Box & Box (free' & squeeze')

7 months without any post ... a record ;-) In fact, I was playing with my box'es ;-). At the beginning of the year, I've got my freebox revolution v6 : a great toy, with a lot of features to test ;-). I won't list all the features (everybody should know them now), but it was(/is) a great move from Free. There were a lot of bugs at the beginning, but firmware updates are frequent, and all the main features work very well. The only trouble, for me, is that I can't test my freebox's apps on the V6, and I can't developp new ones. But it seems that elixir will be available this summer.

The other boxes, which take my time, are the squeezebox'es. I've bought a Touch and a Radio one. I wanted to change the way to listen music at home. In the past, my main computer was running mpd. The sound was sended to the hifi in living-room, and to different active radio-frequency HP in home. The server was drived thru a http website, the multimedia's keys of my keyboard, or with a radio-frequency remote. It was great, but not really simple for others ;-). With SqueezeBox'es : they do all that things (and a lot more) in a simpler way, with LCD display. For me : it's the perfect solution ! Everything is now inter-connected : my music (on a Nas), my computers, the box'es (squeeze and freebox), and the audio with my lastfm account.

And the best : I can develop things on the squeezebox device, or on the serverside, to enhance the experience. I've started my dev with a generic applet (in LUA), which is able to understand json commands, over http, to display some widgets on the device (menu, search box, text ...). It let me easily develop serverside's features with python ;-)

I'm in love with theses boxes ! They are perfect for non-geeks, but are really really perfect for geeks/developpers too.

I think I will release my squeezebox's applet, because it's an easy way to add serverside's features (in any language) not related to a real squeezebox server (which is perl based ;-( ).