I got me an iPod!
Yeah! It finally shipped this week. It arrived on my chair yesterday, the 30th at 10:00am. That ruined my work day. All day I wanted to go home and plug it in. Here's my review:
I open the box, and take out all of the parts. It's small, but very heavy. Dense. Apple has packed a lot of stuff in this little stainless and plastic case. I was upset that I got fingerprints on the stainless back, but then I realized later why it's stainless: when writing to the drive or charging the battery, it gets rather hot. The device is beautiful. It fits in your pocket. Once you get a hang of the scrollwheel, it's the easiest interface on a device of that type I've ever seen.
I get it home, and plug it in. Damn, it's just as I suspected: that cheap firewire card I got from newegg is broken. Out to best buy: $80 for a firewire card. No way. On to CompUSA. 30 USD for a card. I take it home and plug it in to that archaic PCI bus. It works! NT 5.1 sees it. After installing the iPod software (which sucks. Apple went to a third party for thier windows mp3 player/playlist manager) I start the upload. 4Gb takes a while, even at frewire speeds. But at least it's not USB 1.1, like my camera. (Did I mention my digital camera here? See this.)
Then i start playing it. No, it doesn't make any music sound any better. But it is really reliable, unlike the mp3-playing cd player I have. And it fits in my pocket. And the remote on the cord is perfect and easy-to-use.
I'll quickly mention how to use it as an external hard drive. Plug it in, and a dialog should pop up asking if you want to sync. Don't touch the dialogue, and look at "My computer" (I hate windows. I never feel stupid telling people about /dev/hdb7 or /usr/local/bin.) Your iPod should be there as a new hard drive.
Will someone tell me the state of firewire support in linux? I know about the /etc/hotplug/ieee1394.agent file and I've got hotplugging workign with my usb camera. I just want to mount it as an external harddrive.
Update: I've switched from KDE back to WindowMaker. The 'maker is still faster, and I don't need any of KDE's "advanced" features. But when I made my parents use linux (evil grin), I set the default to KDE, and they were happy. And they like KDE's games.
No, I haven't convinced them to get linux+X11+KDE. But I might have finally convinced my father to upgrade from windows 95 to NT 5.x on his home machine. Especially since MS doesn't support 95 anymore. He'll probaly have to get a faster processor, though.
Here's my spectrum of OS goodness:
DOS < MacOS < Windows95,98,ME < NT,2k,XP < other unixes < OSX < linux.
I just want my parents to move further to the right than they are now.