Five Taps and a Zip File: Running My Own Code on a Denon DJ Player

A Denon Prime GO is a $1,000 standalone DJ controller. No laptop, no phone; you put music on a USB stick, plug it in, and play. It has a touchscreen, two decks, a battery, and absolutely no reason to let you run your own software on it.

It does anyway. You tap the version number five times, put a zip file on a flash drive, and it runs whatever you gave it.

I’ve been documenting inMusic’s firmware for a couple of years now. Denon DJ, Numark, Akai, HeadRush, Rane all share a codebase, so work on one device tends to apply to a dozen. Everything in this post lives in my documentation site. But the way into the device is my favorite thing I’ve found in it, partly because of how it works and partly because of a bug I found in inMusic’s own version of it.

Let me walk you through it.

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ZFS: A Resilient File System

Why Is ZFS Needed?

As "cloud computing" has required ever growing needs for storage capacity, there has been a need for larger and larger data stores, which has led to the development of ZFS.

Since ZFS has been developed with enterprise use in mind, there are many unique features that have been worked into it. In this article, I'm going to share some details about this filesystem.

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