There's an old saying, "the more hardware you buy at the same time, the more likely something else will prevent them from working properly on Day One".
Ok, I made that up, but I am going to stick by it and make it an adage from now on. By no deliberate effort of my own.
So today I decided to be a little spendthrift and shop around for a microSD card to store more songs that I won't listen to on my mp3 phone. Prior to me leaving, a colleague cautioned me of this particular model's limitation - it cannot handle 1GB or bigger cards. True enough when I was testing at a shop only a 512MB card is readable. The 1GB simply gave it a headache, went unresponsive, threw up this morning's breakfast, and self-rebooted. These cards are dirt cheap nowadays; what the heck, 512MB it is.
Along the way I finally decided to purchase something I had in the back of my mind for years but never acted on. A TV tuner card for my TV-less room. Yeap, eversince I put my TV in my sister's room some 47 years ago I have not watched broadcast TV. I am so out of touch with tubeland; heard that TVs can actually display colour now. I saw these TV cards have dropped in pricing considerably; so what the heck.
Should I be giggly happy now that I have some new toys to play with today? Well, while 512MB card can be "read" by my phone, but when I connect it to the computer to transfer files, its internal drives didn't show up half the time in Windows Explorer. Actually they did appear, after I unplug the phone. Each time I set the phone to disconnect mode (in order to have Windows see the drives on the phone, it needs to be explicitly set to connect mode), it ends like behaving as though it had a 1GB card per above example.
Who wants to buy a 1-day-old second-hand microSD card?
Then came the TV card. Plugged it in nicely into my desktop computer, only to discover that my old TV antenna cable is lost (we have been using Cable TV for over seven years). So out I rode to the neighbourhood town centre to get a fresh whip. And then, no matter what I tried, it simply won't detect any TV channels. Everything ends up as 0Hz. The next few hours was probably the most strenuous activity I had done in months, running up and down looking for old TV ports and a TV small enough for me to test. In preliminary conclusion (is that an oxymoron or what), I inferred from test results that our roof antenna's either rusted or stolen - there is simply no reception for any channel.
"the more hardware you buy at the same time, the more likely something else will prevent them from working properly on Day One".