Blackberry Q20 Linux ✦

blackberry-q20 login:

Mira flipped open the leather holster. She tapped the trackpad, launched a minimal mosh session, and reached her backup server in a data center three states away. Her thumbs flew across the physical keyboard— systemctl restart dnsmasq , iptables -F , ansible-playbook failover.yml —each click a tiny, certain declaration of competence.

The next day, the company auctioned the glass slabs. Mira started a new procurement list: twenty BlackBerry Q20s, a bulk order of replacement batteries, and a promise to never trust the cloud that couldn't fit in her palm.

In a world of glass slabs and invisible clouds, a sysadmin finds the perfect weapon is a forgotten brick with a Linux heart. blackberry q20 linux

Then the outage hit. The "glass slab" carriers went dark. A cascade failure in the cloud provider’s DNS—the one her company used. Her iPhone was a spinning beach ball of death. Her colleagues’ Androids were stuck on "loading...". The entire smart building locked down.

One night, while cleaning out a deceased client’s basement server room, she found it. Buried under a pile of deprecated routers, a solid, almost arrogant chunk of black plastic. A BlackBerry Q20. The "Classic."

She picked it up. It felt like a tool, not a toy. The keyboard—a perfect grid of sculpted, physical keys—begged for thumbs that knew how to type. The trackpad, a tiny sapphire sensor, winked in the fluorescent light. The next day, the company auctioned the glass slabs

The second week, she got reckless. She compiled a custom packet sniffer and wrote a script to map the building’s internal network. The BlackBerry hummed along, its battery lasting three days on a charge. No background processes, no ad-tracking, no "AI" assistant listening to her keystrokes. Just her, a terminal, and a relentless little brick.

While the C-suite panicked on a dead Zoom line, Mira sat cross-legged in the server room, the blue light of her tiny square screen reflecting off her glasses. One by one, services came back online. The lights flickered, then steadied. The doors unlocked.

"It runs Linux," she said. "And it has a real keyboard. Turns out, you can't swipe your way out of a kernel panic." Then the outage hit

The Classic wasn't a phone. It was a lifeline. And its keyboard was the only confession she needed.

She held up the BlackBerry. It looked like a relic from a forgotten war. The green notification LED pulsed once, gently.

24 thoughts on “Introducing MuxMaster – a kickass open-source Muxtape player/downloader built with Flex and AIR

  1. “. If you’re a lawyer looking to scratch that soul-destroying litigious itch that you have, I’m the wrong guy to talk to.”

    Actually, you are that guy, just not if that itch involves music rights. 😛

  2. Pretty cool, nice to have a cross platform solution. I dig the random 10 feature but have had a lot of problems with audio skipping and lagging.

    Not sure I can solicit the download feature, I know Justin was banning IPs that were running a userscript that allowed for download.

  3. @cawlin: Dunno why the audio would lag or skip any more than the normal Muxtap web interface, except maybe on Muxtape he’s buffering more of the song before trying to play it, I just stream it and play as soon as it will let me. I could probably do some more advanced buffering to try to get the playback to skip less on a slower connection.

    And yeah, I figured he might not be happy about the download. But given the nature of the service he’s providing, it’s something he’s going to have to deal with eventually. The truth is, he’s providing massive lists of links to unprotected MP3s that people can download.

  4. blackberry q20 linux Andrew says:

    I love this app. I was waiting for someone to build an AIR app for Muxtape. The only thing I have to say is I wish there was a way to turn off Coverflow. I really don’t like Coverflow and wish I could just use the app without having to deal with erroneous 3D elements. Other than that, though I really like this.

  5. Pingback: Doug McCune » Blog Archive » MuxMaster update: download functionality removed and a new icon

  6. blackberry q20 linux On Going Problems says:

    Any chance you could build this for imeem.com? Particularly the download part. Muxtape may be all the talk of the blog world but imeem is still the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to web2.0 music and has millions more tunes.

    imeem has an official api for making flex applications, could I use that to get the locations of their mp3’s and download them?

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  8. Pingback: Pimp My Muxtape (SSB)

  9. blackberry q20 linux j says:

    Wow.
    Couple cool adds that would make this even better:
    refresh button on indiv playlist to get a new playlist when one is lame
    + button to add as a favorite playlist

  10. blackberry q20 linux cDima says:

    Hm, is the coverflow in AIR that slow, or is this local? Nothing like the iphone, imho.
    Awesome job man!

  11. blackberry q20 linux Patrick says:

    I love the application! A feature that I would love: bookmarks.
    When I find a cool list I would like to be able to come back to it later.

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  16. blackberry q20 linux Charlie says:

    Haha, you beat me to it. I saw that guy’s coverflow Fluid thing and immediately started my own version, with searching and downloading. Now I can just use yours. Nice work.

  17. Pingback: New music everywhere you go. Muxmaster is your mobile jukebox. | hellokinsella

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  20. I am having trouble getting this app to work. I have it installed and everything but it seems to never actually load anything. It just says “Loading…” the whole time. Any suggestions?

    -Brandon

  21. Pingback: Muxtape reloaded | Googlisti.com

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