• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I guess you could say that. The first is that I have multiple drives. I did install CachyOS on its own Ext4 drive but I have others that I wanted to use as is where I have games installed. They use NTFS. They worked on the first day fine but wouldn’t auto mount on reboots. After setting them to auto mount and despite never booting back into windows they just stopped being writeable on subsequent use. Everything I researched said this had something to do with Windows fast boot. So I disabled that but the problem persisted until I installed ?ntfs-3g? And used it to run some kind of fix that set them as writeable.

    Then eventually I found that any download that took some time in Steam would fail with disk read or write errors even when trying to install to my Ext4 root drive. I tried all sorts of download and cache clearing and uninstalling and reinstalling steam. Eentually someone said to run cachyos-bugreport.sh which revealed a whole bunch of usb device errors with a sim rig shifter. I unplugged it and since then my steam downloads are able to finish and work. I don’t know how that is related but… Well anyway things are working right now.












  • It sounds like “lifter tick” to me. I believe that the 626 has hydraulic lifters, and over time the get gummed up and oil isn’t able to get into them as well as before. It’s possible to remove and clean them but that involves removing the valve cover. I know a lot of people in the Miata community (which have similar engines) find that other than the sound there isn’t really a problem and just live with it. I’m less sure about that for the 626.









  • For starters I’m old enough that if your TV or monitor was fuzzy or blurry you gave it a good bang on the top. This worked 50% of the time and was considered common practice but it sounds stupid in retrospect.

    But wait there’s more: I boiled a demo disc (videogame magazines used to come with a disc of demos for new or unreleased games). During a particular print run of Official Xbox Magazine many of the shipped discs would skip or fail to read and dropping them into boiling water for about 30 seconds was a way change the refractory index of the plastic and fix something that was causing the laser to be unable to read them.

    I guess this is my jam because that last one reminded me of another hilarious practice from that era: “Toweling” an Xbox. First generation hardware of the Xbox 360 we’re prone to detecting an overheat and sometimes entering a state where they wouldn’t boot up anymore and display an iconic “Red ring of death” where the LEDs on the front would light up red and it would it never finished booting. But it was running, just it wouldn’t continue. While it was getting a little warm, it seemed to be more a failure of the sensor rather than a catastrophic overheating. So naturally the solution was… Get it hotter. Wrap it in towels blocking all of the fans from doing their job and get it hot enough that the sensor would seem to go out of range and reset itself. This returned it to normal operation for hours or days, for some people indefinitely. Fortunately I haven’t “toweled” any electronics lately.