Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Don't ask me why, but my video iPod has unexpectedly arrived yesterday instead of sometime next week as I was told. But hey, who am I to complain?

Quick notes:

• Sound quality is great, videos look great.
• GNUpod doesn't work yet, it seems the iTunesDB format has changed. I'll investigate.
• I tried putting the whole Wikipedia on the iPod using the Notes feature. It's not that easy unfortunately, as the built in software limits file sizes to 4 KB, and the number of notes to 1000. Maybe iPod Linux software will support this.
• Speaking of iPod Linux — it doesn't work yet. I'll try to come up with patches.

No time for blogging, must play with iPod...

Yes, that's right. I have ordered one of those shiny new video iPods today.

I was never impressed too much by all this Apple hype going on all around me. In fact, I have never owned any Apple product (no iPod {photo|nano|shuffle|*}, no powerBook, no iBook, no iMac, no Mac mini). Until now. I simply couldn't resist to replace my 256 MB noname MP3 player with the full-blown 30 GB of the iPod (the 60 GB version costs way too much for my taste). See the specs for more technical details on the new iPod.

Apart from the usual iPod features you all know, this one's supposed to be thinner, can display photos and (the major improvement) videos. Yes, it's only 320x240, but it's videos. This thing will initiate a huge video blogging / videocasting wave, and those vlogs will soon become as popular as podcasts are today, I'm sure.

I hope to get my hands on that thingy in a bit more than a week (shipping takes a few days, it seems). I already have a lot of things on my mind, which I'm gonna do with it:

• listen to a huge bunch of podcasts
• watch various vlogs (btw, older models can play videos, too, if you ask nicely)
• store some photos on it to show off to relatives and friends
• record various stuff using the built in 44.1 kHz stereo recorder (think podcasting, for example)
• try out some of those 50 fun things to do with your iPod
• install iPodLinux / podzilla on it (you've been waiting for this, haven't you?). The new video iPod is not (yet) supported, so I might contribute a few patches, but don't take my word for it.
• oh, and I might use it to listen to music from time to time, too ;-)

If you have any suggestions for more geeky things I could be (ab)using it for (think john the ripper on iPod and similar things), don't hesitate to write a comment! Hm, I might port bb to the iPod if nobody beats me to it...