Its_All.Lost
Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Samsung 980 Pro Not Recognized

Samsung 980 Pro

For the past couple months I have been collecting parts to build a new PC. I have not built a PC in about 10-12 years now since I jumped over to the Apple ecosystem. I have been trying to get my hands on a PlayStation 5 in what feels like forever. I have gotten close a few times but no dice. My son has a PlayStation 4 and I wanted the new console so I could play games with him as he is in another state. Well I finally gave up on trying for a PlayStation, even the PS4s are impossible to find right now. So I decided to build for gaming instead. Most of the games these days are cross-play compatible so no need to have a console it just would have been nice. I transitioned from PC gaming to consoles a long time ago, when I got kids. It was just easier but I do miss it. So back at it I go #PCMasterRace!

I landed a fantastic deal on a Asus Tuf Z690-Plus Wireless D4 Motherboard which I paired with an Intel i5-12600K processor. I tossed in some Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 memory (32GB, and the RGB enhancement kit) and topped it all off with an Asus Tuf AiO water cooler. I decided since I was building a pretty recent machine (hardware wise) I wanted to kind of go all out as, much as my wallet would let me anyway so I bought a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB M2 SSD and OMFG is this thing fast, and this SSD is why I am making this post…

My brand new motherboard would not see the M2 drive. I tried every setting I could possibly find in the BIOS and yes I did update the BIOS, it was quite old for how new the board is actually. Still no dice. It would not show up as a detected drive but I could see it listed as a physical device that was connected to the board so it was working, right? Just nothing would see it, the board nor the Windows installer. I searched for like 10hours and found a lot of others that have also had issues with this drive in particular, some of them ended up have to exchange the drive and the replacement worked. Some replaced it with another brand. As it was nearing 4am I was about to give up for the day (I had even posted to Reddit asking for help with real no luck) and I found a post stating that Samsung doesn’t even have an official driver for the drive, they used the Intel driver. So I went over to Intel and downloaded the driver for (current at this time) 12th generation processors, slapped it on a thumbdrive and loaded the Windows installer, loaded the driver and it saw my SSD immediately and Windows installed without a hitch. On reboot the drive also now shows up normally in my motherboards BIOS. Ran some speed tests in Windows 10 and I am hitting the numbers quoted by everyone else and seen in those fantastic screenshots. This thing is fast! Game loading times are damn near non-existent. Its beautiful! And whats better, is that my board supports four of these bastards! This rig will never see mechanical drives.

 

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (11th and 12th Gen Platforms)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/720755/intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-11th-and-12th-gen-platforms.html

I downloaded and used the driver named “df6vmdflpy-x64.zip” and it worked for me.

 

XMP Memory Issues

Since I’m talking about my new build and the issues I came across I have another one for ya. I purchased 32gb (2×16) of Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 RGB memory that supports XMP. But I could not get XMP to work properly. If I enabled XMP the system would consistently hang on boot in safe mode with an error stating that the memory has issues with its current settings. After some Redditing I found out some people had to manually set the voltage for the sticks but I also saw someone mention to simply switch RAM slots. That the modules needed to be in the other RAM banks on the motherboard (A2B2 banks – slots  2 & 4, on my board they’re the grey slots not the black slots). Once I moved the sticks to those slots and enabled XMP everything worked just fine and I am getting the proper speeds out of my memory now.

So if you are having issues with enabling XMP on your (Asus Tuf z690-Plus?) motherboard you can try swapping memory banks and see if that clears up the issue.

The ATOM editor

ATOM Editor

When I ran with the unwashed (ms windows) I used notepad++, then I moved to sublime when I started using a mac. I had used it for several years, then I decided to look for alternatives one day. I can’t remember why I was unhappy with sublime. I tried Brackets, Komodo, Aptana Studio and a few others but they didn’t feel right. Then I found ATOM, and that felt right. Maybe because it was so similar to sublime, that’s probably it. But it is so much more. It has many plugins you can well, plugin. You can make it just like sublime (but its better), and that may help with the transition. Fuck notepad++ that shit is old news and windows only, and windows fucking sucks. ATOM is cross-platform. Even if I had to do it all over again I would choose mac or Linux over windows, except for gaming (I bought a PS4, yeah fuck xboxes too). That is the only thing you can do with windows that makes sense, but then it doesn’t even really make sense. Everything about windows is wrong but that’s for another story all together.

