Paul Begley Web Log

Paul bought an iPod

This is absolutely shocking. I don’t know what to say, other than it’s a refurbished 40GB 4th Generation iPod and it cost under $80 from ecost.com.

I still feel a bit dirty.

But I did it for my daughter. Sarah’s Zune was in her car when it was stolen in Atlanta. I’m shipping my original 30GB Zune (white, refurbished, $99!) tomorrow.

In my defense, I’m not running iTunes. iTunes is a piece of poo. Lots of strange services, ACC format files, DRM, ugh! I’m running Rockbox, a firmware upgrade available from www.roxbox.org. I used the Rockbox Utility to detect the iPod, download the appropriate software, and install. It was a very painless process. The really neat part was just did a drag and drop of MP3 library to the iPod, and I was in business. It even recognized my WinAmp playlists. I have some songs in FLAC and Vogg Orbis formats and will experiment later.

I tried using the ml_ipod add-on for WinAmp, but I was having some problems and just opted to move to the Rockbox firmware.

I’m quite pleased with the combination of the iPod and Rockbox software. I am experimenting with the Themes so I can read the screen without glasses when I am on my stationary bike (single speed bike with Nashbar fluid trainer).

Technorati Tags: ipod,rockbox,mp3,firmware

Labels: bicycle, hardware, Linux, Software

Upgrading Katie’s Desktop

GParted – Welcome

Katie’s PC is a 2.0 GHz IBM workstation, but the original 40GB disk is full, and it needs more RAM. I didn’t have a lot of time to spend on this upgrade, so I backed the system up using Acronis True Image Home 11.0 and restored to a spare 160 GB Hitachi disk.

The problem I had is that Acronis restored the original ~38GB image onto the 160GB drive. I probably missed something, but this was an opportunity to test re-sizing a disk drive.

I downloaded the latest GParted Live CD ISO file from SourceForge and burned it to a CD using Alex Feinman’s ISO Recorder v2.

I booted the CD, took the defaults, and it boots into X-Windows and auto-starts GParted. Through the application GUI, you select the disk you want to resize, click on the edge and slide to resize. Optionally, you can enter in the disk/partition parameters to resize. Click OK, accept parameters, and it is complete.

After re-start, Windows XP SP2 automatically performed a checkdisk, which completed successfully, after the first start of Windows, I received a message that Windows installed a new device and required a restart. After the restart, I was back in business.

Technorati Tags: GParted,partition,editor,hardware,Win32

Labels: Linux, Microsoft, Software

Google Experimental Search

http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

Keeping track of new features in Google is almost a part time job. I stumbled onto the Alternate View for search results and thought I should post the Experimental Search page.

A comprehensive overview with examples was posted on Ars Technica

My first week at Unisys, I took an accelerated Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 course. Craig (the awesome Unified Communications Instructor) pointed out you can narrow searches to just Microsoft or Linux topics by appending 'microsoft' or 'linux' to google.com to get an alternate, filtered search view.

http://www.google.com/microsoft