Skip to main content

Home of the Zune, Part 1


 Happy new year -- Let's take it back to 2007-2008, and completely ignore the housing crash and economic downturn to talk about Microsoft's semi-failed* mobile media device, the Zune.

Mine is the Halo 3 30GB version. I've never played Halo; It was the cheapest one and had a fair amount of storage, so aesthetics be damned. With tactile, round buttons, one within another, it did reasonably simple things like 'host pictures' and 'play music' and even videos.

 

Source: Halopedia. 

I didn't realize there were two different versions, I had the Military Special Edition one!

Looking at this picture, I don't remember the Community aspect one bit. I also don't remember the home screen looking like this. I remember The GUI being simple, with the same narrow fonts that zoomed in when selected, but the text was quite a bit larger on my device.Maybe I had changed a setting.



Perfect picture of what I remember, thank you for letting me embed it!

 It did have a radio receiver, something I don't think iPods bothered with. I know my tiny, off-brand circa 2004 MP3 player had that capability as well.

There was proprietary software to upload things to the Zune, I think it came on a CD with the device. It was a handy hub for updating podcasts as well.

 I was a victim of the Leap Year Glitch that affected those of us -- All 80 of us -- with 30GB Gen 1 or 2 Zunes. So, for the entirety of my own birthday, I couldn't use my device.

When the Zune HD came out, I wanted it, but it never came to be. I did see it, as a friend had one (What are the odds, two teenagers with Zunes in the same area? Slim.) If I simply went to eBay and bought a used one, then wish fulfilled! -- but I  have no need of it.

Amazing how, over about 12 years, the concept of a standalone MP3 player has mostly become obsolete.  You can still buy some, and they look like off-brand machines running some version of Android, sporting a touch screen we only dreamed of using with the iPod Touch 15 years ago -- But major brands (Sans Sandisk, good on them!) seem to have left them behind.

Do people buy standalone MP3s these days? I know you can from Amazon and, not so long ago, Google Play Music (RIP)


Part 2, should I find my Zune, will be an actual re-visiting of the interface.

But I will leave you with an image of my dock;




*It had marginally more success in the UK than the US.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H
Post a Comment
Read more

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory
Post a Comment
Read more

Building, Breaking, and Building A CRM with Retool

 I like no- or low-code solutions to things. I've often wanted to simply push a button or move some GUI around and have the code implement itself.  I've thought about building something that's like a customer relationship management (CRM) system for keeping up with my network better than my little spreadsheet where I click links and then go like something. The general idea in this CRM Development is:  To have a GUI to add people to a NRM (Network Relationship Management).       Attach it to a database (MySQL is what I went with eventually using Amazon Relational Database service, but you can use PostGRES, and probably others).     Make sure components are connected to each other in the retool interface. This video is a good start. Watching the tutorial video, heard some SQL commands and went 'Oh no 😳" before going "Wait I know basic SQL", which is good, because you'll see.  When you get set up, there's a plethora of resources you can use -- Incl
Post a Comment
Read more