My #Sandisk Sansa Clip+ portable music player started acting up yesterday. Actually it has been buggy for a long time, but now it stopped working if the MicroSD memory card was inside it. Then I found #Rockbox works great on my device.

https://www.rockbox.org/

Rockbox is a free replacement firmware for digital music players. It runs on a wide range of players

I'd heard of Rockbox before but never tried it or even tried to find out if it worked on my Sansa. I installed it, which was super easy, almost trivial, and now everything works great. Much better than it ever did with the crappy, original proprietary #firmware! Some songs that didn't play at all before work flawlessly now.

Rockbox is an amazing piece of #freesoftware released under the #gnu #gpl. Everyone with a compatible device should at least try it out. Rockbox is a prime example of how much better the world would be if all electronic devices had #free-software on them by default.

Hooray for #freesw!

After I found out it is possible to use #Debian Jessie without #systemd I decided it was time to upgrade my old Wheezy (oldstable) system to the latest stable release. As always, the upgrade had been a huge pain in the ass and it's really hard to get the computer to a useful, working state.

First it was difficult to figure out how to get the Grub boot loader to update its config. After that problem was finally solved, it turns out that #tor is not functional and no amount of searching seems to tell me why it is so or how to fix it. Also, for some reason the mouse cursor in X turns invisible after logging in.

I probably should just move to some more functional #GNU -based #free-software operating system. I feel like I've gotten too old to spend days, weeks of even months trying to get my computer working after a system upgrade.

#freesw #freesoftware