Computers

WiBArM

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There was a game that I played as a child on our old Tandy 1000 that I’ve wanted to look up for about the last 20 years or so. A relative had sent us a copy, but no one really could read it since the instructions were in Japanese. The 5 1/4″ diskette however, worked just fine.

One of those problems with being a kid, even if I can remember things from way back in more details than I probably should, is that memory is more visual than auditory for me. My best recollection of the name was something like ‘Wib barn,” but hey I was like 5 when I played the game! It’s not like I could spell yet! Literally, I was using MS-DOS before I could read…lol.

Needless to say, trying to find the game on this side of the floppy diskette era has been largely fruitless whenever I’ve tried.

Well, last night I was watching a video on 80s game development, and noticed that the clip of Thexder was Really, Really similar to what I remember but definitely not the same game. Sadly, doing some research into the game also showed that its sequel wasn’t it. Also, I’m pretty sure that I never encountered the Firehawk games personally.

Attempting to find similar games led me to the similar games tab on Giant Bomb, which began as mostly another exercise in futility. I’ve tried to look up the game in the past, always without success. Like seriously, how many late 80s side scrollers were there where you can transform between a robot, and a jet, and a car while exploring pseudo 3D dungeons reminiscent of the Windows 95 Maze? Yeah, you’d think that’s easy, but a lot of old stuff on old video games never made a big impact on the Internet. There were more than a few such ‘robot’ games, but I don’t think any that combined all three modes.

Then in scrolling through the list, I come across one word and it’s like “Holy shit, I remembered the name right,” and lo’ and behold: their page on Wibarm even matches my childhood memory to a tee on the screenshots. It’s without a doubt the same game, and it checks all the boxes: the three modes, the side scroll and 3D like dungeon, and the almost RPG like battles when you encounter the mobs.

So now, after many years, I finally know what that game was, and that my childhood memories are even more accurate than I expected.

Thoughts on Home Audio

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In general, I haven’t cared too much about whole home audio, but have had that available long enough to not really care.

The first setup I had for that, was based around Chromecast almost a decade ago. The 5.1 Vizio surround sound system I had in my apartment had Chromecast support, and the Chromecast Audio was very cheap and very effective when paired with the AUX/Line-In on the analog based Logitech 2.1 that was hooked up to my desktop. No real complaints about the multi-room audio support, although the sound system was enough to fill my apartment.

Sadly, those both audio devices went the way of the trash heap over the years. And I haven’t really used the Chromecast audio since the move to Desktop=Games, Laptop=Desktop. The move from Android to iPad tablet made that less of a concern, since the iPad Pro was only secondary to the surround sound system in terms of speaker quality at home, and could fill my entire apartment with music almost as easily.

The second setup, which is still in use, is an Alexa based one. Over a lustrum, things expanded from a simple puck based Dot, to an orb with a clock. Enough to easily have the audio controls over my shit in the bedroom and kitchen/living room space of my apartment. These days, one of those is still on my headboard and the other is in my kitchen/dining area; and I bought a Pop to gain Alexa control in the study.

Because of how good Nerine’s speakers were, I never really cared too much about the whole home audio was, even after losing the surround-sound setup. Doing multi-room audio with Alexa worked well enough in my experience. But in practice, I only tend to need current room audio and at most, briefly next room audio. The kicker however, is that what audio device I’m playing from can vary. It’s usually going to be my tablet, but it might be my laptop, or my phone, or one of the experiment earlier this year, etc, and sometimes my devices change.

That’s kind of what lead to the Roam 2 solution. I was never really impressed with the Echo Dots for music playback, but they were good enough for anything not an iPad Pro. Since Nerine’s retirement, that’s now basically the case for anything, because the Mini can’t beat the Pro on listening to music, lol.

For me, the dots have always been more about whole-home Alexa control than whole-home audio. But really, both have been a pain in the ass in recent years. Generally, I liked Alexa control. As a voice assistant, it worked better than Siri which has always been rather meh for me and unlike Google’s, doesn’t tend to make me rage-monkey. Let’s just say, Google’s voice assistant wasn’t a concern when I left the Android eco-system.

