By default, the Sandisk Sansa e280 is a great music player already. It comes with 8 GB of flash memory which is more than enough for music. It served us great during our summer vacation, and you can even carry it with you when you go jogging. But the current firmware lacks some functionality like custom playlists for example. Half a year ago, I took a look at the alternative, open source firmware named Rockbox. The development of a Sansa version had not started long before, so I decided to postpone my experiments with it for a while.
The while ended yesterday, when I installed the latest Rockbox version to the Sansa e280. To cut the story short: Everything went smoothly, and now Rockbox provides all the features I was looking for (if I figured it out right so far) … and even more. I chose automatic over manual installation which turned out to be a good idea because the Rockbox Utility offers a simple interface and easy customization of installation options. I haven't finished reading the manual, but the interface is quite intuitive, I guess. Take a look at some pics I've taken of my Sansa with Rockbox:
Just a short announcement of a fun project by Paul Reinheimer and Courtney Wilson: Funcaday.com introduces a new PHP function each day, complete with description, possible uses, and additional notes. Sounds like fun? Go ahead and subscribe to the feed. [via]
First, there was Optimus, now Glenn Jones at lab.backnetwork brings us ufXtract, another online Microformats parser. It was created with a specific goal in mind, namely in order to help explore the real world issues of creating portable social networks. So, for a start, ufXtract's main focus seems to be a set of Microformats related to social networking: hCard and XFN, rel-me, rel-next, and hAtom; but it can detect many others as well, even the quite complex hResume. Output formats comprise plain text, XML, and JSON. ufXtract is written in C# and seems to be pretty fast, although I cannot really compare its performance to that of Optimus.
I think this is great work by Glenn, and I'm curious about the demos he is going to add. Go ahead and check it out yourself, or click on one of the following links to see some demo output of this blog's contents:
