Friday, May 2, 2014

Manufacturer's blues

The state of technology sometimes gives me the blues. In 2014, I found myself installing a package called `dosfstools` to format my pendrive. That's because the car's radio wouldn't accept any device with a filesystem that's not fat32:


Of course possessing a filesystem of another kind makes the device "not a device". After a few seconds on the command line the problem went away:
$ sudo pacman -S dosfstools
$ sudo mkfs.vfat -n BILLY /dev/sdb1
but the sadness remained. At l(e)ast I can listen to some badvoltage while driving.

Oh yes, did I mention it doesn't accept any format except mp3? And how does it signal it? By not showing the files at all, of course.