The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dylrob

Oh no, I mean I gave it the full makeover. I initial tried just rooting, but still found it too limiting (also the auto updates kept removing my root), and the performance with Google Play store apps wasn’t great. So then I went and replaced the android build altogether.

Ahhh. Flashed a new ROM? I assume performance became acceptable.
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Dennis

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

No.

SDHC vs SDXC are hardware specifications for the slot the card plugs into. See https://www.sdcard.org/developers/ov...ity/index.html

SDHC slots have a 32GB volume size limitation. If you have larger volumes, you need SDXC or SDUC to successfully mount and read them. The file system on the card is irrelevant. The volume size limit will apply regardless.

(As mentioned in my post, despite the fact that the manufacturer's on device manual stated a 32GB volume size limit, the device saw and used my 64GB card with no issues. There was apparently an engineering change for the slot hardware that never got communicated to the writers of the manual.)

And cards that large tend to come as exFAT, so redoing as FAT32 would have questionable benefit.

What tends to happen in newer Android tablets (running 6.0 Marshmallow or above) is that the device will offer to "adopt" the card. If you do that, the card is reformatted with the Linux ext4 filesystem Android uses. The drawback is that you can't then pop the card from the device, put it in an adapter, and access it from Windows, because Windows doesn't grok ext4 by default. (There is an open source third party driver that lets Windows access ext* file systems, but the vast majority of users won't be aware of it.)

I use the card strictly for storing data, so leaving it exFAT was fine.
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Dennis

Dennis, all I know is I have gadgets both music players and video players, that can't read exFat chips, but if I reformat the chips into Fat32 they will work fine. I have done that for chips up to 512GB. (Sansa Clip, KDLinks HD-700, for example)

Now if it is implemented in hardware, (mostly high end Japanese gadgets), then, yes you're SOL.

I have found the most gadgets implement SDHC reading in software, so they can use "off the shelf" card readers (to save money). Those don't care what Fat is being pitched at them 16, 18, or 32. . .

Worth a refomat on a sample card to see. If it doesn't work, you can format back real easy.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Dennis, all I know is I have gadgets both music players and video players, that can't read exFat chips, but if I reformat the chips into Fat32 they will work fine. I have done that for chips up to 512GB. (Sansa Clip, KDLinks HD-700, for example)

Please reread what I posted, with special attention to the link I provided for SD card slot specifications.

The limitation I spoke of is in the slot hardware, not the file system on the media. An SDHC card slot cannot read media whose volume size is over 32GB. What file system is on the media is irrelevant.

Now if it is implemented in hardware, (mostly high end Japanese gadgets), then, yes you're SOL.

In fact, the reverse is true. Lower end devices tend to have SDHC slots. SDXC and SDUC occur in more expensive devices.

(While the analogy is imperfect, think of the difference between USB 2 and USB 3. There, the limitation is in data transfer speed. The desktop I use now is a older USB 2 machine, and does not have USB 3 USB ports on the motherboard. I fixed that not long back when I found a USB 3 card that would fit into the unused mini-PCI-e slot on my motherboard. USB 2 was not a deal breaker for my normal use of USB - supporting keyboard, mouse, and a handful of USB thumb drives I use to archive data. Transfer speed was not a major issue. With some things I'm planning to do, like boot an OS off a thumb drive, USB 3 is a necessity. It's all USB, but data transfer rate is a matter the hardware design of the slot you plug into and the supporting hardware on the motherboard.)

I have found the most gadgets implement SDHC reading in software, so they can use "off the shelf" card readers (to save money). Those don't care what Fat is being pitched at them 16, 18, or 32. . .

They don't implement SDHC reading in software. Once again, that's a hardware spec.

Just about everything understands FAT*. It's been around for decades, and is well understood. The FAT file system imposes volume size limitations. The smallest unit of space readable/writable on a FAT formatted drive is the cluster. Each cluster must have a unique address. FAT16, as the name implies, uses 16 bit addressing, so you have a maximum of 65,536 unique clusters. The maximum cluster size produced by DOS/Windows format is 32KB, so FAT16 volume size tops out at 2GB. FAT32, using a 32 bit address, was developed precisely to get past that limit as hard drives got progressively larger. We now have exFAT, which is the next step beyond FAT32.

Worth a reformat on a sample card to see. If it doesn't work, you can format back real easy.

It will work just fine, but why should I bother? What I have works, and the change won't give me any real gain. FAT32 offers more efficient storage if you have lots of small files that take less than a cluster because it uses smaller clusters and there is less wasted space. I don't care, and haven't cared in some time. The 64GB card isn't used for storing small files, and SD cards are cheap and getting cheaper. The wasted space simply isn't a concern.

