I always love it when this happens, because it proves that it still can. In this day where its said that garage shops cannot be a business that you need venture capital backing or sponsorship, Pat is showing us that people are still doing it. Pat cobbled together a MP3 player inside of a PEZ candy dispenser. This is clearly a hardware hack that is pretty cool. He then went to the manufacturer of PEZ candies and secured a license to US distribution of the MP3 player. Pat is now in the process of securing manufacturing contracts and all that fun stuff. He has no corporate backing and is getting a loan for the first small production run.

Why Should I Buy One of These?
There are several reasons to buy, and one big reason not to buy. Among the reasons to buy is:

• Its cool looking!
• It supports a geek inventor.
• It plays Ogg, as well as WMA and MP3.
• It has a screen and several buttons, unlike the POS I-Pod shuffle.
• Pat has agreed to consider open sourcing the firmware code, if the manufacture agrees to it. Samsung, the current OEM partner, may have some issues.
• The extra magic button, that will have a published API. Current plans are something like when you hit that button, it remembers which song it was, and you can extract that later for a exportable favorites list or some kind of preference system.

The only reason I see not to buy it is:

• Lack of Janus support. This means that you cannot use Napster To Go, or any other services which uses the Janus DRM method.

I am not a fan or DRM any more than anyone else, but you have to admit that Napster To Go’s buffet model is pretty attractive.

The latest article on Pat’s Wordpress-based blog can be found at
http://www.pezmp3.com/archives/2005/03/24/no-longer-invisible. I wish I had a picture to show everyone, but it appears that the site has been Slastdotted, even though I don’t recall seeing this on Slashdot yet (I see Wordpress database notices now >:). I saw it on my personal RSS aggregator this morning as an article from Gizmodo. Speaking of myRSS, based on lilina, I need to do some cache-ability work to implement a 1-hour cache. It only updates the RSS hourly anyway, so its kinda slow the way it works now.

Update:
I was able to grab a picture! It is hosted locally since Pat’s site is having problems.