Worked like a charm! I listened to my Sansa all day today and didn't have the sound cut out once. I was starting to fear I'd have to get a new MP3 player. And while the Sansa View and Sansa Fuze look nice enough, and have high-capacity microSD slots, Rockbox isn't stable on them yet. And frankly, Sandisk's native firmware isn't that great. If nothing else, I just like that Rockbox lets you use both database and file system navigation. Not to mention those handy plugins and the extra media formats.

Have I mentioned I hate computers?

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

In case there was any doubt, I'm not a hardware guy. Yeah, I can do the basics - put a PC together from parts, swap out components if something goes bad - but it's not an area where I have a lot of experience or confidence.

So what should happen to me last week? Hardware problems galore! It started with one relatively small thing and just snowballed to both the PCs in my house being more or less out of commission.

The first problem was with Sarah's PC. It would occasionally soft-lock (meaning it wasn't completely unresponsive, but wasn't operational either) and need to be rebooted. A quick inspection revealed a bunch of I/O errors. My first instinct was "bad drive", but just to be safe, I figured I'd put the drive in my PC, just to make sure the SATA controller wasn't going bad.

Good thing I did, because after some testing, it looked like it was the controller! On Sarah's PC, heavy disk activity (copying a few dozen gigs of data) always resulted in an error sooner or later. But on my PC, I never saw any problem. I even tried swapping out the SATA cable with one from my box and it didn't make any difference. So I concluded that the problem was the SATA controller.

Meanwhile, some time during this testing, one of the drives on my PC went bad! I'm assuming the problem was in the drive's controller card, because the disk was still spinning up and not making any funny noises, but the system BIOS just wasn't seeing it. In fact, when the drive was connected, the BIOS would hang on detecting it! The worst part was that it was the new 750GB drive I bought just over a month ago! On the up side, I didn't have anything irreplacable on it, and was eventually able to revive it long enough to copy most of the data off (unfortunately I didn't have enough working storage for everything, but I got the stuff I really cared about). Of course I was just past NewEgg's return window, so I had to put in an RMA to the manufacturer.

So fast-forward to this past weekend. The new $20 PCI SATA/RAID controller for Sarah's box came in. I've never dealt with an add-on SATA controller before, but it was dead simple to install - put it in the PCI slot, connect the drive, and you're done. It worked great - for one evening. Then I started seeing more disk errors. This time they were failures from ext3_find_entry() rather than generic I/O errors, but that's still not too helpful. So now I'm back to square one on that.

On top of that, I've now been seeing lock-ups on my PC. Hard locks, too, as in the system goes totally unresponsive and the capslock light starts blinking. That, for the Linux people in the crowd, indicates a kernel panic. This one was a bitch to track down, too, because it was happening randomly as I did things from within X11, but didn't seem to happen on the command line. And since kernel panic output gets dumped to the console, I couldn't see what was going on (because you can't switch from an X display to the console when the system is crashed). So I ended up leaving the system at the console and eventually got a kernel panic again. Turns out it was coming from the USB subsystem somewhere. I still don't know if it's one of my peripherals, my hub, or the USB controller, so I'll have to do some experimenting.

It's weeks like this when I really appreciate the philosophy of technical people who say, "Forget building it, just buy from a system vendor so that you can have it repaired under warranty." Fixing problems like this is sickeningly time consuming and generally not much fun. Especially if you're not a hardware guy.

More laptop fixups

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

As I mentioned the other day, I recently acquired a hand-me-down laptop. My sister-in-law bought herself a shiny new Dell and gave me her old Compaq Presario R4000 with the dead battery.

So I'm currently in the process of fixing this system up. So far I've just wiped the drive, laid down a fresh install of Windows XP SP3, and installed the drivers and some standard applications. It's actually not a bad little system - Athlon XP-64 processor, 80GB hard drive, DVD burner. Hardly state of the art, but it beats the pants off my old Dell Inspiron B120.

Aside from the battery (which is gonna cost me about $75 to replace), there's only one problem: memory. The system comes with 512MB of RAM, which was fine for the time, but is a little small now. The problem is that the system has two 256MB RAM modules - one of which is under the keyboard, which is really annoying. And they're not especcially cheap modules, either - it takes DDR PC2700 sticks, which go for about $40 per gig on NewEgg. By way of contrast, I recently got another 1GB stick of DDR2 PC5300 to max out the RAM on my Dell, and it only cost me $12 with free shipping.

So I'm debating how much to get now. In better times, I'd just spend the $80 and max out the memory. But times are tough, and it's an old laptop, and I'm already spending $75 to get a new battery. So maybe I'll just stick to 1GB, or perhaps even half a gig. It wouldn't be quite so annoying if they'd just used 1 stick in the first place. As it is, I'm going to lose half the existing RAM if I upgrade either DIMM slot, so I'm not going to get out of this as cheap as I'd hoped.

Either way, it'll still be nice to have another laptop around, so that Sarah and I aren't fighting over the one. And even if I max out the RAM, it's still way cheaper than getting a new system, so it's still a win-win situation.

No more dollar store USB cables

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Note to self: no more buying cables at the dollar store.

Last week I was in the local dollar store looking for pocket-sized packages of tissues and lint rollers (because there's no point spending a lot of money on that sort of thing), when I came across some of those retractable USB cables. You know, the kind that have the spring-loaded roll so that they wind themselves back up - kind of like cheap blinds. I probably should have known better, but come on - it was only a dollar!

Anyway, this afternoon I tried using that cable and it didn't go so well. I attempted to use it to connect my 320GB external USB drive to the hand-me-down laptop that my sister-in-law just gave us after buying a new system. I was using SystemRescueCD and PartImage to take a drive image of the original installation - you know, just in case - and the performance was...let's just say "disappointing". More specifically, the estimated time to completion, on a 75GB drive, with about 40GB used and no compression on the image, was around 11 hours. For those with no point of reference, using the same external drive to image my other laptop, which has about 30GB of used disk, takes maybe half an hour.

And what's worse, partimage kept hanging every 5 or 10 seconds, so even that estimate wasn't accurate. I left the laptop to image while we went on a wine tour of Seneca lake this afternoon, and after being gone for about 7 hours, partimage still said it had 6 hours of work left.

So, just to check, I tried it with my regular USB cable and, sure enough, it's running along at 667MiB/min, estimated completion time 55 minutes. It's still running a little choppier than my other laptop, but not too bad.

So I guess this discredits my old opinion that cables are cables and they either work or they don't. Turns out there are different levels of "not working". Like I said, I should have known better.