I’ve been playing with electronics for a few years now, and given my interest in how things work, enjoy reading people’s commentary as they take apart various devices. I recently found this Playaway at a second-hand book sale and given it was just $1, decided to see what was inside. I hadn’t seen one of these before, but they’re a small digital audio player that comes pre-loaded with a particular audiobook and runs on a single AAA battery. Their website seems to be targeted towards libraries, so they’re an alternative to digital distribution or sets of CDs.
Judging by their website, this is an earlier model of the player with a simple LCD and buttons for basic functions such as play/pause, changing tracks, adjusting volume, and power. The SP and EQ buttons adjust playback speed and equaliser preset respectively. However, this isn’t particularly interesting, so let’s get the cover off!
Back last year, I posted about how I set up a non-bare git repository on NearlyFreeSpeech so I could work on the site from both my laptop and desktop. This has worked fine, but the fact that it’s not the ‘right’ way to do it hasn’t sat well with me.
The issue I was having with a bare repository came down to deleting the temporary clone that was used to build the site. Despite working fine from the command line and via SSH, attempting to remove the temporary clone used to build the site gave Directory not empty errors, all related to the .git subdirectory. Because the directory wasn’t completely removed, creating the temporary repository failed when the script next ran.
Apologies to anyone who uses the RSS feed and has seen posts being republished as I’ve been making changes to the site. Apart from fixing a few typos and updating the semantic layout, the major change has been a slight update of the colour palette to one that uses the Solarized scheme.
I’ve had a few projects on the go and will hopefully have something to write about them soon. In the meantime, here’s a rough list of things I’ve done:
New(ish) colour scheme.
Changed article headings to second-level (the site title is now the only top-level header).
Discovered there’s a <main> element in HTML5, so substituted that in for the <div id="main"> that I’ve been using since first starting with CSS somewhere around the year 2000.
Added a link to the RSS feed at the bottom of the home page because most browsers seem to have removed buttons for feeds.
Post archive is now organised by year rather than month.
Got rid of the by tag archive because I’m bad at tagging and honestly I don’t post enough here to justify it.
Changed the permalink structure to omit the month of the post, then remembered what ‘permalink’ means and reverted it.
