I'm still using Linux for my primary desktop for the foreseeable future and wanted to weigh in on the state of multimedia compatibility. Well, at least my own experiences. To catch up some readers, I've jailbroken my iPod Touch, it's running the 1.3 firmware, and I'm able to connect to it in Linux through SSH. Which brings me to the crux of this, a commentary on the state of multimedia apps on Linux. Frankly, they're behind Windows apps, which makes me grumpy enough to not put links in this post.

Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.

On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.

So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.

OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.

My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.

Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.

Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.

I've now got a jailbroken 1.1.3 firmware iPod Touch. Some of the apps I was using didn't quite work right with the new firmware but that seems to have been resolved with a bit of upgrading. I learned some things about how ssh works to get the iPod Touch syncing back up with Ubuntu again, too. What good is a toy if it's not edjikayshunal? The deeds are done and I'm good to go, back to using it as my primary in-car music source. Aw yeah.

Best of all, no iTunes was involved, though I find myself browsing through the podcasts once in a while.

I dove into the three Sandman graphic novels that one of my stepdaughters gave me for Christmas last week and utterly devoured them. There's unbelievably good stuff in there, and now I have GOT to get the last graphic novel to finish up the story because the ending of the last book I have leaves a gigantic change that needs resolution. Mr. Gaiman, I salute you and thank you again for this amazing literary journey.

I'm still cruising through The Secret Adversary and enjoying its breathless sensational pace and the whole English society setting. One of the protagonists calls a friendly young man a brick in one sentence, and while I thought at first that she was berating him unjustly for dimwittedness, I learned from context that she meant he was rock solid and dependable, as one example. Another fun difference from current usage is that "cute" is used to mean "smart". It's fun.

I haven't started Battle Royale or any of my new Bill Bryson books as my wife's tasked me with reading some of the baby-related books that she's been going through. I may have to give Battle Royale back to its owner unread.

Not that interesting this post, there's been a lot going on in meatspace these past couple of weeks. Content here will pick up, though.

I got my iPod Touch syncing through Ubuntu Gutsy via gtkpod! It's not a full solution, because gtkpod doesn't handle some of my files correctly, possibly due to directory depths on my file server, so I have to look into that further, but gtkpod will convert my Ogg Vorbis files to mp3 format and send 'em to the iPod Touch. The full solution was, frankly, laborious. I'll go over all of the general steps, though, and let people hunt down the details because I sure as hell can't find them now.

• Ensure Wi-Fi is working at home for the iPod Touch.
  
• Set the iPod Touch to not autolock. Very important step while working with the Wi-Fi, avoiding many connectivity issues.
  
• Jailbreak the iPod Touch. I ended up leaving mine at 1.1.1 firmware release thanks to issues with the 1.1.2 jailbreaking.
  
• Install the BSD subsystem and OpenSSH onto the iPod Touch through the newly-available Installer.
  
• Set up OpenSSH on my Ubuntu system.
  
• Set up SSH access to the iPod Touch.
  
• Use ipod-convenience to set up a mount point of /media/ipod on my Ubuntu system and test it.
  
• Install the latest and greatest gtkpod. Configure it to point to my music library and the iPod Touch. Manually get gtkpod to add library subdirectories because it doesn't seem to go down more than a couple of directory levels. Test synchronizing a non-mp3 to the iPod Touch. Adjust as needed and retest. Repeat until it's working.

iTunes is still useful in case I totally blow out the iPod Touch or I feel a deep sense of urgency to upgrade the firmware. At this point I haven't got either of those issues, but I am interested in some of the podcasts I can get through there. I might rent movies through iTunes, too, I dunno. If I do, it'll be to watch 'em on my computer rather than the iPod Touch. I don't get why someone would want to watch a full length movie on such a tiny screen.

Anyway, this means my iPod Touch is now officially a useful toy for me rather than just interesting to dink around with. Thanks to all of the hackers and developers who are opening up the iPod Touch under Linux. I'm hunting for online tip jars for you people...

HowTo Convert a Friend to Linux starts out hilarious and proceeds into thoughtful and helpful advice on this nerdtastic topic. One thing I thought was most interesting was the lack of dual booting or usage of a secondary system for Linux immersion. Both of these things have proven invaluable for me, a PC gamer who needs Windows to play many games on, and those fallback measures should prove at least useful for others.

