At certain times, I’ve worried about my future in the IT industry, just by virtue of being “too rusty” to be useful any more. Then at other times I realise I probably needn’t worry.

I have a digital (internet) radio which stopped working a while ago. All was fine from my network, but the radio was meant to connect to some cloud-based service, and couldn’t. I resolved to fix it this afternoon.

It turns out that the service provider had discontinued the service, which is why I couldn’t connect. Instead, they have a new service. My radio is quite old, must have been one of the first internet radios -we always had poor reception here in terms of RF signals, but good internet. So, over time, I can imagine things get superceded. Annoying, but true – companies think nothing of pulling the rug up from under their users.

The dumb thing is that the firmware of the radio obviously contains the URL to connect to. The old firmware obviously contained the old URL. So, my radio couldn’t connect to the new service, to play radio, unless I upgraded the firmware. The only problem was that the “upgrade” function was obviously trying to connect to the old URL. Which no longer existed….

I am fortunate that this radio, whilst it should do everything by wi-fi, also has a USB port. Wires to the rescue!