Tag: site news

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Just a very minor update

I know I haven’t posted in quite some time. I’ve been busy with getting my life in a position where I can move in with my wifey. But I’ve been distracted by some health issues. No worries though, I’ll pull though.

On that note, I have been working on finding a more permanent place for the server that runs this blog and for now have found a place that I’m hoping will be it’s permanent place. Bad news is, I need more ram as I’m running a few other things on here as well. 16GB of ram isn’t cutting it anymore.

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Some odds and ends for the Creative Zen Vision M

A while back I bought a bunch of old mp3 players on the ebay. I’ve fixed most of them. Sold one of them. I’m using one of them. The rest; a Zune 30, an iPod mini 1st gen, and a Creative Zen Vision M. All but the Zen I have fixed. Why not the Zen you ask? It’s because the device is very picky about replacement batteries and most(all) replacements won’t work unless you run an old firmware. Version 1.41.01 or older to be exact. And therein lies the problem, finding that firmware or one older will lead you down a rabbit hole of broken links, forum posts(most of which aren’t in English), and sketchy sites that don’t even have the firmware. Creative themselves no longer has the firmware either.

So… I decided to go on a mission to find this “golden firmware”. Searched countless sites, clicked countless links, translated who knows how many pages just to find it. And I have. Yay~ Not only that, but I’m hosting it here. That’s right. Here. Along with some odds and ends so no one else has to.

Zen Vision M 30GB firmware version 1.51.01
Zen Vision M 30GB firmware version 1.41.01
Zen Vision M 30GB firmware version 1.30.02

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A major update

So, I’m not sure if anyone actually reads these or not and quite frankly I don’t mind either way. With that being said here’s some misc updates with the site and my life.

My site is currently hosted on my old desktop with a i7 3770k, 16GB DDR3, and a few spare drives for the OS, this site, and storage. It’s also currently shared with a few other things. I’m planning on changing this. I don’t see a lot of traffic on here and I feel like switching this to a VM or a raspberry pi would let me better use the hardware this site is currently on for my backups and media.

You also may note that I have not ads on here. I will keep it this way, but in the future I’m going add a link to patreon, ko-fi, or something of the like. It won’t be mandatory but every little bit helps

That’s about it for site news, now some personal news from the past <insert date here> or so.

I got a new phone, a iPhone 12 mini to be exact. To be even more exact, a iPhone 12 mini in green with 256GB of storage. I would have loved to get the 128GB model but I couldn’t find one in stock in any colour. And I absolutely love it. So glad I waited instead of getting the 2nd gen SE. It’s so smol I can one-hand it without having to use reachablility. The battery life is also not too bad for something this small, it lasts about an hour more than the 2nd gen SE from what I’ve heard people say. And omfg the cameras. Just being able to do 4K HDR video is amazing. Also night mode, that fucking night mode. 11 out of 10.

Projectwise, not much at the moment. Just the iPod and Zune for the most part. I’m also half-assedly working on getting a gopher server running on an esp8266 in Lua, but might have to switch to arduino because of memory constraints and the fact I find Lua a pain in the ass to program in. I’ll post the code and make a post about it when I get it done.

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A minor update

Replacing the screen on the Zune is still on hold. Not much a choice in the matter since I’m having some trouble finding a replacement screen. I could always just buy another one for parts on the ebay but that seems a waste.

However, I do have another pet project on my hands. I found a logic board for a 6th generation iPod classic in my junk drawer. The battery connector is gone as well as a trace. But it does still seem to work. At least enough to be stuck on the battery charging screen when I connect it to my PC. So all I need to do is find where that trace leads and solder in a bodge wire. Shouldn’t be too hard…I hope, the trace is tiny and I’m not even sure if it’s 100% needed. It looks like it’s just for a temp sensor. It also could be for balance, but I doubt it since it’s just a single cell. Here’s to getting it to work. Cheers~

The logic board in question
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Good news, bad news and a Zune update.

Good news first. The battery replacement for the Zune works. Now for the bad news. Had my first issue with the server. During it’s first reboot it wouldn’t POST. Like at all. I tried using a different outlet. Tried resetting the CMOS, and it was just a whole bunch of nothing. So like any other tech I started to take everything apart and just get down to the motherboard, CPU, and RAM. Still nothing. At this point I’m starting to get worried. I don’t have any spare CPUs or RAM laying around and not much money to spare to get replacements. So I decided to pull out all the ram and just try one stick at a time. That seemed to work. Tried two, that didn’t work. Tried just one stick again and that worked. Now two sticks worked, then three sicks worked. Just for the heck of it I tried all four sticks and much to my surprise it worked like there was nothing wrong. I ran memtest and had no errors. I have no clue what happened. Everything was fine before the initial reboot. I just needed to reboot to update the kernel. Everything seems fine now. I’m just going to chalk it up to a gremlin or something. I’m hoping it’s not going to be an ongoing issue. I mean in a pinch I can probably run this off of my Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi…maybe. I rather not have to try.

Also while taking apart the Zune to put in the new battery, the display ribbon ripped. At least on some boards the display ribbon is also held down with some adhesive. This wasn’t mentioned on the iFixit guide at all. Not that it would have helped to know. The whole guide is mediocre at best. I will try do write my own when I get the new display. At least a new display isn’t too expensive. It’s just about 15$ shipped off of ebay.