Mostly normal

Life around the house is mostly normal. That, of course, just means "what I've become used to."

Stacey and I received iPod Shuffles as holiday presents. Neither of us wanted Shuffles, but Stacey did want a heftier iPod. So we traded up for Stacey and I got Stacey's old one. I've been playing with Linux software to deal with the IPod. I think I have finally figured out how to make it all work.

I'm probably going to wipe out all the music that is currently on it by accident while I'm trying to get it configured like I want. In my research I was only mildly surprised to find a bunch of geeks trying to get Linux running on the iPod itself. I think that is really funny. Partly it's funny because Apple's software runs on BSD. I would think the port would be straightforward IF anyone had the source code for iTunes.

Off to work over the garage again. Love.

iPod and Linux

I am often told by Linux (unix of all flavors) enthusiasts just how wonderful it is. As far as I can tell, it's best claim to fame is that it is more or less free. It has decent tools -- all free -- for most projects.

The tools, though, are far, far behind the tools available in the pay-through-the-nose-for-applications world. OpenOffice isn't quite as good as Word, for instance. The page layout (Desktop Publishing) isn't as good. It's okay. More than okay, on fact. Almost anything you might want to do is doable in Linux and it is almost free. It is free if you know someone who already has the disks.

But.

Linux has no chance of converting the non-geek world until the geeks start writing decent user documentation. And I see no changes for the good in that department.

This rant as been brought to you by the letter i.

Just try to get any of the Linux world iPod interface programs to work. No help files, no tutorials, no instructions. I don't have time or inclination to become smart enough about it. So, on Stacey's machine, there will be a playlist for Lynn and when I want to change what is on my iPod, I'll connect it to an Apple machine.

Further, if it weren't important (more or less) for me to work with Linux, I would have spent my $2k for an apple laptop and NOT something to run Linux.