In other news, IPv6 may be coming to a root DNS server near you on February 4 of this year. What does this mean? It means that full end to end IPv6 over the Internet will become possible without the use of any IPv4 (aka "The Way TCP-IP Is Now") hardware. It also means that sysadmins should check their DNS servers and firewalls for compatibility, though not IPv6 compatibility but with the ability to send and receive packets over 512 bytes in size. See the article for more details.

IPv6 is definitely coming, folks, and while IPv4's still going to be going strong for years, IPv6 is eventually going to beat it down. My prediction is that in five years IPv6 will be the predominant protocol used in new networks. Late this year I plan to look at my network hardware and nodes and see what I'd need to upgrade to IPv6. I probably won't make the switch, even partially, until 2009 at the very earliest, but we'll see.

Feedbooks.com, one of my favorite online book sources, has a rough beta of their iNewsStand software available for the iRex iLiad. I haven't tried it yet, but this service is poised to be a killer app for any ebook reader that supports it, able to bring in RSS feeds, Web-based news, books, Sudoku puzzles, and possibly other information and interactivity right onto the ereading device. It appears that FeedBooks already has a working Kindle version of this application. Bravo!

In other iLiad news, I find that browsing on the thing is just too slow. But reading a lot of text or PDFs on the iLiad is like night and day vs. the iPod Touch. There's no comparison at all. One funny side effect of the iPod Touch's touch screen is that the more you use it with your finger, the more finger grease ends up making reading a little tougher. It's never enough to seriously affect usability, but it's there. The screen's too small for serious text reading, but it's fine for interactive fiction and general Web browsing. Decent for Google Reader, too, with Google's special mobile device formatting. But for anything of decent size, the iLiad's the way to go. I like it more than regular paper books now.

I've been exchanging paper books with a friend lately and recently finished up her copy of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I liked it a lot as a variation on the usual "world of dark scariness" type of story. There are vampires and shapeshifters and other Others in it and all of this works in the context of the stories, with explanations given as needed while the plot unfolds in each of the three parts like a chess game. Readers may be able to guess what's going on before the end of each story, which is also extremely fun. The absolutes of morality figure strongly into the novel's overarching plot and themes, and by the end of the final part, readers have a full understanding not only of the main character, but the nature of the epic struggle between the Light and the Darkness. There is also a hint of information about a third group, the Inquisition, which oversees the actions of the two more active groups, leaving plenty of space open for more exploration. Night Watch is an English translation of a Russian book, and so some Russian mannerisms, such as stating a person's full name fairly frequently during conversation, show through, but these don't detract from the book so much as ensure that the reader knows the action happens in a non-English-speaking part of the world. I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

My friend seems to be into dark sorts of stories, having also loaned me a modern Japanese Lord of the Flies tale called Battle Royale and another book called Wraeththu. Battle Royale is almost unreadable for me, basically looking more like a gratuitous slaughterfest than a revisitation of the morality play that Lord of the Flies presents. I'm going to plow through Battle despite the occasional survivor count notices plastered throughout the text because it's supposedly much more subtle than it seems. Wraeththu, written by Storm Constantine, is about Young Hermaphroditic Mutants In Love, and after reading the first novel of the trilogy between this book's covers, I can't stomach more. I don't understand why there are so many weird names for places, people, and things, or why most members of this astoundingly powerful new race have such gigantic, sappy relationship hangups. Constantine has generated a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting pregnant with interesting story possibilities, but it seems as if he's using it as an outlet for Anne Rice-esque passionate vampire stories that are dissimilar enough to Rice's tales to avoid being lumped wholesale into the same cauldron with Poppy Z. Brite and others of that genre. I guess I'm not into "standard" romance genre fare, even with mutants and magic.

I'm definitely more picky about literature than I thought I was a few months ago. Maybe it's that I have so much to read now via my iLiad and my threshold for what I want to spend time on has risen as a result. I also got three Sandman graphic novels and some Bill Bryson books from one of my stepdaughters for Christmas and dammit, they're calling to me, so maybe that impatience is a factor right now... I'll post something more about Battle Royale after I finish it.

