msknight

The system boots from MicroSD first and then eMMC. You can put Debian on it this way, using the SD to eMMC images to transfer an image to the eMMC, or else boot from the MicroSD card directly. However, if you're using Debian with the intention of using ZFS, then I had problems with the FriendlyElec ARM kernel images so I was about to try Ubuntu before my CM3588 died on me.

I used the Micro SD card slot. It appears that the boo order is MicroSD and then on-board. I started using the resource in 1) Official images and 2) SD to eMMC to put an image onto the SD card, and then inserting that and it would transfer itself to the eMMC. ... at least that's what I was doing before my CM3588 died.

It seems that after a few hours of working, mine has failed. The only thing I can tell for sure is that over the course of five seconds-ish, the unit ramps up power consumption to 3 amps, at which point the bench power unit shuts it off. This is with no drives, etc. attached... just the bare unit. Prior to this, it was only pulling a few hundred milliamps. I've gone to FriendlyElec and reported this, but I do have at the back of my mind, the history that western designs are over-engineered and can survive real world things like accidental shorts, voltage spikes, whatever, and shake some of it off... but it costs. Chinese designed electronics, however, have lacked this and I've paid the price. If I get an update from FriendlyElec I'll let you know, but even if they go out of their way and ship a replacement FOC, I'll have this nagging doubt in my mind as to how far I can trust it.

I'd like to see the Sennheiser HD 480 1700 added. While the HF 600 seems to have gone off the radar, this is about two thirds of the price and can still be had new from the UK - https://www.canford.co.uk/Products/54-172_SENNHEISER-HD-480-HEADPHONES-1700-ohms-wired-stereo-3.5mm-A-gauge-plug - I found them after chasing old second hand versions on e-bay because BBC audio engineers used them (I still see headphones on webcams of radio broadcasts which seem to use these models) and eventually found that they were still being made. Quality/price is reasonable in my book, although I do have to turn up the volume a bit. They're my favoured phones for concentrated listening, and I own a few including the Sen HD 600, the Massdrop HD 58x Jubilee, the Beyerdynamics DT 990 Pro, Grado SR225e, among others, and I keep coming back to the HD 480 1700. I don't see much on this headphone in the audio section, so I thought I'd comment.

WAN Show Hoodie - as approved by sleepy dachshunds. Shame he pinned my drinking arm.

That's actually a very bad thing. Orders over £135 are supposed to have issues with VAT and customs duty on arrival. They are duties that are supposed to be paid because LTT can't/isn't collecting duties, etc. at point of sale, they're only collecting VAT. If they're not being processed properly, then that's going to open Linus up to exactly what he didn't want to happen... an audit a few years down the line costing him a small fortune in unpaid duty.

I made a mistake with my order and the continued delay in support tickets is having an effect. After receiving the screwdrivers and testing my bits I determined that I’d need the extra sets of shorter LTT bits, so I ordered two of each set. The order went in on Thursday 29th December 5AM Vancouver time. Realising that I’d ordered two of the standard set, which come with the drivers, I e-mailed 10 minutes later to firstly apologise for my mistake and to request cancellation of those two sets, or the whole order if it was easier for them. However, on the 3rd of January, I received a shipping label notification and despite it still showing on Wizmo tracking as data received (it appears that it’s still in the LTT warehouse according to Wizmo) I received an e-mail from support late on the 4th saying that the order had shipped. I can't blame them for not wanting to go through a pile of stuff to find my parcel. In my case it’s not too big a deal but in some cases this could turn out to be a potentially expensive problem. Incidentally, as this was going to be my last ever order from LTT, I decided to get another of the stealth hoodie pros for the mobile phone carrying pocket and as I was going to be over the threshold for customs charges, I decided to get hung for a sheep as a lamb and got a mystery hoodie as well. I mean, last time I was going to order, right? Unfortunately the tax situation at checkout was not sorted and I was charged VAT at point of sale, for an order which was nearly £250, well over the £135 UK customs limit for the seller to charge VAT. So that’s going to trip customs VAT/duty/charges at import and will be another pain in the rear end to sort out when it eventually arrives as it'll mean another eventual e-mail to LTT to refund the VAT, just like the backpack. So… double check your order before committing because support response is still slow despite previous commitments to considerably up staffing levels, and if you’re outside the US/Canada, be ready for a potential customs issue/second payment as that issue is still outstanding also.

