In May, Spotify announced the death of its in-car music player, Car Thing. The little dashboard-mounted board was all bricked up as promised, leaving many users with a $120 chunk of circuitry, screen, and knobs.

Spotify certainly sees it that way; visit the Spotify Car Thing webpage and recycle it; Spotify recommends recycling the Car Thing, but until January 24, as an apology for the end of support, Car Thing You can get a refund until January 24th. This is a bonus.

That said, even though it's officially been bricked by the company that spawned Car Thing, there's nothing stopping the Internet from giving Car Thing a second life, so grab your USB cable, open up your gaming console, and come on. Come on. Hacking.

Here are three things you can do to bring your Car Thing back from the dead. It's alive!”

A few seconds on Reddit's 'r/SpotifyCarThingJBreak' is all it takes to see one of the most popular things to do with an old Car Thing: jailbreak it and install a new OS. Some people are now calling it 'DeskThing' instead, to reflect their new desk-based fate.

It seems so simple, you ca... Sorry, there are lots of YouTube videos showing how to install a new OS on a DeskThing. My favorite is this video by Dammit Jeff, which not only shows you how to hack your DeskThing, but also how to install various apps that expand the possibilities.

To learn more about DeskThing, check out the DeskThing webpage at deskthing.app Once you have DeskThing installed, you can start installing apps.

Once you have installed the new OS, you can start putting apps into the DeskThing... why not turn it into a little music controller, as many people did when Spotify still supported this device... DeskThing s “app store” and install the Spotify app.

You can also install controllers to control music apps on your computer, such as Spotify or Apple Music. If you want a control option that allows you to access your music at any time without having to open a separate window on your screen, this is the car... Sorry, I trashed DeskThing again.

If you really want to get the most out of your old DeskThing, you can find an amazing amount of things on GitHub. One of the coolest is this macropad hack in the car-thing-reverse-engineering repository.

With a little more tweaking (the instructions are all on the site itself, and the community is incredibly helpful), you too can get your own little touchscreen macropad, DeskThing hacking travelers, no more key combinations needed! .

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