shadowspar

Picked up a blue 4GB Sandisk Sansa Clip+ with some of the gift certificates I got for Christmas.

It seems like such a little thing, but I'm disproportionately thrilled to have an mp3 player again. I've been without since the death of my Cowon iAudio7 (an excellent piece of equipment but for the breakage of the volume buttons). I've had one more or less continuously since 2007, and I've apparently gotten quite used to "filling the gaps" in my day with it. Chores become a lot more pleasant when you have something to listen to while doing them, and having a player on hand is a good way to do something productive, or at least amuse yourself, during times when you're waiting -- waiting for someone, waiting for an appointment, waiting for the bus, or what have you. Since I have a short daily commute now, I eat through podcasts at a surprising rate. You can get through a lot in 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.

We all know that the rate of progress when it comes to computers & electronics is staggering, but every now and again, I still have to take a step back and boggle. I picked up the Clip+ for $35; a deep discount boxing week item from Future Shop. It's cheaply made, very light, but seems solid enough nonetheless. Despite this, it's probably more powerful computer than the first x86 box I ever owned -- the Clip+ has a 250MHz ARM processor and 4GB of storage, vs the Pentium 120 with a 1.2GB hard disk that we paid some $1800 for in 1997. The original firmware is OK enough, but the main thing that sold me on the Clip+ was that there's a port of Rockbox, the open source audio player firmware, for it.

Rockbox is a thousand flavours of awesome; I'm an unreserved fan. Out of the box, the Clip+ can play most common audio formats, let you listen to FM radio, and record from either the radio or the built-in mic. Flash it with Rockbox, and its capabilities expand a hundredfold: it now plays almost anything you can get your hands on (including MOD files, demoscene stuff that harkens back to the Amiga days!), lets you read text files (important for me, since I like to keep itineraries, booking references, confirmation numbers and the like in my player for convenient reference when I travel) and even edit them; it has games (Tetris, Asteroids, Puzzle Bobble, Breakout, and Pong clones; Solitaire, and it even plays DOOM, albeit badly) and even hacky mpeg video support (though on a tiny monochrome screen, it's only a breathtaking experience in that it can be done at all).

The open source future is here. I like this future. =)