The little black box that keeps on giving

It appeared out of the blue after I had listened to a throw away comment and ran with it. Keith and The Girl were discussing their expectations of a robot invasion and how humanity's survival shouldn't depend on people having read instruction manuals. The Girl pointed out that she's always asking how to fast forward on their new iRiver music player, and when the response is along the lines of "read the manual", it tends to shut her (like most people) up.

I had been pondering that same question since I purchased my fine iRiver H340, but I'd only read the manual to install the drivers on my PC and stowed it safely away in the box. I was unamused to discover that the manual's suggestion to hold down the forward button (everyone's first instinct) did not solve the problem. Instead it skips forward tracks quickly, which is totally ridiculous as it has a full menu structure and isn't an iPod shuffle. Again through chance, I flicked through the manual hoping to strike gold when I noticed the section about firmware upgrades.

Not only did the firmware upgrade fix the fast forward problem, it can now play video! I became so excited I encoded one of the Family Guy episodes I stole off Josh into the format for the beautiful 2 inch screen. It's far from real television, possessing a frame rate that compares with streaming video off the net. The audio's also a little off-sync, but it could've been my encoding. It's still a neat way to kill some time.

I'm very impressed with these little add-ons. I also found out about the text file reader. I took NFL.com's Rich Eisen's latest article, saved it as text and tried it out. It'll be great when you're just listening to music looking at nothing (e.g. on the train). Words span across lines on the ~20 char screen width, so I might write a parser to keep words on one line if I actually intend on reading stuff with this. With all the scripts I've been writing at work, I feel like the king of string manipulation. Hello, ladies!