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I just got back from the local Target where I picked up a JuiceBox. (warning: annoying Flash on that site!)
What the crap is a JuiceBox? It's a kid's portable media player that Mattel released for Christmas '04. They didn't sell very well at their retail price of $50, so stores like Target and Walmart cleared them out at huge discounts. Walmart cleared them out months ago, and according to one source, was selling them for as cheap as $6!
Target, just this week, dropped their in store prices from the already discounted $24 to $12.
"Okay, so why did you buy an unwanted toy?"
Recently, Slashdot ran an article about hacking your JuiceBox into a picture frame. This is my current goal, as it is for several others. The key to the mods surrounding this little gadget is that it runs a version of uclinux. We'll see how this goes.
update: Pfft, well that was cake - no real "mod" involved. The "MP3 Starter Kit" that I bought for $11 at Target includes a CD that converts pictures to a proprietary format (.jbp), compressing each image down to 57k. You can tell the image quality has been lost, but on a screen this small, you don't really care that much. I'm sure as the hacking community grows, there will be more options available. For those interested, if you have an SD card and USB adapter for your computer, you can play MP3s right out of the box. The software kit gives you the image conversion software, as well as an adapter to allow the SD card to be plugged into the media card slot on the JuiceBox unit. (I believe a few people have tried to make their own adapters.) Aside from the JuiceBox card adapter, the kit doesn't actually do anything to the Juicebox. |
