#hifiwalkerh2 — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly notes 22 2026

Weekly notes 22 2026

I am sad for the recent changes in Tamilnadu politics. Wanted to get back into life and keep things moving. Started to read books and hear music.

HiFi Walker H2 Audio Player

FLAC and WAV are the complete song formats, where the MP3 seems to give only 60% of the audio content.

If you have time, interest to enjoy good music, invest some money, get a music player with DAC processor and a good headphones. Then, you can live in a wonderland.

Wrote more about this here. https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2026/05/30/immersing-into-music-with-offline-flac-music-player/

Resuming French learning

Learning Go language and RAG

Thanks to my Chennai Linux Users Group friend Mohan, to push me to learn go. He has done many projects with Go already. I enjoy the go projects like gotosocial, hugo etc. I like the compilation into single binary and pretty formatting.

Will write on my learnings soon.

AI webinar series in Tamil

Dr. Tamil Arasan did a wonderful job on the training. He explained the things with neat presentations. Thanks for him and his family for the great support throughout the period of 2 months.

All the recordings are available here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-PHk6fQ1AI&list=PLIez9dJD6K9YJVjckIwQbq3ebP97OSH-f

Get the slides and google colab note books here – https://tamilarasan.io/talks-toronto.html

All the course content is available as Tamil ebooks to purchase in amazon kindle. https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0GTLYPZ6F

Happy to be part of such good initiative.

org-social

With org-social, we can use emacs editor to be part of a decentralized social media org-social.

Here is my public org-social file. https://host.org-social.org/shrini/social.org

Few links to know more about org-social

https://en.andros.dev/blog/ddd78757/quick-tutorial-to-get-started-on-org-social/

https://en.andros.dev/blog/c68f00c3/quick-tutorial-to-get-a-blog-online-from-org-mode-thanks-to-org-social/

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social

Wallabag – Save and classify articles. Read them later. Freely.

Now, it is easy and peaceful to read the articles I saved already.

It is easy setup. It has good extensions for firefox and chrome. Explore more here – https://wallabag.org/

Hospital visits

Learning Car driving

Summer is here

TossConf26

Help to promote the event and participate .

Call for speakers – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/tossconf26-call-for-speakers/3316/3

Call for workshops – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/tossconf26-workshop/3315/2

Call for Exhibitions – https://forums.tamillinuxcommunity.org/t/call-for-foss-stalls-tossconf26/3314/2

There are good problems to solve for the hackathons. Check here and contribute – https://tossconf26.kaniyam.com/#schedule

Immersing into Music with Offline FLAC Music Player

Recently, I bought a Offline Single Purpose device. It is a Music Player.

I am trying to be away from the smartphone, and the social media. Limited the phone usage with “ScreenZen” and “StayFree” apps. Still, the hook of phone is there. I use it to read the news from news websites and RSS feeds.

For few weeks, I stopped completely reading any news, in phone. The only major usage is music.

When I am in Gym or walking, I hear music, French learning podcasts. But ending up hearing technical/news/political podcasts.

Realized that a complete offline music device will help. Enjoying Music is my all time favorite. I had my teen days completely immersed with music and books. There was no internet at that time. Only Cassettes and Books.

On those days, I have spent all my savings/pocket money on the search of good music. When the duplicate cassettes were normal, easily available, One day I purchased a original music cassette of the movie “Kadhalan”. I still remember the freshness it provided. Even in a Panasonic Stereo Music Player, I can sense a great difference between the original audio cassette and its duplicates.

From that moment, I started to buy the original cassettes, even they cost 3 or 4 times more. I have spend so many evenings and nights immersed in music with a Sony Walkman player.

In few years, the CD era came. I moved to buy and collect the original CDs. When MP3 came, I can sense the difference between Original CD version and MP3 version. But MP3 wave took ever me due to the cost/storage issues.

I had a Sony w700 phone ( https://www.mobilephonemuseum.com/phone-detail/w700i ) and Sony digital Walkman NWZ-B183F ( https://www.amazon.in/Sony-NWZ-B183F-Walkman-Player-Built/dp/B00JX8W23S ) for few years.

They both are the excellent mp3 players I ever used.

I used apple iPod for a week. But, it was not compatible with Linux on those days. So I sold it. I think, after the apple wave, the Sony stopped producing affordable mp3 players.

Life also took its own turns. As I grow in age, the time for music is reducing. Social media, Smartphone are taking all the time.

When I want to take back the time, from the internet, the offline options are helping a lot.

Kindle, is one of the best inventions of this century. It gave back the reading habit. Nowadays, I am reading more physical books too.

To hear music, I explored the offline music players and found the “HiFi Walker H2” ( https://hifiwalker.com/products/h2 ) is a good one.

It has a processor to work on the audio. It can play HiFi audio formats like WAV, FLAC.

FLAC is a open source Free Lossless Audio Codec. When MP3 compresses the audio to the highest possible level with tons of loss, FLAC gives lossless compression. It gives the same quality of the original audio CD.

A 5 min song in WAV is around 150 MB. FLAC is in 50 MB and MP3 is 5 MB. FLAC magically gives the same quality of WAV.

I still can not believe what I hear with FLAC songs. The same MP3 version is giving only 60% of the sounds. The FLAC gives crystal clear audio. We can hear what the music director hears. All the instruments, different layers, small fillings are audible now. Hearing music is become a good addiction now.

We need to have a wired headphone, to get the best from HiFi audio devices. Bluetooth adds its own compression. A wired connections conducts the audio to the highest quality. My Sony WH-XB910N headphone is a wonderful pair for this HiFi Walker h2 device.

Internet gives plenty of FLAC audio. But, there are many fake, mp3 up-scaled FLAC files too. We can easily find out them.

When a regular MP3 gives 128 kbps of audio, a good FLAC gives 1k-2k kbps audio. Even youtube is giving the audio with 128 kbps only by default.

If you want to enjoy the world of music, I strongly recommend, HiFi walker h2. You can buy any HiFi/HiRes audio player with separate processor for audio. Think it as a GPU for graphics. With special audio processor, we can hear the HiFi audio with a difference in images of VGA to 4k.

All you need is, some money to invest on the device, good headphone, time and mind to immerse in the audio.

With more single purpose offline devices, we can take back our time and life from the internet.

Update :
Many friends asked for the price.
I bought HiFi Walker H2 in Canada for 180 CAD in amazon.ca . It is 12,600 INR. But the same costs around 25,000 INR in amazon.in

Explored for similar devices in amazon.in around 15k.

– https://www.amazon.in/SHANLING-Support-Bluetooth5-0-Tablets-Tatanium/dp/B0F59WMGLG – 15,000 INR

– https://www.amazon.in/MECHEN-M30-Lossless-Resolution-Card%EF%BC%8CGold/dp/B0DMF9MCDC – 16,200 INR

– https://www.amazon.in/Pro-MP3-Player-Bluetooth%EF%BC%8CDigital-Player%EF%BC%8C1-54/dp/B0DJRJ67GR/258-5837001-0042630 – 18,000 INR

These are costly, but good devices to escape from internet and immerse into audio world.

Well, the iPod is officially a bust, so I must search for other avenues.

My choices of #MP3player / #DAP are then:

- Ultra low-cost machine, with quite possibly VERY crappy sound for under €40;

- Proper DAP that's over €100 with some being able to run #Rockbox as an alternative firmware. Currently eyeing the #HIFIWalkerH2.

- Weirdly enough, some retro consoles like the #R36S and its variants, which can also run Rockbox as an app.

So, Fedi, what say you on this topic? What do you suggest?