Software to solve you own problem

Thursday. December 21, 2023 - 1 min

The desktop PC/server is home to the Raspberry Pi backup drive. That means the PC has an out-of-sync copy of every podcast/audiobook/picture/movie at its disposal to support its part-time transition to the home server, used in a read-only way.

One drawback of an offline first media setup is the inconvenience. Currently, the Pi must be on to find fresh listening material. Downloading ahead is fine, but batching is most effective for a series you’re working through or regularly listen to.

Switching on the Pi solely to listen to a podcast seems a shame when everything is already on the device. A quick search didn’t uncover a file-based podcast player, so I threw one together.

It’s super basic, but for 20 minutes of work with co-pilot it does the job. From the console, it allows me to navigate through the library folders, select a file and open it in the default mp3 player.

There’s nothing fancy here. In fact, it’s pretty ugly. Regardless, it’s a solution for finding something to listen to when sitting at the desktop. Plus, it’s an excellent excuse to write more C#, try out co-pilot a little more, and have something helpful to tinker with.

Software doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfectly adequate for its purpose.

Perfectly adequate software can have many purposes.