Since Amazon’s cutting up of their Alexa division, I’ve generally found myself going more “Why do I even bother” at how well my Alexa control works, both in terms of voice recognition and third party things. Enough so, that I mostly consider its days numbered at this point. Since discovering that my watch can handle “Hey Siri, turn on the book lights,” I’m even more considering the end of Alexa control. As meh as my relationship with Siri is, when it works, it does actually work.

E.g., if my typical use case is like, “Alexa, turn on the book lights,” as I’m changing my clothes after work–there’s two ways this exchange can end. Either the lights turn on by the time my belt’s off, or I may as well go out of my way to do it by hand. Let’s just say that I’ve become grateful over the last couple years that the controllers for my Nanoleaf lights are easily accessible, and that they use a capacitive button that doesn’t make me worry about straining the adhesives.

That’s how much my relationship with Alexa control has soured in the last two years compared to how well it worked (let’s Alexa all the rooms) ~five years ago.

In terms of a Bluetooth speaker for the current room though, I’m basically calling the Alexa setup a dead stick. Much more than saying “Pair phone” and hoping the current Dot connects to my tablet, and it’s more bother than it’s worth. Pairing new devices typically ended with grumbles like the Dot connecting to my actual phone not the device I’m using, issues in getting it to connect to the device I’ve named, and the joyous fun that is connecting a new device–even if using the Alexa app.

So, a portable speaker is looking to be a good plan. Off sale, the Roam 2 costs a bit less than my surround sound system did, and on sale closer to what replacement for my JBLs were looking like on a purely Bluetooth front.

I think Sonos is too damn expensive for building my next surround sound system, and may be too expensive for my taste in terms of equipping a speaker per major room, even if I exclude the smart home control as a factor. Really, for downstairs it would make more sense to just migrate from Fire TV to Apple TV for being able to use an AirPlay target–when I eventually go surround-sound. Since the Vizio’s demise, I’ve just made due with the TV’s integrated speakers and been glad that they don’t sound like ass.

For the short to medium term plans though, both audio and smart home control are on the agenda. For right now though, AirPlay -> Roam 2 -> take it with me, is looking to be a good plan. Plus in the study, my laptop is usually docked with the Pebbles on, making it a dandy AirPlay target.

Sonos + AirPlay 2 = :)

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For years, a friend’s told me to just buy a damn Sonos. To which, I’ve generally regarded that as the same kind of problem as why I don’t drive a Porsche–to damn expensive 😜.

Recently though, audio has been a minor thorn in my side. Getting bluetooth audio stuff to work with Alexa is mostly a pain in the ass when you have multiple input devices, and picking music in the vain of ‘Alexa, play ….’ is nice but not preferable. I used to have a pair of JBL Bluetooth speakers, one of which I gave a friend and the other, well, I frankly have no idea where the fuck it ended up.

So, flash forward to today: I may be in the study, in my bedroom, or in the kitchen. My iPad Pro’s quadraphonic speakers were great, like really I didn’t give a hoot about it being four channels-the speakers themselves were great, and while it doesn’t fill my entire home with music the way it used to in the apartment, it’s close enough. Nerine was a great machine for music.

Mayumi, the iPad mini that replaced it, on the other hand has more ordinary speakers: not great, not bad, but nothing really to write home about either. I’d say it’s a little worse than Shion’s speakers and most of my Alexas. But to be fair, music from my tablet speakers has always been an auxiliary function not a primary function–that’s what headphones and speakers are for after all.

In practice it works better to AirPlay from my iPad to my laptop when I’m in the study than to use the younger Echo. If Shion is docked, the pair of Pebbles that replaced my desktop’s old 2.1 Logitech system when it died some years back, actually sound pretty damn great and I love the audio output. I forget how much I paid for those Pebble v3s but damn, it was money well spent! In my bedroom, I’ll usually use the old Echo Dot with a clock on my headboard, after the occasional argument over which device to Bluetooth audio from and that sometimes ends with silence from the lack of wanting to beat it into submission. Downstairs the way it typically goes is wanting to use the really-old Echo Dot and ends with using my iPad speakers because the goal is to cook dinner not win battles against technology.