Unfortunately I had to come back to add that in addition to the expected six days between label printing and shipping, they then apparently sat around Vancouver for five days. This is not looking good for LTT's chosen method of shipping. .

OK – well, here we are. WAN show complete and still Linus hasn’t addressed the customs issue, particularly the disparity behind him claiming that LTT does its taxes properly, against people receiving customs declarations misrepresenting the value of the backpacks and the relatively minor thing of not addressing why the “free” stickers will cost you a few pence at customs. (LTTStore and HMRC responses on the stickers are a few posts back) To the wrong customs declarations LTT Store did respond, “We have been informed of this on a couple of occasions and are currently working on how to have this resolved.” … but I can’t see how they’re going to, “resolve,” this. LTT have collected VAT and will have to pass that to the relative countries, but beyond that discussions will have to be had on missing duty charges, etc. I can’t see them coming after the customers for anything. LTT will likely eat whatever this costs them. A good chunk of people who escaped customs duty would likely not inform LTT and I don’t blame them; but LTT should have the precise numbers on this because they have the paperwork; and if Linus doesn’t want this to bite him in five or ten years, as he claimed at the end of the WAN show the previous week, then all that paperwork is going to have to be sorted out… not that we’ll hear anything of it. We’ll see what happens when the screwdrivers arrive but as this is my last post here I won’t trouble updating further unless something drastic happens; it should all be relatively scripted now so I’m not expecting any drama, just a bit of a wait and possibly end up with a repeat of the customs charges issue. So in conclusion… 1) Linus’ lack of acknowledgement of the customs issues is the final event that takes him off the pedestal I held him on, as being a champion of the tech/gaming consumer. It was my fault for putting him up there in the first place. 2) The videos now being made are of things I’ll never do or afford and the style change isn’t delivering for me. They are extremes. The writing seems to be tuned to the staff’s preferences and not leaving things open for the viewer. There has been a marked shift from technology that can change my life, to outlandish builds, what the staff do in their spare time and their own preferences. I do appreciate a look in to what life is like in Canada, the home space, layouts, etc. (the journey to get the CRT) but I believe the main LTT channel is not the place to give a lesson on coffee brewing; that’s why they created channels like Superfun in the first place. There used to be some great reviews of tech that was useful in my life, at a price I could afford. Now, it’s just leaving me with the impression that they are struggling to find good, relevant content. Maybe the lab will change that… but it is yet to come. Eg. the recent mechanical keyboard review for mac users was mushy in my personal opinion; especially when weighed against earlier videos like Luke’s that sold me on the Hyperion Fury. How do I quantify that? I now have six Hyperion Fury. The Mac keyboard maker they recommended in the end… I can’t even remember the companies name. The Mac mechanical keyboard video failed to make a sale; and I’m someone who has a small collection of mechanical keyboards and used the IBM classic steel-bottomed tanks when they came out first time around in the 80’s. (My specialist IT course back in the day, trained us on touch typing with electric typewriters to the point where we had to pass an exam; so I know what I like in a keyboard… what I’m saying is that if a video on mechanical keyboards fails to make a mark on someone like me who has a long history in the subject... it’s not good.) 3) The store is no longer appealing to me. There was a great design feature in the stealth hoodie, namely the mobile phone pocket. Absolutely brilliant piece of work which makes a difference to my life because I know my mobile is safe from “pocket drop,” and I can get at my mobile without having to open the main zip. I’ll even wear the stealth hoodie when I don’t need to, purely so I can use the pocket to carry my mobile, however I don’t see it in the other jackets. I expect the screwdriver to make a difference also. The backpack, less so, but the quality and effort sold me on it. The rest of the offerings in the store… I can get equivalent quality for less money in the UK, and not have to contend with the customs situation. Linus’ standing and ethics was the reason I bought T-shirts, etc. some years ago and put up with getting fleeced at import… but not any more. The current designs just aren’t floating my boat and when it comes down to it, that’s the only differentiator. Linus is now talking about making wallets which puts him at odds with one of his sponsors. Is he moving too fast? 4) The delays and the misguided efficiency saving of printing shipment labels ahead of time, I can forgive, but not the management behaviour of piling things high and not resourcing LTT Store to cope. Bringing the screwdrivers and the backpack on-line in addition to the regular orders which also would have ramped up for christmas anyway, which was then compounded by shipment delays from china; and in the midst of all this, a black friday deal that sold out in less than half an hour. They could have missed the black friday boat this year and had a unique LTT sale in January, once things had settled down a bit. LTT Store must be backlogged to all heck. While I’m not the kind of person that demands my new widget on my doorstep next day, I do like to be informed about realistic expectations regarding my order and what’s happening that affects it, without having to hunt for a statement on a web site (like the planning announcement in Hitch Hikers Guide - “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’,” “Yes, but it was on display...”) which I believe is a reasonable position. I only received an e-mail for the china backpack delay; everything else I had to actively watch LTT announcements. It seems that a fair chunk of complaints/talk in the forums have been about the lack of communication. What also isn’t funny is the length of time it took to hire new staff when support responses starting getting to a week long, and the opaque language Linus used when he was hiring, 100% and then 50% more staff. I am very aware when numbers are presented to me, in HOW those numbers are presented to me and whether they are being used to hide something. I get the impression that something is being hidden here… those figures could be one person, who is then doubled to two people and then upped to three people; another thing that is against Linus’, “honesty,” score IMHO. Again, mostly management failings here I believe. I take my hat off to the store crew (however many they are) for handling the situation as well as they have; while coming under flack from justifiably upset customers. For the times I upgrade or buy my computers, I trust a family business in the UK. Things are moving too fast for me to keep track of… so I let them to do that for me. I know I can go to them with something like, “I need good single thread performance and a graphics card with good linux drivers while not sucking down the national grid. Here’s my budget.” … and it will all work out; because prices and models change so fast. LTT is less relevant for me because by the time I’m ready for an upgrade, the equipment LTT has reviewed have come to market and then gone again. However, said family business have started putting out their own videos and I’m tuning in to them instead. Being a hardware company, their sales and black friday deals are of more interest to me to boot. They also inform of offers on games as well; something I haven’t seen LTT do. They haven’t got LTT’s polish, but I can forgive that, they’re telling me the news I want to hear. So that’s why I’m done with LTT. At least until labs get running, then I might take another look; as long as the reviews are clean and more like the Hyperion Fury than the mac keyboard. Ciao for now.

