§ This feels like the last big gasp of summer before autumn starts creeping in. In the garden our first dahlia finally bloomed and our sweet autumn clematis is suddenly full of tiny flower buds that are threatening to open any day now.
§ Last Sunday we took the baby to the zoo for the first time and then on Friday we visited the Natural History Museum for the first time since they finished its enormous renovation last year. One thing I appreciate about Cleveland is that it punches above its weight when it comes to museums and other cultural institutions.
§ As a side project I started researching how to make a custom music box and mobile with Aphex Twin’s surprisingly cute song Avril 14th for the baby’s birthday which is, fittingly, April 14th. I got as far as cutting together a seamless 24 second loop of the song’s melody before I found out that apparently a pre-made music box movement for Avril 14th already exists? I still haven’t decided exactly which route I’ll take.
§ As I contemplated doing last week, I installed Rockbox (and Rockpod) on my old iPod Classic. The experience was as janky as I expected (read: 24 year old open source software) but after quite a lot of tweaking I landed on something pretty nice. Most importantly, music syncing between the iPod and my Navidrome library was surprisingly easy.
But after a couple of days small details started bugging me—especially the weird, non-default navigation and the lack of support for inline headphone controls. So I reverted back to the stock iPod firmware synced with iOpenPod. I guess I never fully appreciated how well optimized the native firmware was until experimenting with alternatives.