The fact that you have things that grok FAT32 but not exFAT is curious indeed, but not a factor here. The main difference I'm aware of is that exFAT uses a larger cluster size than FAT32, and is less efficient at storing small files which won't fill the cluster and leave wasted space. That's not what the 64GB card here is used for, and it's been a while since I had any reason to care about the issue. Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper, and wasted space on a storage medium simply doesn't matter.
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Dennis

[Greg Anos]

Whatever floats your boat. I merely note that all my gadgets that have said SDCH only, limit 32 GB, have all happily used (the total capacity) of reformatted (to fat 32) 64, 128, 256, and 512 GB chips, even when they can't read any exfat formatted chip.

[PandathePanda]

I really hate being the towns go to panda to fix cellphones, especially here in South Africa. two thirds of the problems I get is stuff I never had to deal with while living in the big city.

Common ones I get:
1. I forgot my pattern/password
2. I did a factory reset and can't get my phone to work, as I don't remember what my gmail account is.

[Adoby]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

No.

SDHC vs SDXC are hardware specifications for the slot the card plugs into. See https://www.sdcard.org/developers/ov...ity/index.html

Where does it say it is a hardware limitation?

No. It is not a hardware issue. The issue is if the software is hardcoded to respect the limitations imposed by the SD card specification.

Yes there are differences in slot hardware as well as in the software. But if you reformat a 64 or 128 GB SD card to FAT32 it is usually perfectly usable in a device that "officially" only allow 32GB cards. As I understand it this is a licensing issue. Microsoft only license use of FAT32 for SD cards up to 32GB. This also means that the SD card specification follows this limitation.

I have personally successfully been using 64GB and 128GB FAT32 SD cards on devices with specs allowing only up to 32GB. I have also failed to do so. However I have been successful more often. At one time it seemed to work fine as long as I didn't connect to another device. If I did it reduced the size of the card to 32GB. So I removed the card when I wanted to update the contents and used a SD card reader. Worked perfectly fine then.

What the actual limitations are is not publicly known. It depends on the SD card slot hardware in combination with the device software. Not on the official SD card specification.

It is well worth a try, if you are capable of reformatting the card.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Whatever floats your boat. I merely note that all my gadgets that have said SDCH only, limit 32 GB, have all happily used (the total capacity) of reformatted (to fat 32) 64, 128, 256, and 512 GB chips, even when they can't read any exfat formatted chip.

The fact that they can read up to 512GB chips when formatted FAT32 but not when formatted exFAT is a real curiosity. I can understand not grokking something like NTFS - to get that I had to install software under Android that required root - it exposed the Linux ntfs-3g support built into the Linux kernel but not normally exposed under Android.

But exFAT is simply the next evolution of FAT to handle even larger file systems. Current devices should support it. Older devices may have been released before it became widespread. (Imperfect memory says the main difference between exFAT and FAT32 is a rather larger cluster size.)

It works for you, so I'm happy, even if I don't understand it.
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Dennis

[Greg Anos]

Here's my reading of the tea leaves. . .

By the time SD cards came out, both Fat 16 and Fat 32 were already in common use for hard and floppy drives. The reading software for both formats debugged, and was (probably) written to separate the physical I/O code (that actually sends/receives the read/write hardware interface) from the logical Fat processing code, once again (probably) with the I/O module sending a flag back (telling it what format is was) to the logical processing code.

Maybe they got fancy and only used Fat 32 code, and had the I/O routine automatically blow zeros through the high order bits on the address. That way you only have one Fat (Fat 32) logical block of code. <Shrug>

That's how I would have designed it, to make it as hardware "independent" as possible.

Remember, the chip reader manufacturers were building "cheap and quick" in a low margin business. The manufacturers had to meet the SDHC spec, nothing said <how> they had to do it. If it was cheaper and safer to just blow high zeros in the addressing and do everything as Fat 32, they'd do it. especially if they offered low level firmware with the reader hardware, and would customize the interface to the gadget firmware cheap.

Nor would most gadget manufacturers care, if it worked with SDHC, was available fast and cheap, and was reliable, they were happy. Only high end companies, who were willing to pay to control every piece of software in their systems, would embed the SDHC limits in their firmware.

ExFat, was a separate format, <and it cost a separate fee>, that initially most gadget makers wouldn't pay for. now, of course, everybody does. It has advantages over Fat 32, but that doesn't matter is your hardware won't read it. . . .

If you look at the connector on an SD card, SDHC card, and an ExFat card, they are the same. . .

[cromag]

So, here's an interesting problem. ...

