Peter's Blog

I'm laying on bed writing this on my pocketpc while listening to the Daily Source Code. I'm using gsplayer to play it while writing, surfing or whatever. It's a simple program, it just plays mp3s but it does it very well, the sound quality is very good.

When I have tried using Windows Media Player, which was bundled with the ipaq, I run into odd problems with running out of memory if I try doing anything else. gsplayer doesn't seem to have these problems because it isn't bloated.

The one thing it is missing is a slider bar to choose a place to resume playback: it only has fast forward and rewind. This makes less than totally convenient to use on a device such as this where playback is likely to be interrupted at any moment. UPDATE: discovered that it does have a slider bar only it's a very plain line that I only noticed when I clicked in it by mistake.

I'm using some cheap philips in-ear headphones (7 pounds). My main purchase criteria for them were:

• not too cheap (90p in tesco: cannot be any good)
• not too expensive (my hearing is not great anyway)
• comes with carry case so I don't have cables tangling all the time
• black/dark grey so i won't get mugged for my 'Ipod'.

They sound good to my ear, I'm happy with them.

The ipaq has a built-in speaker which is just about loud enough to listen to stuff if you are no more than three feet away and there is no background noise.