Internet Doohicky
Nov. 29th, 2010 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertWell, I got Music Player Daemon running on the Infocast. It's interesting installing software on a minimal system like this, the dependencies and dependencies of the dependencies that would probably already be installed on a full Linux installation aren't on something like this. (Tip: if you are going to compile a fresh glib to get all the development files, use the exact same version as the runtime files already installed.) I may add some more add-ons later, but for now I do have MPD running and playing flac files off the usb disk attached to the Infocast. I'm using, at the moment, the Gnome Music Player Client to control it from either the netbook or the big computer. Yay for open source: This device isn't really marketed as a music device, but now I have it doing pretty well exactly what I wanted all along. It's small, it's cheap, I've attached local storage for the music files, and I can control it over the network from a real computer with keyboard and mouse.
When I don't have the thing displaying random photos from flickr or weather maps or whatnot, I've been setting it to that flip-clock, which nicely animates the flipping of the numbers (no sound effects, thank goodness!). When I was very little my mom had a real, mechanical, flip clock, which I was fascinated with and would set and reset and rererereset the time on, for the joy of watching numbers flip. When you think about it, those things were a bit amazing, all those little parts, aligned well enough to flip reliably. I see you can still get them, and people are trying to get hundreds of dollars for "vintage" clocks on e-bay. A quick search turns up some available new for anywhere between $35 and $100. Here, I have a full-color 800x600 LCD, and an 800MHz processor and 128MB of RAM and so on, getting time information over the Internet, pretending to be a flip clock. For $99. Can you imagine trying to convince people back in the sixties or seventies that someday we'd start to think it easier and cheaper to just animate one with a flat-panel color display and a computer that also plays music and downloads stuff off the Internet while it's at it? Why bother with all the hundreds of fiddly little mechanical parts when you could just use a few hundred million transistors?
When I don't have the thing displaying random photos from flickr or weather maps or whatnot, I've been setting it to that flip-clock, which nicely animates the flipping of the numbers (no sound effects, thank goodness!). When I was very little my mom had a real, mechanical, flip clock, which I was fascinated with and would set and reset and rererereset the time on, for the joy of watching numbers flip. When you think about it, those things were a bit amazing, all those little parts, aligned well enough to flip reliably. I see you can still get them, and people are trying to get hundreds of dollars for "vintage" clocks on e-bay. A quick search turns up some available new for anywhere between $35 and $100. Here, I have a full-color 800x600 LCD, and an 800MHz processor and 128MB of RAM and so on, getting time information over the Internet, pretending to be a flip clock. For $99. Can you imagine trying to convince people back in the sixties or seventies that someday we'd start to think it easier and cheaper to just animate one with a flat-panel color display and a computer that also plays music and downloads stuff off the Internet while it's at it? Why bother with all the hundreds of fiddly little mechanical parts when you could just use a few hundred million transistors?
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Date: 2010-11-30 03:08 am (UTC)mpd!
Date: 2011-03-04 06:29 pm (UTC)