Bought a new MP3 player

In the process of shopping around for more tubing stuff for the lights, I stopped at Goodwill Fashions (376 Jefferson Rd., in Jefferson Plaza) and found they had an MP3 player for $25 so I picked it up. It's a Memorex MMP8560 with 128MB RAM. With 4 times more RAM than the Digisette, I'll be able to put on more music stuff. However, the interface to get it to start is more complex so I'll probably need to use the computer chip to run it (whereas the old player needed one button to be pressed to start, the new one needs to be powered on first and then started with the play button.)

The good news is that it only draws 40 mA. If I use a linear regulator from 12 volts to get to 1.5 volts (it uses a single AAA alkaline, not a NiMH cell) I'll only have to get rid of around 450 mW of power as heat which was as good as I got with the buck converter anyway. (Remember that the rationale there was to pick a higher-than-audio frequency and the transistor tended to go linear. I might try the buck converter again anyway.)