It’s not like me to be so far behind the technology curve. I was finally able to afford his gently used (a few scratches) 20 gig iPod. As a proud new owner, I can now understand and appreciate the iPod phenomenon.
This little piece of equipment is the real deal. The click wheel is an incredibly easy and intuitive interface. The battery life is good and the sound quality is great. The storage space is immense; my iPod contains several audiobooks, a couple podcasts, and neary a thousand songs and I still have 15 gigs left. You could spend your fortune just purchasing add-ons and accessories for the iPod — FM transmitters, skins, headphones, clips, armbands, car adapters, stereo speakers, you name it.
One of the unintended consequences of the iPod is the new phenomenon called podcasting. Unlike a radio broadcast, the podcast is a saved audio program can be replayed at the listener’s discretion. KSL offers podcasts of its shows; I’ve heard rumors that Rush Limbaugh is getting into the game. Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) called podcasts “Wayne’s World for radio” but the future version of iTunes is going to support podcasting, so it is only going to grow. iPodder is free software that can help you subscribe and manage podcasts until iTunes gets in there. More about podcasting can be found at wikipedia.
If any of you find any podcasts worth listening to, please post them in the comments for this article — I still have plenty of space to fill on my iPod.
May 23rd, 2005
My laptop hard drive recently crashed. Not a fun experience. Anyway, after struggling to make sure I had correctly backed up my files I wondered how I was going to be productive on a computer without a hard drive.
I stumbled upon Knoppix, a Linux bootable CD. I had tried Knoppix several years ago when I was first trying to learn Linux, and was unimpressed. However, I was facing several days without a hard drive, and I still needed to use my laptop, so I decided to give Knoppix a try again to see what it would do.
I got a copy of the CD (it’s a free download), plugged it in, and turned on my laptop. I was interested to see what it would do without a hard drive. To my surprise, it booted right up and started recognizing my hardware. Even though I didn’t have a hard drive, Knoppix didn’t skip a beat. I was soon looking at a nice and clean interface.
Knoppix is full of programs you wouldn’t think would fit on a single CD. It has a great web browser (Mozilla Firefox), a full office suite (OpenOffice) that is compatible with Microsoft Office, and even a high-end graphics editor (GIMP). I was able to use all of these programs (plus literally hundreds of others) with no problems. Knoppix even created a virtual hard drive that I could use to save documents and files. As long as I didn’t turn off my laptop, I could reopen files, edit them and save as though I actually had a hard drive. Pretty slick.
Overall, I was surprised at how far Knoppix had come. I would definitely recommend Knoppix to anyone who wants to mess around with Linux and see what it has to offer as far as programs go. Oh, and by the way, it also works great if you have no hard drive and are waiting to get one back from the manufacturer.
September 7th, 2004