::A Geek in Korea::

My wife doesn’t exactly share my love of geekery and computers. I am content to play with files, install and explore programs, and even maintain a website. She’s strictly a utilitarian sort of computer user. So far, I’ve got her logging in to her own account to check email or to browse the web using an installed version of Windows XP in a virtualization program. That’s good enough for now.

Today, I had this weird flash of inspiration. “Hey, I wonder of Rockbox works for the iriver H10 my parents bought my wife? That thing is a total pain in the ass. If it managed it’s own database, it might actually be worth using again. Plus, Rockbox is so cool to play with. I wonder what they’ve done with it since I last used it?”

When I went to check this morning, the Rockbox page was down. I wasn’t able to experiment setting up the firmware until after my wife got back home from running errands. The installation is unbelievably easy. Rename ONE file, place the bootloader, install the rest of the files by dropping a folder, fire it up and watch it go. No dangerous flashing of hardware or anything.

I love Rockbox because it lets you extend hardware. My wife’s mp3 player has a small 128×128 pixel resolution screen. Some bored hacker enabled video playback. Why? It’s like watching a movie on a postage stamp. This strikes me as awesome, if not pointless. It’s a “just because you can” sort of hack. Ogg Vorbis support? Custom themes? Games? DOOM port?! Who doesn’t want the opportunity to play DOOM on an Mp3 player? It’s completely impossible to try to beat, but it’s DOOM on an MP3 player. That’s just awesome.

I told her, “I’m going to upgrade your player. I won’t break it. I hope.

She willingly gave me her mp3 player to experiment on. I didn’t have to pry it out of her hands or anything. A lot of the improvements are “under the surface” and not as readily apparent as the streamlined GUI she is used to.  She doesn’t need to worry about building the database for the player, but I do. Anything that gets around the horrible software bundled with the H10 is good with me. I just hoped she was willing to navigate through some text menus instead of the id3 tag database she was used to.

Her primary concern was that since we moved to Linux, Korean fonts no longer work. This does sort of suck, since she listens to a lot of Korean music. She’d rather I go back to Windows XP just because her mp3 player isn’t working 100% correctly. Linux does 95% of everything else we need to do, and we aren’t going back, despite that annoyance. I’ll just have to figure that out some other way.

I’ve told her I’m on the lookout for workarounds. When I showed her Puzzle Bobble on her Mp3 player, she said, “That’s good. I can see it, so I can play that. Thanks!” While I still need to figure out how to get things working under Linux sometimes, at least there is a reason for her to understand why I am trying.