Disable USB power saving for booting from USB

Having issues booting from USB connected SSD and disabling this in the Linux Kernal seems to solve the issues of the disk becoming unavailable.
Edit /etc/default/grub and change the following line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash usbcore.autosuspend=-1"

Update the config with: sudo update-grub

Reboot

Thanks to this post.

Chromium Hardware Acceleration Issues on Mint 18,2

I'm currently testing Mint18.2 and have run into a number of issues with Chrome. It initially started with corruption issues in Youtube.
After investigation I discovered that the hardware acceleration had been disabled. By adding the following switches to the 'exec' lines in /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome I was able to force all the acceleration options on:

• --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers
• --enable-zero-copy
• --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds
• --ignore-gpu-blacklist
• --enable-gpu-rasterization
• --enable-checker-imaging

I added these to the file by editing it with root (sudo) options. I suspect the file will be overwritten on update. There seems to be an environment variable for chromium which allows you to set command line options to pass to chromium without editing files, but I can't tell if this works for Chrome yet.