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Quartus Prime FPGA USB-Blaster Problems On Ubuntu 18.04

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I’ve decided to learn how to program FPGA:s. So I got myself two Terasic boards, one Terasic DE10-Nano for testing out the excellent MiSTer FPGA hardware arcade/computer/console emulator and a simpler DE0-Nano for beginning to learn Verilog.

But the software used, called Intel Quartus Prime 19.1, is truly horrible. The Windows version doesn’t work with high-resolution screens when using scaling; the text is cut off on the display. So I installed it on my Linux Ubuntu 18.04 machine instead. Now the display works, but there’s a lot of other problems, like getting the dreaded error message: “USB-Blaster unable to scan device chain”. I’ve written them down here for later reference, and maybe you have the same install problems, so this might help.

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Shairport Crashing When Using USB DAC with Raspberry Pi

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I’ve moved over from Squeezebox server to Roon as my multi-room music playback system. The new system works wonderfully, and I love it. However, there’s one thing that I’ve had a problem with, and that’s getting Apples AirPlay to work reliably with my Roon Raspberry Pi endpoints running Diet-Pi Linux. The Shairport-sync constantly crashed. After searching around the net, I found a solution to my problem.

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PayPal Two-Factor Authentication in 1Password

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You want to keep your PayPal account safe. Using SMS to add an extra authentiation is a hassle and could cost you money as well. PayPal in their infinite stupidity has chosen not to use the regular 2FA two-factor authentication used by most of the online sites. Instead, they decided to go with Symantec/VeriSign’s design, where you need a proprietary iOS, Android app or a dedicated hardware key. This method makes it very hard to get it to work with the worlds best password manager software, 1Password. However, with some elbow grease, there is a way of getting it to work. Here’s how.

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MacBook Netflix Flicker Flashing in Full-screen

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I had an annoying problem on my MacBook Pro Mac OS when watching movies on Netflix using Safari. When in full-screen mode, the display would flash/flicker a couple of times a minute. Well, after digging around, I found a solution for it.

Why Does the screen keep flashing when watching Netflix?

Some MacBook Pro’s have dual graphics cards. Mac OS switches between them depending on what kind of work you are doing, and by switching cards it saves batteries. Unfortunately, the built-in Intel graphics cards are the reason for the flickering and flashing. So we need to turn on the high-performance graphics card when watching Netflix.

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HifiBerry DAC+ Click When Changing Song

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My current music setup is a Raspberry Pi 3 with a HifiBerry DAC+ audio card as my music player. It works perfectly, except for one annoying thing. The new HifiBerry DAC+ makes an audible click or poping sound when changing the sampling rate. I have a lot of recordings in higher resolution than CD-quality of 16-bit 44kHz, so it’s jarring when it happens. I like to play my music loud which exacerbates the problem. But there’s an easy solution, and at the same time, you can get better sound quality overall. Here’s how to fix the problem.

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