OK, so held a poor lad out here - where is 1.11 Beta?

Shaddap, Rob.....

Amazon's tendency to offer "you might also like..." makes me nervous from a Big Brother perspective, so I don't order much from them. It was about the only place I found the Vibez, though.

On the upside, their RMA process was the easiest and slickest I have ever seen. I got so excited I pre-emptively bought another Vibez with 2-day shipping via "XXX'. You'll like this. I ordered on the 28th:


12/4/2007 5:34 pm Scheduled for delivery Seattle, WA
12/4/2007 6:17 am With delivery courier. Seattle, WA
12/3/2007 8:57 am With delivery courier. Seattle, WA
12/3/2007 8:46 am Arrived at XXX facility. Seattle, WA
12/1/2007 1:43 am Depart Facility Chehalis Regional Hub, WA
11/30/2007 6:56 pm In transit. Bellevue, WA
11/30/2007 5:57 pm Depart Facility Bellevue, WA
11/30/2007 9:01 am Shipment arrived at incorrect facility. Sent to correct destination. Bellevue, WA
11/30/2007 6:40 am Arrived at XXX facility. Bellevue, WA
11/29/2007 3:34 pm Depart Facility Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH
11/29/2007 10:06 am Processed at XXX Location. Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH
11/28/2007 4:59 pm Picked Up by XXX.


So, picked up on 28th and leaves Ohio on the 29th and at 7AM on the 30th it is within 10 miles of my house (Bellevue).

But that's no good. We gotta put it on a truck and send it 100 miles south to Chehalis!

And of course then we have to flood Interstate 5 between Chehalis and Seattle to totally screw things up.

Given the hardships many other people are suffering this week as their cars disappear into sinkholes and their homes slide down hillsides, I am hardly concerned about this trifle, but I find the system's decision to send it 90 miles farther away quite amusing.

Well the RMA Trekstor got here (and another one I decided to snag). I also decided to get an FM tuner module. The FM module is either just as bad as many people have said or it is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. You decide.

I have both Vibez hooked up to my Fedora MPS Cray emulator and I am copying 10 384k ultra VBR OGG copies of _Night on Bald Mountain_ back and forth between them to stress test the itty-bitty hard drives. If they survive until next Sunday then I face the more serious issue of deciding what playlist tools to use to organize music on these. I have been fooling with Amarok. Not sure if it will work.

Hmmm, those itty bitty hard drives are not specced for continuous operation, so I can believe that stressing them seriously could cause failures.

The typical use profile (after syncing) usually doesn't entail running for long periods of time.

Hugo

Notorious purveyor of bullshit that I am, I figured you knew that I don't have an emulated Cray or 384 MP3s (would that even be in the spec?), so I haven't really been abusing the new (My Precious!) Vibez. I am interested to know what kind of duty they *can* support, though. The previous Vibez shucked off its mortal coil sometime during the effort to transfer about 5GB of music.

Mmm that was definitely a bit quick. I guess a lot depends on temperature, etc, but I suspect that more than a couple of hours continuous operation would be pushing it. ISTR the assumed duty cycle was written somewhere in the datasheet, but that was rather a long time ago and I don't remember.

My vibez is still working fine, apart from the awful wheel thing they covered the sensible wheel control with. If you want to see the actual wheel that was going to be on the Rio 1.8" players, take a look at the Sansa Connect - that's the exact rio wheel, same moulds and everything. Ok, we had some LEDs added round the side to light up the play/pause, skip track, etc icons, but it's the wheel. What might have been, etc... it's a pretty good control in that form.

Hugo

v1.13 anybody? Just posted this morning.

http://www.trekstor-uk.co.uk/beta/update-vibez-beta-v1.13.htm