end of 2004 - beginning of a new hack

It's the end of 2004. Yay!

I really could care less about the passage of time or the excuse that people use the end of the year to get stupid and drunk. but i do care about new things to hack.

I recieved for Christmas a devicethat is cooler than the iPod (OMG! Heresy! How dare I say anything bad about the iPod!) it's the element company's player called the Aireo.

It's a hard drive base mp3/wma/whatever player with WiFi built in for wireless content transfer, a FM radio and FM transmitter built in plus a SD card slot in the side. Is it bigger than an Ipod? yup, and some people will have a hissy fit about that. The only problem i have with the device is that the company is hostile towards telling anyone how the WiFi part works. So I'm going to reverse engineer it and publish that information for everyone to see, read and hear. :-P hear that Element company managers?? I' will reverse engineer your product, make a linux app for it and give it to everyone including the specs and protocols used.

Ok, i'm poking fun, I am sure there is nothing special about the wireless portion, the techs and managers at element are just being asshat's thinking they have something that is worth trillions of dollars when in reality it is not even worth the paper it is printed on. I want linux compatability. Why? well their software SoniqSync sucks. it sucks big time. it will only transfer music if it is in a playlist on the computer already, it's buggy, and not really useable compared to the software that apple and other companies give away free with their portable players.

a linux app would allow me to script things to happen based not only on the day of the week like they support but the season and even the weather! Imagine, if it's going to be warm out and sunny the software decides that I would prefer to have some Jimmy Buffet tunes in there. if I make a simple command line transfer interface perl scripts could do all the other stuff.

so that is my goal for the 1'st quarter of 2005. completely reverse engineer and PUBLISH the specs to the element Aireo as well as create a command line wifi transfer app for it.

my second task is to try and source some of those 1 inch hard drives that are in there and try to install a larger one :-) upgrades are always fun. oh and try a larger SD card in the slot. they say that 1gig is the max size that is supported, I'm goingto borrow a 2 gig SD card and give that a try.

More info here later but this device will reveal it's secrets to me :-)

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