I’ve been running with the Nike+ setup for my iPod Nano since this past December. Since then, I’ve used it for nearly 50 runs & 365 miles. (You can see the results on my Nike+ page.) After all those miles, I think it’s time for a review. (more…)
My previous first generation iPod Shuffle was well on it’s way to death - it didn’t play songs 90% of the time when first turned on, didn’t work on shuffle mode, was actually rusting & it’s armband was starting to fall apart. I coincidently also happened to lose it recently as well, so I was due for a new music player and anxious about the new iPod release rumors that had been circulating.
After a couple days of excitement about the new iPods Apple revealed this past Wednesday, I headed to the local Apple store to pick up a new iPod Nano to replace the Shuffle. I had planned on getting a green 4 GB model, but the clerk told me green was only available in the 8 GB size. I’m not sure if they don’t ship 4GB colored models or they just didn’t have any in stock, but could really care less about the color, so I picked up the 4GB plain aluminum/grey colored one instead, along with a matching armband for running. As Saturday was the first day the new iPods were in the store, I didn’t expect any accessories to be there. The store was busy, but I’d expected much worse. It hardly took any time to get a clerk to help & I was out the door in 15 minutes tops. (more…)
I picked up a Sharp Zaurus 5600 (poodle) a while back and was recently able to connect it to my Verizon LG vx8100 cell phone to dial into the PPP servers at work. If you’re not familiar with it, the Zaurus is an extremely hackable PDA that runs linux. It has a terminal with ssh and can run Firefox or pretty much any *nix application out there (including X-Windows). I can now drop the Zaurus, cell phone and a USB cable into my waterproof Simms camera bag, hike a couple miles up a creek and no longer have to worry about being paged for work and not being able to respond.
One of the things I finally got around to doing for the end of hunting this year was to figure out how to convert videos into 3gp format to watch on my LG-VX8100 phone. I used the venerable ffmpeg program to do so. Due to licensing restrictions on the 3gp (AMR) codecs, the version of ffmpeg shipped with Ubuntu is not capable of doing the conversion without being recompiled. While there are a handfull of guides on the web for compiling ffmpeg with 3gp support from source, I didn’t find one that detailed how to make a Debian .deb package it & I hit a few bumps along the way, so here’s the steps I took to get it to work.