The LG GS20N Optical Drive in the ICY DOCK MB343SPO Front Bracket Adapter

The LG GS20N Optical Drive in the ICY DOCK MB343SPO Front Bracket Adapter

Hi everyone, In this post, we will see the LG GS20N Optical Drive in the ICY DOCK Ultra Slim ODD + 3.5″ to 5.25″ Front Bay Bracket Adapter (MB343SPO). Installing the optical drive in this adapter was very simple. We just push the optical drive into the 9.5mm drive slot and use a single screw to secure it into the bay adapter. Since I’m not adding a 3.5″ hard disk drive, I placed the cover into the 3.5-inch slot. The…

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The ICY DOCK Ultra Slim ODD + 3.5″ to 5.25″ Front Bay Bracket Adapter (MB343SPO)

The ICY DOCK Ultra Slim ODD + 3.5″ to 5.25″ Front Bay Bracket Adapter (MB343SPO)

Hi everyone, Today, we will see the ICY DOCK Ultra Slim ODD + 3.5″ to 5.25″ Front Bay Bracket Adapter. This is a bracket that allow us to add an Ultra Slim 9.5mm Optical Drive and a 3.5-inch Hard Disk Drive or Solid State to the 5.25-inch front slot some computer cases has for a 5.25-inch optical drive. If you have a 9.5mm optical drive instead of a full-height 5.25 drive, or need to add an additional 3.5-inch hard disk…

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The LG GS20N Slot-Loading 9.5mm Optical Drive

The LG GS20N Slot-Loading 9.5mm Optical Drive

Hi everyone, Today, we will be seeing the LG GS20N Optical Drive. This is an internal SATA 9.5mm Slot Loading drive. This drive is compatible with 12cm CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD+/-R DVD+/-R DL, DVD+/-RW and DVD-RAM. It can burn CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-R DL DVD+/-RW and DVD-RAM. This is my first slot-loading internal DVD Drive. Here’s a look at the front and back of the drive: On the other side, we can see some drive internals: By taking out…

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Enabling the Apple USB SuperDrive on Ubuntu

Enabling the Apple USB SuperDrive on Ubuntu

Hi everyone, In this post, we will see how to enable the Apple USB SuperDrive Optical Drive on Ubuntu. This drive is nothing more than an LG GX50N drive inside an Apple-designed case. It’s very likely the drive is also a special version designed for this case too. One thing for sure is that the drive’s firmware seem to also be modified to only allow it to work with some Apple machines. However, we can trick it to work on…

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The Apple USB SuperDrive Optical Drive A1379

The Apple USB SuperDrive Optical Drive A1379

Hi everyone, Today, we will take a look at the Apple USB SuperDrive. This is a CD and DVD drive sold by Apple. The current model is A1379. This DVD drive can read and write all standard CD and DVD formats. This includes CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW and DVD+/-R DL. This drive compatibility is limited to some models of the Mac. However, it is compatible with Linux after using a special command line. I’ll talk about this on another post….

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Enabling AV1 video encoding for the Intel Arc A750 GPU on Ubuntu

Enabling AV1 video encoding for the Intel Arc A750 GPU on Ubuntu

Hi everyone, Yesterday, I installed a new Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) into my main machine. Unfortunately, I had some problems when attempting to encode videos to AV1. However, it is easy to solve when we perform the following steps. It seems that we must use Intel-provided packages in order to enable the full use of the hardware. Barely using ffmpeg with Ubuntu’s default packages will show a couple of errors which are fixed when we install the intel packages. Note…

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The Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition Graphics Card

The Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition Graphics Card

Hi everyone, Today, I have installed a new Graphics Processing Unit into my main machine. The card I chose is the Sparkle Intel Arc A750 Titan OC Edition. The reason for choosing this card has to do with video encoding, with its Intel Quick Sync component supporting VP9 and AV1 encoding. AV1 encoding is slow on the CPU itself, so having a GPU capable to do that is great. It is also able to encode to H264 and H265/HEVC. It…

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LG BP50NB40 Blu-Ray laser died

LG BP50NB40 Blu-Ray laser died

So, these past days I’ve been having trouble with the LG BP50NB40 External Blu-Ray Drive. While I was archiving my data, it failed burning on PlexDisc BD-R DL 50GB discs at different intervals. Later, while I was trying to verify some other discs, it started to make some bad noises and it seems this is where the Blu-Ray laser gave up. Now, it simply tries to load the Blu-Ray disc with annoying sounds, sometimes working, sometimes failing. Discs that used…

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Fixing GRUB 2.12-rc1 booting issues on the HP Stream 7 and 8 tables by downgrading

Fixing GRUB 2.12-rc1 booting issues on the HP Stream 7 and 8 tables by downgrading

Hi everyone, In this post, we will see how to downgrade GRUB on the HP Stream 7 and 8 tablets. These tablets use the Intel Bay Trail platform and only have a 32-bit bootloader. The CPU in these tablets are 64-bit, so it’s weird that the bootloader only works with 32-bit EFI loaders. The good thing is that we can use a 64-bit version of Linux paired with the 32-bit GRUB EFI loader. In Ubuntu 23.10 and the upcoming Ubuntu…

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