| Posted on: | 06/18/22 03:06:09 |
| Last edited: | 06/18/22 03:06:09 |
Instead of working I have found myself dealing with some mysery and happiness. Lots of both sometimes. I miss things. I think I miss writing. I like writing at the two a.m. in the morning because why not.
Anyways, I recently bought myself something that actually uses the usb-c port on my computer. The USB-C connection actually has a Thunderbolt 3 controller and yes, in theory, I could just connect literally everything I’d possibly ever need through that cable.
I went to a Best Buy in Michigan to get a thunderbolt 3 capable dock but to my surprise I did not find any of my liking. The thing that was missing the most was a Display Port. Literally none of them had it. Not even the extra expensive ones. I mean, they were all kinda equally expensive, even though they’re probably as shitty as one would expect from too new technologies and not enough real manufacturing of them.
In the past month I stumbled upon a hacker news post talking about thunderbolt 3 was. The conclusion was that the expensive and ali-express bought docks were just as equally likely to fail, not work at all, and or work at advertised speeds.
Anyways, I did find some interesting stuff at the best buy. I found a micro-SD card reader that has both a USB type A (that’s the regular USB port you’re used to) and a USB type C port. That’s nice, maybe I’ll gift it to my sister who both owns a regular laptop without USB type C and an iPad with a USB type C connector, hopefully this will work if she has to transfer files faster.
So I did buy that, I bought it open box [0]! I know, I’m a cheap, ain’t I ? Also, I bought a 100-watt USB-C power adaptor for my computer, to charge it much, much faster. As a bonus, it has a 20-watt [1] type-c port and a usb type-a with a little more amperage than your regular phone brick.
Anyways, I bought these two products. The power adaptor worked great. I can now fast-charge off a single AC connection three devices at the same time! Pretty neat. We’ll see how hot she gets.
The micro-SD card reader did not work. Well, the USB type-A connector did work. So that’s good. I could access the file system off my only not-lost micro-SD card and can play the files just as well as I would on my computer’s port. But the type-C connection wouldn’t work. One of my first ideas was to try on a proprietary operating system that normies call Windows. (un?)Fortunately, same results. Only type-A would work. Although something interesting was that power would indeed work. I could charge my phone off the port easily. But I could not read any data off any devices.
So I thought maybe BIOS drivers but wtf am ieven saying idk. Idk enough to know if the BIOS is in charge of this or not. Maybe Lenovo weird firmware updates ?! I checked but nothing. Just annoying windows 10 fat updates. Some Linux stackoverflow questions pointed in weird directions.
the culprit is that… well… not-so-long ago I delved into my BIOS settings and chose to disable the THunderbolt 3 port. To my surprise, power was not cut-off the port and still worked like a charger and I therefore expected it to still be working. But in fact I just jumped into my BIOS a few minutes ago and lo and behold there it was the Thunderbolt 3 disable setting! turned it right back up, worked like a charm. Even if the connection was not over thunderbolt 3, it encapsulates the type-C data port as well, so that’s that. Now I can access my micro-sd through an adapter connected to a USB-C port that is accessed by a mostly open-source operating system.
nice.