gTd -

Some months ago, before I'd had a stick to play with, an article dealing with the memory cards used in cameras commented on their similarity to the flash sticks - cautioning that "special care" was needed in formatting.

For cards used in cameras, the preference is to always let the camera do any format. Your computer will read what the camera does, but the camera may or may not read a format done by the computer. There was no explanation of why this is so, but several sites affirmed the same recommendation.

For a memory stick to be used with a few computers, it's probably safe to format the stick using the computer utilities. It might be well for someone to do a little browsing for comment on this, but the sticks (for smaller sizes) are cheap enough to experiment with, I suppose.

An almost forgotten curiosity about drives in general popped up with an application LiK was trying to use, once I gave her a stick.

She has a Bernina super sewing machine that supposedly came with a computer connection interface that we had never been able to get any use out of. It requires a serial port connection (with a #%!$@#^!!!! DONGLE) and the only computer we had that we could get close enough to the sewing machine to connect was a laptop that didn't have a serial port connector that the #%!$@#^!!!! DONGLE would accept.

Four or five years down the road, I found a USB-serial converter that the sewing machine would accept. Her old software was obsolete, and wouldn't run on anything but Win95, but some new stuff that she found runs on WinXP/Win2K - with a new #%!$@#^!!!! DONGLE that plugs into a USB port. Still no direct connection between computer and sewing machine; but with the USB converter we could plug in a memory stick to transfer "programs" from her desktop to the sewing machine, after she built them (mostly by downloading from the web, I think) on her WinXP machine.

The forgotten glitch: The memory stick she started out using was a 1 GB and was formatted FAT or FAT32 - I haven't bothered to checked which.

With either of these formats, the root directory can contain no more than ~255(?) entries - files or folders, because each file/folder in the root directory has to have an address in the "root sector" and the root sector only has space for that many address entries.

If you make a folder in the root directory, the folder can have as many files in as you can stuff into it, up to the disk/drive capacity.

Having downloaded several thousand "patterns" that she wanted to try out, naturally she "spoke loving words to her tech support" (I thought she was talking about the #%!$@#^!!!! DONGLE again) and I suggested making a folder and putting them all in the folder.

Success loading the stick with a thousand tiny files, but ... ... then we discovered that the sewing machine can't read the files from a sub-folder. They have to be in the root of the stick for the machine to access them.

Someday, maybe, I'll give you my full impression of the idiots who produce "computer campatible" sewing machines and stitch layout programs, but I think I'll wait a bit. I've only had a few months to settle down from Lin's latest round of trying to make some of it work. If I do get around to it, I may also give you my opinion of people who foist those #%!$@#^!!!! DONGLES on anyone - for ANY reason.

John