Update on Project Murphy: fuck me a lot of things have needed... adjusting. It's been a learning curve for sure. The original plan was to install a 2TB SSD with a 3000mAh battery, then Rockbox it. The battery was on back order so it only just arrived yesterday and I was really excited to finally put everything all together, snap it shut and start using it. However, the following problems presented themselves:
1. The SSD and 3000mAh battery didn't fit together inside the casing. (Even the bigger casing.) I was short of physical space by just 1mm.
2. No worries! I decided to reinstall a new 650mAh battery instead. Did so, snapped the case shut, carried on Rockbox-ing.
3. Murphy is very unhappy with the SSD situation. Every time, it takes several attempts to boot up successfully, and usually with the assistance of a Firewire charger. Not good.
4. After a bit of faffing around and sleeping on it, I decided to change tactics. I'm going to install an SD card adaptor instead (the iFlash Quad). I will need to purchase this, but I now don't need to purchase an additional SSD backup drive like I was planning to, since I can simply repurpose this drive and fit it in a different casing. Happy days.
5. Except... the iFlash Quad is on backorder until the end of the month. I probably won't receive it until early November.
Needless to say - this project is demanding more patience than I anticipated when I committed to it. At least I hadn't already bought the backup drive, so I don't feel like I've "lost" money, just time. And also - it was fun to get a little preview of Rockbox, and realise just how cool it actually is. I'm glad it's a viable option, because drag-and-drop is just so much faster than syncing through iTunes (and who knows when Apple might decide to bork iTunes itself...)
In uncanny timing, DankPods posted a video today about collecting and ripping CDs for his music collection. So that cheered me up, and reminded me why I'm doing this in the first place. Owning my own collection of music is certainly less convenient than streaming, but for me, that makes it more valuable. ❊
Big updates on the site today. Moved this section into the database under new "logbook" section; decided to group entries into months for ease of navigation and future reference. Also finally got round to making page for Murphy. Updated home page accordingly. Between last logbook entry and this one, also made separate pages for artists by letter and reorganised.
I'm enjoying how this site feels more and more, I think it's less likely I'll abandon this any time soon now that I've settled on function over form. It's also kind of nice to have an archive I've built up from scratch, it's easy to find things when they're placed according to your own logic rather than an app's design (no matter how good that design is - they still have to be learned to be utilised). I think I mentioned somewhere else, but I'm finding this space kind of comforting, like a digital home of sorts. It's nice. ❊
I did something entirely unnecessary.
Spotify kindly sent me my entire streaming history from 2011 to the present day. In json. Which I pulled into a spreadsheet. And then sorted. And then removed duplicates. And then posted to the 'artists' page of the database.
Did I need to do this? Absolutely not.
Has it taught me something? Yes, but probably not the lesson it should.
Turns out, there's a limit to how many lines you can have in an HTML editor before it starts to almost break. Which means I now have a page on my site that's... not functionally editable, in its present form.
I think I'll need to make a separate page for different groups of letters... and it's got me thinking: I can't keep this log going on one single page forever, either. Hmmm. ❊