My remaining Bluetooth speaker hasn’t turned up over the past year, and a replacement surround sound system has been on hiatus for other reasons. So, I decided to shop for a suitable speaker for Christmas. Sonos’s Roam 2 being the winner in the end.

Contenders for this plan included Apple’s HomePod Mini, which would provide both an AirPlay target and an avenue for an idea I’ve had on the mind for a while: possible replacements for Alexa. The problem there is unlike Echo Dot’s, they’re expensive to scale and some new hardware is likely on the horizon, so I’m hesitant to dig into that. The other contender: find an AirPlay capable speaker, preferably one with a Bluetooth function or an analog line-in.

Turns out that there are actually a good number of AirPlay capable speakers now. In the end though, I opted for the Roam 2. Probably cheaper than finding another one of the JBLs I used to use, which apparently were popular enough that as years went on, the price went from okay to crazy, lol. While for me, the Roam 2 is very expensive, unlike creating a whole home audio or a surround sound setup with Sonos, it’s not prohibitively expensive.

Thus far, the little buddy passes the first test cases: P!nk’s Funhouse album and AirPlay. I often use “So What” as one of my reference songs for audio playback, among several others. So far, it’s a win ;). While waiting on my Blu-ray rips to finish, it’s also a good excuse to listen to music.

I was a little concerned about the Roam 2’s audio quality, given reviews that I’ve read. But I have no complaints. Being someone who likes music but isn’t an audiophile, I would say if this puppy sounds bad, you shouldn’t be using a portable speaker or must be moving beyond its range. Generally, I answer both those questions with “If I wouldn’t otherwise have audio, I’m not gonna complain unless it sounds like ass,” and quite frankly it sounds better than my tablet and laptop. Certainly no worse than my various Alexa devices :P.

More importantly, it doesn’t drive me batshit when wanting to connect something….

RTX space heating

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One thing that I’ve learned with being cooped up by this hamstring, is Rimuru makes a superb space heater. A while back, I bought a small sensor wanting to get an idea of the humidity in the study, since sometimes it gets rather warm.

Rimuru’s waste heat when pumping out the 4070 Ti is actually enough to significantly raise the temperature in here. After a long gaming session the study’s temperature can climb as as high as 26 C versus 21 C across the house where my thermostat is located. Or roughly, play video games long enough and the temperature rises about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Enough that opening the window is more effective than mucking with the thermostat, but then that dries things out on the humidity front. It’s quite an effective space heater when outputting 2160p, but fortunately that’s predominantly waste heat rather than internal. It’s got great cooling, the problem is the place it sends that heat is outside the case ;).

By contrast while the study TV likely has a larger amount of waste heat than the monitor at my desk, Steam Deck event when combined with its dock and an external hard drive, doesn’t really seem to affect the temperature in here at all. Considering the machine would probably become a hand grenade or a pot of thermite if it generated as much heat as the RTX card, that’s not too shabby. It’s more of a 720p/low than 4K/high on more modern games since the APU’s more like an Xbox One, but Steam Deck is actually quite capable for what it’s able to actually run. Plus for older games like MGS:V that were developed around the XB1 era, it can basically pump those out at 720p with max graphics.

So, I think in the future I may want to consider a wee bit more about how to ventilate Rimuru’s place in the study, or perhaps just angle its asshole towards the open door instead of the wall.

And then there’s the fact that without hamstring trouble, I’d actually like to get up and walk around more often \o/ \o/ \o/.

From Pro to Mini

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Based on progress thus far, it’s looking like the iPad Pro will be retiring after five years of use, most of them as my primary computing device for non-gaming tasks, and the past year as a secondary since I mainly find myself desk bound.

Adjusted for the years, the A17 Pro is exactly what I wanted versus the 6th generation Mini, and a much appreciated bump from the A12X. Not to mention the increased storage capacity out of the box.

This will be the first time that I’ve used a smaller tablet since my Galaxy Note 8.0 back in the Jelly Bean era. While the various 4:3/9.7” Galaxy Tab S’s were a pretty perfect size, the worst thing that I can say after 5 years with the 11” iPad Pro is that it’s not the device to reach for when compact or one handed operation is called for. But otherwise has been a superb tablet even if its SoC has been getting a bit out moded.

