Archive for September 26th, 2008

iTunes ate my iPod!

Friday, September 26th, 2008
Kind of what my iPod now does, until the battery runs out

Kind of what my iPod now does, until the battery runs out

I have, well had, a 2GB second-gen iPod Nano. Now I have a very slim brick.

When I upgraded to iTunes 8, it offered an update for my iPod. I let it do its thing, then resync’ed it. I noticed that the iPod rebooted after the sync — no big deal — but then kept rebooting (back and forth …) forever.

I tried resetting it; nope, it would just start doing its thing again.

I tried putting it into disk mode, then restoring it; nope, back and forth, back and forth

In desperation, I tried restoring it on a PC, which needed to reformat the iPod. Partial success; it sync’ed music from the PC, but since my working music library is on my iBook, I had to restore and resync, and guess what? back and forth, back and forth

I’d heard that the problem could be caused by empty podcast folders, so I cleared out and rebuilt my library, put the iPod into disk mode and restored it on a PC, resync’ed on the iBook and … back and forth, back and forth

As a last try I’m going to fsck it under Linux. I might be stuck using yamipod, which is probably a bonus, as all I use iTunes for is as an iPod conduit. I really miss having a Rockbox-capable player, as it just worked the way I expected.

UPDATE: yeah, that last one did it. Shame about yamipod’s UI.

dual monitor + virtuawin = 13,312,000 virtual pixels of awesome

Friday, September 26th, 2008

VirtuaWin adds joy to my desktop: using my 1280×800 laptop with a Dell 1920×1200 flat panel with four workspaces, I’ve got over 13 million pixels at my command. I have the laptop screen dedicated to my Vestas Online Busines SCADA session, so by making the SCADA window sticky, it’s always visible as I move from workspace to workspace on my big screen.

Shame the underlying OS blows pickled pineapple, though.