tekHedd – the blog

Entitlement Friendly

Here in bike-friendly Fort Collins, we really don’t think much about personal safety when riding.

Progress dialog sexy

Just released the first official version of M3UPorterLarge, an app that copies MP3 files to a single directory, for use in your car, receiver, clock radio, or other slightly dumb USB MP3 player.

• Download From Github
• Local Mirror: porterlarge-1.0.1.zip

The M3UPorter program was created for a single purpose: to copy the files in an M3U playlist to a single directory. This is necessary because some portable devices and a lot of cars need all the audio files to be in one directory. As it turns out, it’s very hard to find a simple program that will just copy all the files from your audio playlist to one directory.

I got involved and created PorterLarge, because I need this copying to work with playlists too large to fit onto a USB stick. (These are generated by the as-yet-unreleased Unnamed Jukebox.) PorterLarge is an unofficial feature-development fork of the M3UPorter project, adding some error handling and support for more possible configurations.

I find that devices that have very good suppot for iPod and iPhone have very poor support for normal USB devices. My Mazda’s BoseTM audio system even displays “iPod” on the screen when you plug in a generic USB stick, and gets very stupid when albums or artists are sorted into subdirectories. I can’t decide whether the companies decide that iPod support is enough and then get lazy, or whether AppleTM contractually obligates them to dumb down their USB support. In either case, this program becomes necessary.

It’s EXTREME! or something.

wot;dnr: Great video card; sluggish initial response from tech support, great support after they engaged.

I like my new video card, a “Zotac GTX970 Amp! Extreme Edition”or something to that effect. Runs great and cool, and has what can only be described as unnecessarily excessive thermal management. Three PCI slots wide, and barely fits in my gigantic Antec case.

But, I can not save settings in the Zotac Firestorm application, which on a Zotac brand card is the only way to fully control it. You lose the settings, not just on reboot, but if you accidentally click the close button on the Zotec control panel. It just sucks generally.

So, naturally I contacted tech support. There’s a phone number to call–for every region except the USA. Oh joy. So I used the email. Got my automated response over a week ago; nothing since. Just sent a followup email:

tekHedd .,

This is an automated response. Thank you for contacting us; we appreciate your interest in ZOTAC! This response confirms that we have received your ticket. One of the members of our support staff will be in touch within 1-2 business days. The details of your ticket are listed below. Note: When replying, please include your ticket ID in the subject line so we may track your ticket accurately

Ticket ID: LKD-XXXXXXX
Subject: Firestorm won’t save presets
Department: Technical Support
Type: Issue
Status: Open
Priority: Low

You can check the status of or reply to this ticket online at: https://www.zotacusa.com/help/index.php/Tickets/Ticket/View/LKDXXXXXXXXKind regards,ZOTAC USA

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Support Center: https://www.zotacusa.com/help/index.php