When I used Android tablets, I always favored the smaller ones or found them the best compromise between a phone and a laptop form factor. Phablets and large phones are just not large enough, and at least in Android land, typically fall short of the magic 7” crossing point that lead to tablet layouts being supported. Can’t say I’ve ever been impressed with the “Tablet” support of iOS, but the Mini 7 at least delivers the tablet layouts and is vastly superior to my phone.

Floppies still refuse to kick the bucket

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Reading the Ars article, “San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks“, I couldn’t help but think, “At least they’re not the 8-inch kind,” and ironically enough the article ends with a reference to just such a case.

Growing up in an the era I did, our computer relied on 5 1/4″ floppy diskettes and I didn’t really experience the stiff 3.5″ disks until after both the Pentium and the Internet came into vogue. But it’s actually pretty odd to encounter the even older 8″ variety, since those tend to land closer to the CP/M era than the DOS era of computing.

Actually, the two salvaged Weatherstar diskettes displayed in my study may be the only 8″ diskettes I’ve seen in the wild. Even then the format was ancient. Heck, when my family was buying still 5 1/4″ disks from the school supply store for our Tandy, 3.5″ were already long since the mainstream floppy media.

PowerBook 5300

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One of those cases of “Yeah, I must be crazy, but ….” and it turns out that I am the proud owner of another PowerBook. Also a StyleWriter 1200 that came with it at auction.

The 5300 series is one that I’ve always been fascinated with, ever since I saw Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Less the uploading a virus to the an alien mothership (serious, do they run Java or something?), and more the scene outside the Whitehouse. I always thought the idea of the expansion bay was cool, and felt a bit disappointed that no one ever really created much in the way of that. But I guess, you’re not supposed to triangulate cellphone positions with a laptop even if that’s something “All cable repairmen can, Pops,” but I felt it would be cool if someone hooked them up to science equipment while exploring a jungle or working in an electronics lab. In reality of course, such use cases for laptops often had a more common answer: serial ports and PCMCIA to serial, and today it’s USB to serial. Special expansion bays pretty much died in the 1990s, and those that didn’t became quite plain in 2000s era business notebooks.

Amazingly the machine is in great shape. The port cover is missing one leg but clips on, which is still practically a unicorn in a field of four-leaf clovers. Seems the display housing is starting to split a bit, but unlike most that I’ve encountered isn’t broken to hell in a hand basket, and the frame is in great shape rather than looking like it was thrown out of a helicopter at hover. This machine feels more like a vintage princess.

Sadly the battery had begun to leak, resulting in having to clean out the battery bay. Fortunately it appears to have gone only as far as the terminals and lip area. Plus it’s a post recall NiMH, so I guess it’s a copper sulfate problem instead of oh-shit-lithium. Initial cleaning with baking soda/vinegar seems to have gone well, and we’ll go a deeper round once I’ve got time to take it apart. No sign of anything being harmed.

Ironically, the hard drive still works. I can’t tell if it’s an original or not until I take it apart, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The 8+16=24 MB memory configuration is one that Apple sold for the 5300cs, and I’ve yet to see any signs that the machine was ever taken apart or abused. The only signs of abuse I’ve been able to see are copies of Microsoft Office and Netscape Communicator, but I suppose that Word 6 on a 100 MHz “P6” chip would be less of a bear than it is on my Duo’s Motorola 68030.

One thing that I especially love is the keyboard. It’s beautiful to type on, and still perfectly smooth and limber. I can type so fast that the hard drive eventually spins down, parks the head, and then has a lag spike as it spins back up to page the file to disk. By contrast my 1992 Duo has a keyboard where the keys often stick, or need to be pressed multiple times to register.

Yeah this is a good machine. But I may be out of my mind 🤪

Ramblings of an insane nerd

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The concept™️ 

Mp3Tag (Mac rather than Win in my case) for managing metadata. Cover art is a weak point for something like Quod Libet that I would otherwise choose, and the Mac version is broken on modern systems, meaning I would have to break out my 17 year old ThinkPad to run the FlatPak, or suffer X Forwarding or similar grumbles with restoring my 12 year old Latitude to its Debian glory days. Thus indie software wins this scenario because MacBook Air.

