Finally! I’ve got a black iPod nano. Almost three weeks after deciding to buy one I could finally plug it into one of the extra USB connectors on the back of my Apple keyboard. Wonderful Gnome; it is automagically mounted and placed on my desktop. I fire up gtkpod to fill it with some music. No success there. Gtkpod did some things, but no music was actually transferred. I didn’t have time to investigate further, so I just plugged it into the keyboard on my Mac. I installed the software for it, and expected iTunes to find it. No luck there. I rebooted and inserted it into the USB on the back instead. Bingo! Except for being the 2G version I’m all happy now. Remains to be investigated is why gtkpod failed, but that is just an interesting challenge!
Translation
Hacked up a swedish translation for tagtool while I was at it. I used gtranslator, a tool from fedora extras. Cool and quite simple to use. I never use local translations if I can help it, but there are those who like it (My 75 yo. father-in-law is on fedora core 1 and do).
How to become a hacker
According to this I’m now an official hacker. (No, those bad people are called crackers) I’ve successfully added support for iTunes-compatible tagging in tagtool. It seems stable enough that I’ll use it on my own files.
The only thing Nat forgot in his “howto” was that it takes a lot of time to get there. Not that the actual coding always takes much time, but commuting 2 hrs/day, work 8 hrs/day, sleep 8 hrs/day and cooking/housekeeping/family 5.25 hrs/day leaves 45 minutes hacking-time, most of which is spent trying to remember where you were the day before.
Maybe now that my employer is “divesting” my part of the company we can move to a location closer to my home, reducing the commuting-part; or maybe laying me off. That would increase possible hacking-time by 10 hrs đ
Mono Kick Start, Hans-Jurgen Schonig and Ewald Geschwinde
Mono Kick Start (MK-S) is a thin book. It is obviously written in german, then translated to english by someone who’s native language isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with the facts in it, but it’s nothing you’ll read for the fun of it. MK-S is based on the ancient 0.17 version of Mono and .net 1. As such it may come in handy as a reference, especially for the older collections, a topic that the Jesse Liberty’s Programming C# have completly erased from the latest edition. One section of the book “covers” Gtk# with a rather useless, “Hello World”-style example. That is a topic that would require a book of it’s own, I think. Even Dumbill’s Mono: A Developer’s Notebook isn’t enough for that. (Much better though)
I think MK-S was a waste of money for me.
Reading
I have too much to read for the moment. Not that I’m in a hurry or anything, but its piling up. Taking up precious space on my desk. Its just been a few weeks since I couldn’t find anything unread I wanted to waste commuting time on. I started to re-read Harry Potter and the Phoenix order, and The Halfblood Prince. After completing HBP the first time I was not quite sure whether Snape killed Dumbledore with or without the latter’s consent. Now I’m sure; Snape hated Dumbledore, possibly for being kind to him. However, Dumledore was well prepared for dying, and with him, dead is not gone. Remember when the Ministry of magic was trying to get rid of him in the PO? He said he didn’t care what the ministry did, as long as they didn’t remove him from the chocolate frog cards. We’ve seen many examples of old headmasters acting as spies from their portraits, and they do seem to be more than just animated images, so I assume that Dumbledore will be able to continue giving Harry advice as long as he’s got a card with him.
Well, now Harry Potter is done for a while, (I don’t expect a new book about him in at least another year or so from now) so I may as well get started with the pile: Computer sweden, Ny Teknik, Villa Ă€garen, Orcanen, Bild & Ljud hemma, Studio (2 issues, one still i plastic wrapping), ratten (for Volvo owner, and yes, lower case r), vi i villa, National Geographic, Pistolskytte, Mac World (still wrapped), Foto and finally Kamera & Bild. Then there are a few books wating: Biggles & Co, Biggles – Air Commodore, Biggles in the Terai (In swedish, bought today for 5 SEK each, a bargain), Mono kick start, Dan Brown – Ăânglar och Demoner, and Historiens största mordgĂ„tor.
Quite a lot. I hope I can finish before Robert Jordan’s Knife of Dreams arrives from Amazon sometime between 11th and 13th of October. Hmm, that’s only 17 days off, maybe I am in a hurr after all?