I’ve spent the past while buying and experimenting with some old LTO gear as a secondary backup solution besides backing up to both local disks and cloud. I chose LTO because:

• More suitable for air hand luggage than disk – lighter and less fragile
• My upload speed is trash so the only way I can hope to do a full off-site backup is via physical media
• With LTO4, it works out cheaper than buying about 2-3x 2+TB external hard disks, especially if you go SCSI instead of SAS.
• I have the option of taking tapes out of rotation and storing them long-term. With hard disks this is risky and expensive.
• It’s old school cool

My learnings and notes follow…

Continue reading →

Spent the best part of 2 days trying to figure out why the composition media system (same probably applies for discovery media system) in a MK7.0 VW Golf was failing to read M3U playlists, with the error “No playable files found”.

Literally tried every combination imaginable of file paths, separators, line endings, and even went as far as writing a script to generate extended m3u data from a plain m3u, but nothing made any difference.

The fix turned out to be ridiculously simple: have more than one folder on the SD card with MP3 files in it. The software must have a special case for all MP3 files in one folder that (probably unintentionally) breaks playlists. Even a single mp3 file in a second folder is enough to kick it into life.

Incidentally once this fix is in place the M3U support is pretty comprehensive – plain or extended and a variety of line endings and path separators all work fine.

From what I’ve read, this seems to affect a large percentage of Gigabyte motherboards since S3 sleep became a ‘thing’.

The issue is as follows: on a significantly overclocked Gigabyte motherboard (high end or low end), when resuming from S3 sleep the screen never wakes up and after about 15-20 seconds, the system repeatedly turns off and on again every few seconds. The only way to break this loop is to completely remove power from the PSU for several seconds.

The issue is connected with PCIe power, as evidenced by the various reported fixes of disabling onboard NIC power saving and reverting from Intel/AMD AHCI drivers to the Microsoft default ones.

The real fix is very simple: Use Balanced power mode in windows and check that PCI Express Link State Power Management is set to ‘Moderate Power Savings’ and not ‘Off’. The fact that the default setting of moderate does not have the issue explains why it is not more widely reported.