Good ol’ ffmpeg for audio conversions. I’m really not a fan of hand-wrangling ffmpeg, and don’t want to mess with it for cover art purposes. It’s like a grizzly bear wielding a Swiss army knife when it comes to esoteric video muxing and complex encodes, which are a pain. But I’m content to use it for transcoding audio. The open question is whether I want to load ffmpeg on one of my Linux server’s virtual machines, or just brew install ffmpeg while drinking a root beer.

These both solve the problems that exist between my existing music collection, and what Apple Music can offer in the ways of managing a personal music library like it’s still two thousand ‘ought something.

Apple Music is still combat effective for ripping CDs, since I actually like the iTunes+ format of MP4 + AAC 256K and it does a passable job of fetching metadata. It’s just after the disc is ripped, we’re done.

The file server for warehousing data. I’ve mostly followed the pattern of collecting content in its various forms under Music, while backups exist imaginatively under Backups. Things will probably become divided either by format or purpose, such as FLAC, M4A or Library, Player directories in place of the existing “Artist – Album” structure. I might debate between the old media depot under Backups getting reorganized or moving to a dedicated “Originals” structure organized by source (CD, Steam, iTunes, Amazon, Google, yada, yada) on my Music share. One of the advancements over the past decade is its no longer just “Backups” and individual hosts that gets backed up regularly, but the entire file server’s shares where LAN data lives.

This path of insanity makes a good excuse to start normalizing my approach to dealing with cover art, lyrics, and readme files pertaining to music–but are a smaller problem than ensuring sane song metadata and library structure. Enforcing a tag editor centric data flow is also a good reason to make for easily saving/loading metadata from disk.

I’m also thinking that for a general approach to normalization, making MP4/AAC the standard lossy format with FLAC as the lossless where applicable. One of those things that has changed over the past decade and a half, is I’ve no real reason to prefer MP3/320K over AAC/256 or WAV over FLAC. Software compatibility for decoders (unless perhaps, you’re a damn iPod or the like) just isn’t a problem like it was in the early days of AAC, and there’s no real reason to treat the hax that ID3 evolved from and WAV is basically the software equal of a 3.5mm analog jack this side of FLAC.

Yup, let’s just say the iPod experiment finally drove me over the hill ^(o_o)^

Continuing iPod Experiments

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Augmenting the iPod, I’ve ended up with a trio of different players. Okay, so yeah, I finally went crazy 🤪.

Digital Media Players

There’s the iPod in the middle that I’ve posted about a few times, which is effectively a 5th generation late 2006 model with a new front plate, battery, and a 64G SD card replacing the 30G hard drive. Not to mention some blood, sweat, and tears invested. Well, thankfully not blood since I used an iFixIt toolkit instead of an Elite Old Electronics opening tool, but I can now understand while opening the metal models that followed is such a pain 😂.

Flanking this is to the right is HIFI WALKER’s H2, which has turned up so often in YouTube and Amazon suggestions, that we may as well call this a crosspoint between being advertised to death and being pissed at the iPod that much.

On the Left is Innioasis’s Y1, which is a device that I had came across researching the cost between old iPods and the question, “Surely someone makes a modern thing with a clickwheel,” and it is also the cheapest of the group. The wallpaper set is one I used to use on my Xbox One, not the standard one.

iPod 5th Gen

The iPod actually works pretty good when it works. Issues stemming from the memory card size and the cable aside, the primary beef I have with it is the PC/Mac software. It’s pretty cool that Apple Music and Finder/Apple Devices supports recovering and syncing to iPods in this day in age, but frankly the software sucks.

Syncing services on Mac are pretty crappy but do remain effective. It’s been so many years since the Apple sold iPods, a product that originally began in the PowerPC era, that I can forgive the CPU load and occasional bottlenecking, because it does in fact work. Enough so, that I kind of suspect at least one or two quality assurance engineers at Apple must still have an actual iPod. But I suspect that hooking it up to something on my Linux machine using libgpod would be far, far more resource efficient.