And finally, I started in on an Agatha Christie public domain novel called The Secret Adversary. So far I'm enjoying it as a variation on my usual fare and as a fine introduction to Christie's general writing style. I see why her work's so popular, with its engaging dialog and characterizations. I've been warned, though, that I shouldn't try to figure out who's done what until the very end, as Christie's notorious for bringing in extra characters and such during the final exposition scene, making correct deduction extremely difficult if not impossible in her stories. It's fun light reading, making a fine contrast with my other recent reading.

Happy holidays, folks! Hope this finds you all well and nerdly! It's definitely finding me that way, even though I'm having to venture into the Big Blue Room for social interaction. Actually, I like the familial gatherings, but the nerd in me twitches for a keyboard and Intarweb access despite enjoying the food and conversation.

My big geeky "present" so far this fine season has been a 16 gig iPod Touch that my place of employment gave me for my part in the extensive amount of work that my department has done for the company in the last year or two. And the fact that said extra workload has finally completed. To be honest, I wouldn't get one of these things myself, but for free, I'm finding it a hugely fun toy.

Why wouldn't I want an iPod Touch of my own? Well, for starters, the vast majority of my personal music library is in Ogg Vorbis format, which the iPod doesn't play. iTunes will play them, but the iPod doesn't. I already have a 40 gig iRiver H340 that plays my music and with Rockbox installed, I can have some other fun with it as well, so I really don't need a personal music player. I also, after working with it for a while, dislike iTunes a bunch. Gimme something like foobar2000 or the Audacious music player that isn't tied to Windows and, well, doesn't suck.

Don't get me wrong, iTunes does its basic job fairly effectively, managing content and synchronization from system to iPod nicely, but its playback quality isn't so hot (I have a 5.1 speaker setup and a near-audiophile pair of ears) and its inability to deal with directories of music for organization is a massive drawback for me. Since iTunes doesn't understand Ogg Vorbis tagging, probably 75% of my music comes up as "-" in iTunes's listing with no artist, etc. Brilliant. I'm not about to go through all of my Ogg Vorbis songs and convert them, thus my conclusion that iTunes sucks for music playback and library management for my particular configuration.

So I've been looking at how to use the iPod Touch for other tasks than music playback, and found some very interesting tasks for it to perform as well as the possibility of non-iTunes library management and iPod synchronization.

Obviously if I have a Wi-Fi connection I can do a few things that the iPod Touch is designed for such as surfing with the built-in Safari, browsing YouTube videos, and perusing the iTunes store. But I spotted a note in the Ubuntu community docs that tells about mounting the iPod as a file system under Linux and decided that hell, the thing was free, I might as well mess with it.

First step was to jailbreak the iPod. Jailbreaking took me an afternoon of messing around because it appears that there's a broken component of the 1.1.2 jailbreak upgrade. I might have done something wrong somewhere for the three times I tried and retried, but it looks like a bug in some library management that's out of my hands. Not a big deal there, I've left the iPod's firmware at 1.1.1 because I'm too lazy to work directly on a local copy of the package myself. Once jailbroken, the possibilities explode for possible things to do on the iPod Touch. I have a newly-released test version of ScummVM on my iPod Touch along with Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road to play. Lights Off has sucked up entirely too many hours of my time. I've customized the regular interface look. I have several English dictionaries installed on it. I'm considering grabbing NES and/or Playstation emulators. I'm sure someone's working on MAME already. I have the interactive fiction interpreter Frotz on the thing that I can use with my purchased Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom for hours of fun.

Best of all, though it's particularly nerdy, I'm able to mount the iPod's file system on my desktop through ssh and screw with it directly. I can use the iPod to store whatever I want through this, and there are already two applications that will take advantage of this interaction to allow for syncing from Linux to an iPod Touch/iPhone. However, the package issue I mentioned above appears to be affecting my ability to install the latest versions of these two apps so I'm using iTunes under Windows for the moment to sync music and videos onto the thing. Once that bug's resolved, though, bye bye Windows iTunes. Don't let the door hitcha on the way out.

Thanks to my workplace for giving me something to spend several days happily dinking away on, thanks to Apple for giving the hacker community such a fun toy to play with, and especially thanks to all the happy hackers out there building cool things for this beast. One thing I'd like to see is a local-running version of the iDice web app so I can roll dice on the iPod even if I don't have a WiFi connection. The other is for someone to patch the iPod music playing stuff to play .OGG files. I'm not able to work on this 'cuz I don't have the focus now for programming that I used to. kthkbye