Earlier today I thought I would put my PDA to good use. My PDA, a Dell Axim X50v, doesn't really get that much use anymore these days since I now got a phone that is relatively powerful for general productivity. It has been sitting on my desk for quite a while and earlier today I got such a great idea, I was wondering why I didn't think of it sooner. For quite some time, I have had a set of Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers set up in my room to listen to music. Sure 500 watts may seem like overkill for a stereo in your room, but they are such a great set of speakers. But that's beside the point of what I was talking about.
Back when I got my speakers, I had a desktop PC in my room. This meant that my speakers could easily be plugged into my PC and all my music playback could be done from there. When that was the case, I used to listen to music pretty much every day. Later down the line, I ditched my desktop and started to live off my laptop instead. The one problem that arose from this was that the audio jacks on my laptop are at the front and this led to a messy cable arrangement. As a result, I stopped using my speakers and didn't really listen to music anymore in my room.
While looking into buying an internet radio player (since that's mainly what I listen to in my room), I realised that I could save money and use my PDA instead. Since my PDA has wireless access and the house is a broadband hotspot, I tested to see whether or not my PDA could receive ShoutCast streams. Sure enough this wasn't a problem and there were no buffering issues, even for the 192kbps streams. So after a bit of cleaning and cabling, I have a setup as can be seen in the above photo.
Now I can listen to any internet radio station or MP3, located either on an SD card or on my shared network drive, completely independent of my computer. It's just those litte things that make everything more seemless and make life that little bit easier.
No comments:
Post a Comment