The only thing that was hacky was recovering on Mac, since its kind of a pull plug and restart trick; it’s better to just use Apple Devices on Windows unless you specifically want a Mac APM/HFS+ formatted iPod instead of a PC MBR/FAT32 formatted iPod. Otherwise, the software is just like grossly inefficient and twitchy. Like, the sync services may be one of the more CPU intensive things I’ve ever run on my MacBook Air–a machine that can find itself doing x265 video encodes in 1080p, lol.

Hardware wise, I think the iPod is pretty great. Discounting the cable hoopla and surgical procedures, the worst I can really say there is that it uses the old 30-pin connector and that I don’t want to desolder that for a USB-C mod.

Something that remains questionable is the decoder. Certain audio tracks lead to artifacts in playback, which do not seem to affect other devices.

Attempts at running Rockbox have been spotty enough that I returned to booting into the iPod’s native OS. Stability seems to be better in recent development versions than 3.15 stable, but the combo of an iFlash Solo and Rockbox on the iPod means having to boot into the iPod’s disk mode to sync. Using Rockbox’s USB mass storage mode leads to corruption and slow I/O, the kind where the memory card in the iFlash Solo seems to both get files jumbled up (parts of another song running together) and shitting data across the disk in a way that makes fsck wonder just what the fuck was done to it, lol.

In a nutshell, running the iPod firmware gives crap syncing and running Rockbox firmware is a bit twitchy in my hardware configuration. I think if Rockbox was stable or I had less grief with the iTunes front, I would spring for a 30-pin Bluetooth connector like one from Kokkia; it’s less effort than modding but too expensive to splurge on during the experimental phase.

HIFI Walker H2

The H2 is perhaps the real winner in the experiment, or at least the lead horse. Hardware wise, I can’t say that the style really does it for me, but it is very well made. It feels like a brilliant hardware engineer went craftsmen on the ODM front, and then let his cousin Bob write the firmware as a college project so that they could sell it as an white label product.

The H2’s hardware reminds me a lot of the old school Walkmans. So much so that it makes me wish for a belt clip, lol. The zinc alloy frame seems to be pretty durable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it would hit the pavement like a Chuck Norris joke and come out unscratched next to a broken side walk. Looking online for tear downs, suggest that it likely has a pretty hefty battery filling most of its thickness. While our tastes may differ, I have a lot of respect for whoever designed the H2 hardware, they did an awesome job. Coincidentally, the earbuds that come bundled are pretty darn nice!

Software works as advertised, but is the worst user experience of these three players. I think that the vendor would have been better off hiring some Rockbox developers to improve the port, and someone else to graft on Bluetooth support. The awesome thing is the Rockbox build is even more stable than the original firmware, and sounds like it will be promoted to stable whenever Rockbox 4.0 happens. The main negative to hosted Rockbox, is it places the firmware on the memory card at .rockbox, where the native firmware is on the player’s tiny, tiny internal flash; which makes it easier to go oopsie with an rsync. The Rockbox wiki page has plenty of info on the hardware which is quite helpful.

For the most part, I find myself using the H2 most often in the past few weeks–but booted to Rockbox rather than the OEM firmware. The worst thing that I can say about RB on the H2 is that it doesn’t support Bluetooth, which is pretty much true of everything that runs Rockbox. The native firmware seems to be better about handling cover art, but the only real reason to use the HiBy Player firmware that’s on the H2’s flash is to use Bluetooth.

My preference for BT, and the support for aptX being one of my reasons for coughing up the dough aside. I think that one would be better off using Rockbox and tag editing software on a PC to handle their music collection. From the sounds of the manual, future software updates are likely to include a version of HiBy player that doesn’t support as many features, so Rockbox is probably a net win.

While I’ve experienced no problems with the USB mass storage mode in the H2’s native HiBy Player or the development builds of Rockbox, it’s just more convenient to eject the memory card and use it directly IMHO.

Innioassis Y1

I kind of have the most mixed feelings about the Y1, but would recommend it if someone wants an “iPod Like” device but not an iPod.