I'm waiting for the WAN show this week, by the way, and then I'll give my final thoughts and I'm gone. My screwdrivers are caught up in the large number of pre-printed shipment labels. Got notification of the label six days ago, but still no receipt by the carrier. Unless they're on their way to the US and enter the carrier network at that point. This is a bit of a pain, but nothing to do but be patient.

I wouldn't expect it. Beyond refund of the VAT that we paid wrongly at checkout, customs fees are down to the destination country to set. If LTT helped out, they'd be subsidising the backpack to certain countries and that would mean their profits. But only they can make that call. Likely the best they would do, is put the effort behind an EU warehouse, but as Linus said in one of the WAN shows, it ain't easy and it's expensive. It's a financial decision for them and only LTT know the numbers.

I got a speedy reply from HMRC. They said, "All goods must be valued accurately whether they are a gift or not it doesn't matter they must be valued accurately and cannot be valued as £0 for customs purposes." ... so Creator Warehouse have to put a minimum value even for the free stickers.

What you say regarding the product, the VAT, etc. I agree. For me, Linus has put himself forward on the owning up and doing the right thing ticket, the, "you can trust me," ethics. I don't think that's the case any more and that's what's turned me off. It's a deeper thing, and I went into more detail earlier.

Not true. But I'm not going to get into a slinging match over it... the arguing is not worth it.

OK Linus started talking about the store at about 20 minutes-ish in and didn't mention the VAT issue at all. So that's it. Once the screwdrivers are here... I'm done. Linus' words about doing things right, etc. and what I thought were his ethics, have just slipped a major degree towards being like any other company. The special sauce has passed its shelf life and doesn't smell as fresh any more. EDIT: LTT store confirmed the drop in VAT refund was related to the earlier refund. They did offer to refund the sticker customs charge, but I said that the pennies are neither here or there, but that some VAT declarations being $50 for the backpack was a real issue, not only for legality for customs, but fairness for the customers. It's now just an image thing at this point. So I'll stick around for a few days to see what others have to say about this, (and see if moderators alter my words again) and then I'm gone. Ciao. Edit: Regarding the stickers, they say, "While we don't charge for bonus bin items, customs is required to place a value on items that are imported. In many places, the value for items without listed cost, is set to a minimum of $1. Unfortunately, we are unable to avoid this." ... so I've written to the customs office in the UK to ask if this is true. It's beyond the point of the money itself, obviously, it's now a matter of how factual this all is. To a point, even that doesn't matter any more.