Tags: +Technology+

Wow. I had a CLOSE call. It’s a good thing I don’t have a credit card, or my girlfriend would KILL me. See, we were at the Mac store, getting her an iPod mini(she’s been wanting one FOREVER, and after seeing the auto-load-podcast feature of iPod and iTunes, I want one SO BAD myself), and I saw it: It was a little white box, no wider then the lenght of my fingers spread out.

The Mac mini.

Yeah. That thing ROCKS. It’s so CUTE, and at under $500 bucks, it’s not too pricy, either. I WANT ONE BAD!!!!! And Tiger is SUCH a pretty OS, I can’t begin to explain it if you’ve never used it before. I WANT ONE MOMMY!!! Heck, I could even dual boot in it from Linux. MAN, would that be sweet.

Of course, while we’re on the subject of Linux, I’ve got a crappy old x86 500 MHz with 64 MB of ram sitting idle right now (someone was throwing it out on trash day and I snagged it). Any suggestions from my readers on a distro that makes a good server?

Oh, and another question: I REALLY want an iPod to listen to podcasts (I’m sadly a bit of an addict). Should I just get a cheapo iPod Shuffle on eBay? Or do you think I should get a save for a few months & get a mini? Or REALLY save and get an iPod 60 Gig?

Any thoughts at all on this?

Thanks for reading and writing, gang!

EDIT: Decided to give Mandrake, or Mandriva, or what ever you call it a shot. I’ve got 10.1 community version booting on my craputer right now. Can’t wait to see how it performs.

Tags: +Technology+; +Hacking+

Have you ever had iPod envy? Well, I haven’t, but after seeing all the cool stuff they could do that my Archos Recorder V1 couldn’t, I was starting. Somehow, even though I’ve hacked into my xbox (http://www.xbox-scene.com), it had never occured to me that there might be a community of hackers out there makeing firmware upgrades to popular items. Sure, I’d heard about it on some select DVD players, but I never figured that my MP3 player might have such an option. Enter the Rock Box (http://www.rockbox.org).

It’s a complete rewrite of the firmware for a host of Archos MP3 players. It takes something that once only played MP3s (and that poorly) and upgrades it to be a crappy PDA with calender functions, calculator, games (Wormlets ROCKS!), hell, even a greyscale image viewer and movie viewer. VERY nice. And yes, it still plays MP3s. Infact, it plays them better. I don’t know why, I assume the makers didn’t take much time to make sure it worked right, but now when I fast forward to the next song, it WORKS (before, it would sometimes crash the player)! It even has a car adapter mode (which the original firm ware was sadly lacking).

Very impressive. I’m hooked. I went out and blew $30 bucks yesterday on adapters for it. My MP3 player went from almost useless (I still used it as a big moble HDD, 15 gigs is hard to pass up), to being my third most carried gizmo (right behind my crappy cell phone (kyocera KX414) and my Nintendo DS).