Hardware wise, just imagine what an iPod classic would look like today. Looking online for tear downs suggests that it’s a hardware design that is reminiscent but with a MicroSD card in place of where I would have expected eMMC soldered. Opening the iPod was enough of a pain, I don’t really want to find out, so I will just be thankful for the 128G capacity.

Software wise is interesting but also kind of “Meh” IMHO. Connecting the device to USB, it is obviously running some form of Android because of the folder structure. That it identifies itself with an HTC vendor id and 1 as the device id make some wonder if it was simply a device SDK with a few custom APKs baked in. Looking online, it sounds like the vendor is willing to support customers on the hardware front, but has zero access to the firmware, so it’s basically orphan ware.

The upside however is the software doesn’t suck, it’s just pretty bare. The trick of holding the back/menu key to control sorting based on file name or song name is perhaps the make or break between “Good enough” and “Missed it by that much,” and I think it would be neat if there was a way to jailbreak and replace it–I kind of want to see what happens on a machine with adb available. As it is, I would say that the firmware is just a little worse than an actual iPod. In that, I think it could be called a success, but like the H2–don’t ask a lot of it. Being able to load custom APKs and replace the launcher would be a major win, but I’m not likely to pursue that beyond the most obvious experiments to try.

I’ve only encountered one real problem and a few minor quibbles. Some of my music causes the album view to crash due to the album art, but that was easily rectified by bisecting a lot of music to find which albums caused woe. It’s amazing how many times you can forget to press the button to enable USB storage mode 😆. Aside from that, I would say it handles album art pretty swell–better than my iPod’s stock firmware, more reliably than Rockbox has so far, and less ‘ahh, my eyes’ the H2’s translucency approach.

On the minor quibbles front, the 3.5mm analog jack puts out a bit of hiss whenever headphones are connected. I’m not sure if this comes from interference or whatever state the DAC’s line in pins might be left in, or if it is just the quality of the amplifier circuit. It’s not too noticeable while playing music, and for $45 I’m fine with that. Not really an analog audio guy anymore, and the Bluetooth output to my Echo Dot was fine. In the near future, I need to try BT earbuds or headphones.

Interesting to me, my experiment with the higher sample rate FLAC plays out as a middle ground on the Y1. It cannot play the original FLAC the way the H2 can, but unlike the iPod it can play my AAC resampling just fine. And pretty much everything except for the iPod does play that AAC version just fine, lol.

Where to from here

Given the issues with the iPod, I’m tempted to relegate this to a secondary machine or shelf it as a vintage project. The H2, it remains to be scene whether or not my preference for BT will win out over RB, and the Y1 is a device that would fill the gap if only the software was more featured.

I think in the long run however, that neither syncing my “Originals” from the file server nor my Apple Music library will be a viable solution. Rather, some library where the metadata is more aggressively managed will be necessary. Because when using the former there is too much variation for the iPod/Y1 to take it as is, and in the latter too many issues between the iPod/H2/Y1 to call it good enough.

The question of course is what form that will take.

Batteries and Old Computers

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One of the downsides of breaking out an old laptop to test something that involves a bunch of file I/O, is watching the battery life deplete. To be fair, my old X61T was old when I bought it. That it’s still got about 44% of its original battery capacity left is kind of impressive, and it’s enough for it’s purposes.

One of the upsides of modern software is the oh crap your battery is at 2% warning 😆. This is a great contrast to my very first laptop, where there was a certain tendency as it aged for the power connector to get loose enough to stop charging, and the key way you could tell was the BIOS changing the screen brightness…or the screen suddenly going blank.

The part that I find kind of sad, is given the popularity of ThinkPads I could probably dig up an aftermarket replacement battery for this old machine, but Hill was mostly an experiment that didn’t work out due to hardware issues. On the flip side, somewhere between updated Alpine Linux and replacing my wireless network, the Lenovo PCI-E ID locked BIOS and its P.O.S. Intel card no longer seems to experience routine firmware crashes and connectivity problems. Which has made it rather handy for those times where a spare Linux computer to one side is useful. I think my fiddling with vintage Macs has also in a round about way, provided the hardware that I would need to flash hacked BIOS for removing the hardware check and bumping up the SATA link speed.

But let’s not go booting into DOS while we’re at it 😛