What your seeing is a Rio Cali. A 128 megabyte disposable battery operatedsolid state MP3 player. I ran across it going though some old boxes. Still works to. That is after I replaced the triple A battery. Now its nice that it works and all but what could I possibly use it for? I have more music than this thing can hold on my BlackBerry.

Well it just so happened that my oldest son's God-Mother bought the kids this toy for Christmas. You hook it up to your TV and they can see themselves on screen and listen to music play. Even came with mics so they can sing in. Unfortunately I have a three and two year old and the mics met an unfortunate end with a can of Os. But thats another story. Getting back on track, the system has a speaker jack in the back. So I figured I would move some kids songs over the the MP3 player, hook it up and fun times would ensue. Of course nothing is that easy.

One of the thing I soon remember about the Rio Cali after I connected to my laptop is that it doesn't have Windows Media Player functionality. That basicly means it was made during that unfortunate time where everybody had a custom media library program to compete with iTunes. For some reason it took the industry years to realize people like just dragging and dropping their files like a drive on their computers. Again I digress. Luckily I found this program called rioutil that let me update the player via command line interface (CLI). Being a Linux hack I didn't mind too much and it was a go. So a quick configure, make, install, and ldconfig later I was pushing files to the player.

So I have a video camera that displays on the TV, and MP3 player full of kids songs, and two kids right. But no jumping up and down and dancing. It would figure I put all this work in on an off day. Next sugar high I'm all prepared though. Just gotta remember where I put the damn triple A batteries.