Never mind -- not nearly interesting enough. Looks like an intermittent broken lead in my USB cable.

[DMcCunney]

If you use Firefox as your browser, you may have just discovered Firefox has disabled many or all of your loaded extensions.

The problem is that extensions are required to be digitally signed, Firefox checks that status every 24 hours, and a signing certificate Mozilla had issued for various extensions had expired.

Mozilla is working on a fix - this is a major black eye for them, since the extensions are all fine but their certificate isn't - and outrage is a polite descriptor of the response in the Firefox user community.

There is a temporary fix to keep things running until Mozilla gets their act together. If you use Developer Edition or Nightly, type about:config in the URL bar and hit enter. You eill get a screens saying This could void your warranty!. Click the I accept the risk button.

You will now be in the preferences editor that can diddle system level preferences stored in the prefs.js file where Firefox keeps such things.

Type xpi in the Search bar at the top to list all preferences containing that string. The ones you are interested in are xpinstall.signatures.required and xpinstall.whitelist.required

Right-click each and select Toggle to change the value from True to False. Then restart Firefox. This should re-enable disabled extensions. It will not let you install new ones, and if you removed and tried to reinstall disabled extensions, they will still be broken.

The above also worked for me in current Firefox Stable (66.03). Folks elsewhere said it didn't work for them.

If it doesn't work, another possible work around is the following posted on Reddit:

Paste this in the browser console with ctrl+shift+j (if you can't, set devtools.chrome.enabled to enable in about:config)

This needs to be applied once at least 24 hours until Mozilla fixes this I guess

// Re-enable all extensions

async function set_addons_as_signed() {
Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/addons/XPIDatabase.jsm");
Components.utils.import("resource://gre/modules/AddonManager.jsm");
let addons = await XPIDatabase.getAddonList(a => true);

for (let addon of addons) {
// The add-on might have vanished, we'll catch that on the next startup
if (!addon._sourceBundle.exists())
continue;

if( addon.signedState != AddonManager.SIGNEDSTATE_UNKNOWN )
continue;

addon.signedState = AddonManager.SIGNEDSTATE_NOT_REQUIRED;
AddonManagerPrivate.callAddonListeners("onProperty Changed",
addon.wrapper,
["signedState"]);

await XPIDatabase.updateAddonDisabledState(addon);

}
XPIDatabase.saveChanges();
}

set_addons_as_signed();

I have not needed to use this, and cannot state from experience whether it works, but it looks like it should.

Update: The fix I posted above for toggling xpiinstall values from True to False just stopped working, and I had the apply the script listed above in the browser console.

It worked, but needs to be reapplied every 24 hours till Mozilla gets a fix out the door.

Color me deeply unhappy. I really don't like Chrome, but a Chrome with extensions that work is better than a Firefox with extensions that don't.
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Dennis

[cc_in_oh]

I got the fix about 10AM ET - you may have to enable Studies in the privacy settings to get it...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cc_in_oh

I got the fix about 10AM ET - you may have to enable Studies in the privacy settings to get it...

Thank you. I'll go look.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Thank you. I'll go look.

And I did. Mozilla's offocial statement about it is here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019...ns-in-firefox/

I enabled Studies to be able to get it. Meanwhile, I had to reapply the script I listed above until the fix reaches me.
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Dennis

[BetterRed]

Not fixed here yet, but it only went belly up within the last hour - I have studies enabled, it only has this so far

prefflip-push-performance-1491171

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Not fixed here yet, but it only went belly up within the last hour - I have studies enabled, it only has this so far

prefflip-push-performance-1491171

They're in the process of rolling out the fix, with a temp fix pushed as a study with a more permanent one to follow. (Likely as an FF point release to 66.04, I think.)

I had studies turned off. There had been a previous tempest in a teapot a while back about them, largely because Mozilla hadn't been clear enough that studies might be conducted, nor about how to opt out if you didn't want them. Users saw unexpected activity on the part of FF and howled.

Right now I have the temporary fix I mentioned above in place, and I'll keep an eye on studies to see when the Mozilla temp fix for the problem gets pushed. I just had to apply my temp fix to my SO's laptop. The critical extension for her was NoScript, and it bit because it's baseball season and the only way she can access the MLB site providing live coverage when the Yankees are playing is with it enabled. Performance goes to Hell in a bucket if it isn't.

(I use Raymond Hill's uBlock Origin instead. I tried having both it and NoScript enabled, but keeping them from stepping on each other's toes was more of a pain than it was worth. uBlock Origiin is a generalized blocker that handles ads among other things, and is sufficient for what I do.)
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Dennis