I bought a Mi Pad 4 a while back. Honestly it has no other problems, but for gaming it has a huge one: **Namely, “touch dropouts.” Actually, this kind of touch dropout is an old issue with Xiaomi and the like. Lots of people have talked about it — from the Mi Mix 2s to the Redmi Note 5, it’s everywhere. Many say the problem is that Xiaomi’s touch ICs just aren’t good, and the Mi Pad 4 being a low-end product certainly wouldn’t use any fancy touch IC. So not long after buying this tablet, after playing some Honor of Kings on it for a while, I noticed the screen touch started jumping around, and sometimes it would just randomly cut out… or stop responding. At first I concluded the root cause was: Because the touch chip is cheap, after the machine runs for a while and heats up, the touch goes haywire.

Recently I ran into a permission problem on Ubuntu. It shows up when downloading stuff like flash or mscorefronts. I’d been ignoring it all this time, but today I decided ignoring it isn’t great. Files can’t be accessed by user ‘_apt’, and the permission can’t be dropped for downloading The fix is simple…

Nvidia pushed a driver update today, and right after that Steam on Linux blew up. Dota 2 wouldn’t run.

Firefox just updated to 44.0, and for Linux users that means a new problem. Fonts look like garbage. Like this:

If you use Firefox in fullscreen as much as I do, you’ve probably hit the same problem I have. What happens is this: while I’m browsing fullscreen in Firefox, I click some other popup window and it opens underneath Firefox instead of coming to the front. WiFi status, uploading images to Weibo, all sorts of stuff. And it only happens under Unity. Annoying as hell. Well, there’s a fix now.

My Acer C720 running Ubuntu has never given me any trouble — it’s just been a terminal netbook for configuring switches and servers. But recently I figured it’d been a while since I updated, so I got the itch and ran an update. Which is when I hit this. “The file list of package XXX contains an empty filename” No idea why this happens. From poking around some Debian docs, it’s probably from a flaky connection pulling down an incomplete package or list and then force-installing it.

VMware 12 has been out for a while now. I didn’t upgrade the desktop at home, and the laptop got upgraded but I barely use it. Today I felt like running a VM, so I pulled it out and upgraded — turned out there were two errors during install. The first was a theme error

I can’t live without music, so I keep headphones on at work all day. Problem is my laptop’s drive is too small for a 500 GB library, so the only option was to set up a DAAP server on my desktop. No DLNA because it handles FLAC badly, and my entire collection is FLAC. Unlike the Firefly setup I messed with on FreeNAS at home, Windows Server 2012 R2 gave me trouble. I couldn’t find a fix anywhere I searched, so I’m writing it up in case it helps someone else. The problem is simple: FLAC files won’t play through Firefly Media Server on Windows Server 2012 R2. MP3 and other formats are fine. Specifically, when you try to play a FLAC file remotely, the server-side service just dies and has to be restarted.