So, https://atom.io/.

READ THIS or at least skim through it https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/best-atom-packages-2017.

One of the most helpful plugins I have found is atom-beautify which is the reason I decided to write this post. Because it was such a pain in the ass to get this running. But in the end it wasn’t. It was a ID10T issue. I didn’t understand what exactly it was supposed to do, exactly. But now I do and knowing is half the battle! What is a beautifier? Well it takes all that horribly formatted code and makes it all nice and pretty to work with and look at. Its so fucking helpful.

I had installed atom-beautify and its sub component php-cs-fixer. Upon opening a php file I received an error that php-cs-fixer could not be found. So it looks like I need to install it. Well the ATOM websites directions for installing php-cs-fixer on a mac are wrong. You need to visit FriendsOfPHP at Github. Those directions there do work.

I did a few things to try to get it to work, these are probably not the correct steps, but they got me there. In the end I am thinking one may be able to use the compose install and run with that, omitting the manual/curl install. Remember, I am on a mac (latest OS as of this writing).

I tried the composer install first.

But when I tried which php-cs-fixer I got nothing. Now I know I was using the wrong paths in hind-sight. If I were you I would try installing via composer then using the proper composer path in the settings. If that doesn’t work and you still get the error then you know you need to do the manual install as well. But I am thinking not.

Then I tried the homebrew, at first it was producing errors for read/write permissions on a folder. Persistence paid off and it eventually just installed without any errors. Go figure. But alas, doing which php-cs-fixer  produced nothing once again. So I tried the manual installation, as the others did not produce any positive results. From a terminal do this:

then:

Turns out this comment also explains the same thing on how to install it.

Then, just run which php-cs-fixer, and it should hopefully give you good news (a path). I copied that path, and pasted it in the config settings for atom-beautify and php-cs-fixer. But that also produced the same errors from atom-beautify/php-cs-fixer. Then I found this https://github.com/pfefferle/atom-php-cs-fixer/issues/31#issuecomment-239443397. In that picture lied my salvation. I was using the wrong path this whole time and didn’t know it. As soon as I changed the path for php-cs-fixer I was good to go. That path was:

/Users/yourusername/.composer/vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer

Also of note, no matter what I did I was not able to get php php-cs-fixer  to work, never. I saw it posted all over but it never worked for me. So I did get it working, but I still thought it wasn’t working. Because it wasn’t doing anything (or so I thought). I was running the beautifier on all kinds of pages and I didn’t see any code change, I would even remove all indents and nothing! What the fuck dude? So I tried some html pages, and some JavaScript files. Those all worked just fine. It was just the php pages that were not working. Well as it turns out it was working just not how I though it should, which it should. All of the files I have that are php are intermixed php with html, for websites. I rarely have pages that are pure php. Well this plugin doesn’t structure html, at all. Or even call to the html formatter, as I think it should. It just formats pure php. So if you change the page type to html and run the beautifier it works just fine. I was expecting it to restructure all the contents of the php file, not just the actual php code. My mistake.

TLDR; php-cs-fixer just formats/indents pure php code, not php code intermixed with another language like html.. Also you need to update php5.6 to 7+ and I would install php-cs-fixer via composer, check your paths.

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I am not responsible for anything that you fuck up or that goes wrong. Take these steps at your own risk. You have been warned.

AKAI MPK Mini on a Mac Pro with Logic Pro

Little tid-bit of information I found out today, I’ll share with the class. I have a “late 2013” Mac Pro, aka the trash can. I dabble a little bit with Logic X Pro, sometimes I just fool around. But I do like to use it for recording my guitars and shit. Works great. I thought lol, well it didn’t today. I got bit by the music bug early this morning wanted to get something done. Was feeling in a dirty dubstep mood and wanted to play. Plugged in the AKAI and nothing. It lit up and all the pads worked but no sound. It wasn’t auto mapping to instruments and dials were not moving. Took me about 30 minutes before I switched USB ports and wha-la! Apparently it only plays nice as the main USB port. I was programming an ESP8266 yesterday on the Mac and left the FTDI plugged in on the main port, I just plugged the AKAI into the other one figuring it should work. Never gave it a second thought. The trash cans USB plugs are on the back, a rather inconvenient place for them says I. So I use some USB extension cables to get them to a more reasonable spot on the desk. They look the same so they get mixed up sometimes, which usually doesn’t matter. Did this time I guess.