gotosocial - Link to source

Maybe it's the constant turmoil of the world and/or me longing for simpler times in life, but today I found myself setting up the development environment for Rockbox, the alternative mp3 player firmware. I haven't even had a player for over 12 years.

Rockbox was the first real open source project I started tinkering with back in 2008. Obviously my skills back then weren't good enough to get any changes accepted, but learning to set up various toolchains, building my own custom patched binaries and just hanging around a well-maintained project (and getting rejected for not abiding by the rules) turned out to be invaluable experiences later in life.

Just for fun I did a simulator build (Rockbox has truly excellent simulators for all their supported players) and was at home straight away. Nothing much has changed in all this time. So much of the tech I use has been enshittified in the past 10 years that using a piece of software whose UI has been essentially unchanged since when I was a teenager felt just incredible.

This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to miki

mastodon - Link to source

Sean Randall

I quite like voicedream and eloquence together, but given that I find what to read on a computer much of the time anyway, a card in my clip which syncs whenever I charge it works fine for me too.
Voicedream can't pause between tracks, which I find invaluable, and I also struggle to get it to reliably resume whilst wearing air pods.

I also prefer the distraction-free, single-use device, and especially when doing things around the home don't even have my phone about my person some of the time. Something weighing about 15g is a most convenient carry and I've just grown used to using these things over the last decade or so.

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