this month in my life is much like the past couple have been. not really a big thing to report on but a few smaller things that i’ve been doing.
first is the vr page. for the most part the page states its purpose but to explain it in here it’s preparation for some very future things i want to do on this site. i wish to host pages on this site filled with information i’ve collected over my time in vr because i quite like having free and easy access to information. the first page to go up will likely be one i’ve drafted about the lighthouse. at this moment in time it includes information about the 4 different retail revisions of the device that i am aware of and ways to access its built in serial console. i’m hoping the page will go up soon but really who knows lol.
next is my search for an ipod. i wanted one. part because of dankpods, part because embedded devices interest me a lot, part because rockbox interests me a lot, part because i’ve started buying music off of itunes due to its low price and drm-free downloads. it was easy to find one but god are the prices kinda mad. while looking for one i came across these two guides that really helped me understand what each ipod could do, what to look out for when buying one and where to get replacement parts for them. after researching for a while, i decided on a 30GB ipod video (5th gen) i found for ~£60. it was a bit beat up and had a broken screen and in classic ebay fashion now that i have it i’ve found a much better deal than the one i actually went with but i didn’t mind because in the future i plan to flash mod it and swap the shell anyway so paying a little more for a new screen wasn’t too much an issue. naturally with itunes installed on my computer, setup was really easy. i plugged it in, itunes asked to install a system service, it reboots, it lets me sync my music. what surprised me the most was how easy it was to install rockbox. just run the utility, add a theme in if you want, press install and reboot the ipod. i wasn’t aware it was that simple.
while looking for a dock for the ipod, i came across the sony tdm-ip10. it looked quite nice to me but one thing that i noticed while looking at pictures on an ebay listing for it is that it uses this weird proprietary port that kinda looks like the 30-pin dock connector that i’ve never seen in my life. of course with it being a completely proprietary thing i’ve never heard of i immediately gained an interest in it. turns out the port is called digital media port/dmport. according to wikipedia sony started using it in 2007 as a way to add extra functionality to their a/v equipment through selling devices like docks and wireless or bluetooth receivers that supported the interface. that got me interested in a device that supported it. i had the idea of getting like a stereo in the back of my head either way so why not have a look i suppose. a system that came up a lot when searching for dmport compatible a/v equipment was the cmt/hcd-hx80r “micro hi-fi component system”. it supports cd, all different kinds of radio, the dmport of course, aux in and usb as ways to play audio from it. (and now while writing this post i’ve been made aware of a version of it called the hx90btr that includes bluetooth support. good thing i don’t need that.) sounded good to me and you can find them all over the place where i am for really decent seeming prices, so i bought one for ~£60 and the tdm-ip10 for ~£14. it all arrived not long after and i’m really happy myself with the way that it works and the fact that the dock works fine in rockbox too, which i heard can sometimes be an issue with ipods running rockbox. i’ll have a bit of a deeper talk about it in the future i feel.
thanks for reading, happy halloween if you celebrate it lol :D
edits
(2025-11-01: made the text at the bottom of the page smaller, figured out how i done that last year again finally lol)
(2025-11-01: formatted edit text to follow the same style as the rest of the edited posts)