It was just announced in an email sent to me:
Congratulations!
Your organization “Rockbox” has been accepted in to the Google Summer of Code(tm) 2008.
So let’s get more possible mentors to sign up and let’s get talking with potential students and what they can work on this summer!
Update: the full list of projects is now up at code.google.com/soc/2008/
For you who are into things like open source hardware for your videos, it can be interesting to note Neuros‘ recent posting of their planned specs for their upcoming OSD 2.0 player that I guess then will replace the current Neuros OSD model.
In hard techy interesting terms: they plan to upgrade to Texas Instruments Davinci 6446 chipset, which is a 300MHz ARM9 with a C64x DSP core embedded. Pretty much like the existing DM320 one, but it seems with a great deal of more horse power under the hood. Given their specs paper, it will support a lot of formats and at least partially up to HD resolutions. It’ll also support internal harddrive and offer 256MB RAM and 256MB internal NAND flash.
Personally I don’t care that much as I don’t even have analogue TV and don’t download/have many movies to watch and my existing DVB-T box has fine recording abilities and my DVD is good enough for my kids to repeatedly watch the same animated films over and over and over…
Oh btw, if this sounds like your kind of backyard and other things combine well, Neuros is hiring Linux developers for what I believe is this hardware.
(sorry for the crappy quality of the pic but I nicked it from the PDF)
Me and my fellows of the Haxx tribe have been arranging the Snaxx series of gatherings for about eight years by now and on this Wednesday the 19th of March 2008 it is time for the 18th meeting. We gather up in a dark pub in Stockholm to talk tech, work, open source and similar crap with similar-minded people while going through the beers of the place.
Since several of us in Haxx are pretty much into ales, porters and stouts we tend to prefer places with a large selection of that kind of beer, both on draft and on bottle.
We tend to be somewhere around 10 to 15 friends, but I really prefer if you mail me and tell me if you intend to come so that we can arrange properly to deal with the amount of people that show up. We’re basically all friends and friends of friends.
So if you’re a friend and in Stockholm, welcome!
On the web, it seems more or less everything is eventually getting out and gets accessible for people to download and see. You can fight hard and make a real effort but as we keep seeing, lots of secrets get revealed in the end anyway.
The other day a friendly fellow joined the Rockbox IRC channel and pointed out a russian site full of iriver goodies such as service manuals, firmwares and perhaps most importantly: circuit diagrams for just about all (somewhat older) iriver models, including the H10, H100, H300 series and more.
I wish we had these before when the Rockbox ports for these targets were younger, but I’m sure they’ll still come handy to some people now as well.
(Now I won’t reproduce the link here just to not make the traffic too hard on that site and to avoid getting into problems for linking to content that is clearly dubious legal-wise, but you don’t have to be a genius to find the link yourself.)