For the last few weeks I’ve been looking for a notebook.
It wasn’t that easy.
I had some requirements, but couldn’t find anything that fullfilled them.

I almost decided to buy the MacBook, even though the GPU sucks big time,
when I took one last look into the refurbished store and found the little beauty I’m currently typing on.

A sleek white iBook G4 (1.33 GHz, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9550 32MB).

I love it.

I bought my 4GB iPod Mini about 6 month ago and here are various things I hate about it.

1. The price.
   Value for money is simply off the scale. You can get a player with similar features for half the money.
2. The headphones.
   They are white… yuck.
   They are to big for my ears … so they hurt after a while.
   They sound horrible. They have a lot of power in the bass, but the heights are barely audible. This is ok for modern Techno/Drum’n'Base, but not for the music I listen to.
3. The clickwheel.
   It doesn’t work if temperatures are below 10C/50F (Read: winter).
   It doesn’t work above 30C/86F (Read: summer).
   Sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.
4. Playlists handling I - Navigation
   The “three clicks to every song”-myth. I have about 400 different artists on my iPod, so when I want to listen to Madonna,
   I have to CLICK (1) Menu, CLICK (2) Music, SCROLL (1) Artists, SCROLL (240), CLICK(3) Madonna, CLICK (4) All, CLICK(5) “Song”.
   Even if I count each revolution with the clickwheel as only on click, I still end up at around 20 “CLICKS”.
   My car radio (empeg MKII) has a user-definable playlist structure, including hierachical playlists. That makes it so much easier. With over 800 Artists I need only 8 “CLICKS” … worst case!
5. Playlist handling II - Podcasts
   Maybe I’m too stupid, but…
   When I want to listen to a podcast in my car all I do is to go to the podcasts menu entry/playlist and click play
   and it simply plays the oldest not fully played song/item and starts at the last position I listened to.
   With my iPod I have to remember where I left of.
6. Reencoding.
   Why oh why?
   When I load music from iTunes onto my iPod, I want to reencode them to 128Kb/s MP3.
   The 320Kbs is simply to big and not noticable with the poor headphones anyway,
   but stupid iTunes won’t let me do this
   You can only reencode to AAC … and that’s neither what I want, nor what I need.
7. Portability.
   Why do I have to decide if I want to use my iPod from MACOS or Windows ?
   I got a Mac at home and one at work, but when I’m on the road there are only windows systems.
   So what now ?
   Stupid.
   My car-radio works with macos, windows, linux … and everything else. At the same time!
8. The off switch.
   The what ?
   Exactly. Where is the freakin’ off switch ?
   Everytime I get out off an airplane an pull out my iPod I find the batteries empty, because someone/something touched the button and it was playing the whole time.
   Add an hardware switch and that problem is gone!
9. Firewire
   Need I say more ?
10. Last, but not least:
    The display.
    Too much (useless/uneeded) information, while the important info (e.g. title and artist) is written in 5 point font.
    I have really good eyesight, so I can read it from a foot away, but other displays - with the same size - are readable from 10 feet away.

Would I buy one again ?
I guess not…

I usually don’t like the “do this and get a free that”-schemes,
but this one actually seems to work.

At least I have a few friends, that got their free ipod.
And I really want the new 30 gig video version.

So please gimme a hand:
Get a free iPod … and help me get one, too.

Looks like ipodlinux now supports the mini.

I’m giving this a try now.

[DRAFT]

First:
Backup the whole thing!
Step 1:
Plug iPod into my G5

Step 2:
Find the Volume
mount|grep -i ipod
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Antis iPod (local, nodev, nosuid, journaled)

So my iPod is disk1 which is the first SCSI device.

Step 3:
Backup the original OS
dd if=/dev/disk1s2 of=s2_os

Step 4:
Backup the Data

Hmmm … can’t backup /dev/disk1s3,
so we’ll backup the whole thing.
dd if=/dev/disk1 of=all
(This will take a while, so you might want to skip ahead and download all the needed stuff )

Second:
Install
Step 1:
Get all the needed files:
(techzone has nightlies in the download area,
but these are for Windos only)
Get the files from ipodlinux.org
Get the latest kernel.bin.gz and podzilla.gz

Get uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz (or later) from SourceForge
Unpack it
tar xzf uclinux-2.4.24-ipod2.tar.gz

Get the linux filesystem from SourceForge.
Do not unpack this!

Step 2:
Get the ipodloader from SourceForge.
With the mini you need the CVS version.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodlinux co -P tools/ipodloader
cd tools/ipodloader

make (this assumes you have the arm-toolchain installed!)

Step 3:
Extract the Apple firmware
bin/make_fw -o apple.bin -v -e 0 Backup/s2_os

Step 4:
Create new all-in-one firmware:
bin/make_fw -3 -o apple_linux.bin -i apple.bin -l 2005-08-17-kernel.bin ipodloader-src-0.3.2/loader.bin

The resulting apple_linux.bin should be around 5MB

Step 5:
Copy the new firmware/kernel to y our iPod.
(If you skipped ahead earlier -> make sure your backup is finished!)
dd if=apple_linux.bin of=/dev/disk1s2

Step 6:
Copy the kernel libraries
cp -r lib /Volumes/Antis\ iPod

Step 7:
Extract the linux filesystem tro the iPod
tar xzf ipod_fs_040403.tar.gz -C /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/

Step 8:
Copy podzilla onto iPod and make it executable
cp 2005-08-17-podzilla /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla
chmod +x /Volumes/Antis\ iPod/sbin/podzilla

The Minimate is the thing I really need for my mini.
I went for the “big” model with the 80GB harddisk, but it’s nearly full and I’m only halfway through (re)ripping my CD collection.

All Mac related stuff will from now on go into it’s own blog.

Gotta keep things clean … you know.

Mac Blog

I always wondered why they still ship one button mice,
even though I knew that they support multiple buttons.
Read
Gear Live | Why Apple Makes a One Buttoned Mouse and you’ll see the light…

People everywhere are complaining that the Mac Mini would make the perfect “set top box” or “home media center”
if it only had a video/tv capture card.

I just don’t get it.

You got this really cute video playing device and a broadband connection.
When will you actually watch TV ?

Just download the stuff (legally) from the web. iMovies anyone ?

Oh, you want to capture your selfmade videos ?
Hmmm … put one end of a FireWire cable into your cam and the other into the Mac Mini.
Any problem ?

Stop complaining.

The only thing really missing for this thing is a big harddisk…
… wait a minute. That’s connected to the WiFi-Broadband-DSL-Router-Printer-Server anyway.

Now I only need a cute little (bluetooth) iRemote.

I just ordered mine yesterday.

It was just to hard to resist.
I’ve been waiting for a sub $500 Mac for a few years now.
The Mac Mini is slightly above that, but who cares

Should be here in two weeks…