Rockbox on the iPod Nano!

In my never-ending quest to free myself from the fetters of non-free software and to amuse myself by putting new operating systems on things I find in my house, I installed Rockbox on my iPod nano recently.

It was essentially pretty easy. The hardest part was actually figuring out the difference between Rockbox and iPod Linux. It turns out that Rockbox is a music player, like the original Apple firmware, and iPod Linux is a Linux that runs Linux programs. I toyed around with iPod Linux (played some Tetris!), but since my goal was to have a music player, I moved on.

First step: converting my MacPod (HFS+, which Linux hates) to a WinPod (FAT32, a more widely supported filesystem). Interestingly, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux all recognize the WinPod, while only Mac OS and some subset of Linuxes recognize the MacPod. To convert a MacPod to a WinPod, just plug it into a computer that's running Windows (if you can find such a thing!); you'll automatically be prompted to reformat. You lose all the data on the iPod when you do this, so back up first if it's anything important. After that, it's just a matter of following the instructions here.

So now my iPod dual-boots, just like my laptop -- and just like my laptop, it will rarely if ever see the Apple OS boot up again. There's nothing that Apple's iPod software did that I preferred to Rockbox, and plenty of things Rockbox does that I like better. To name a few: it's free as in speech; it plays .ogg files (the .ogg standard is also free as in speech!); it lets me choose to keep my existing filetree organization, or use it's ID3-based database, or both; it lets me put (any kind of!) files on it and then retrieve them on any computer under the same name and format; it's highly skinnable, so I can get it to look more attractive than the original Apple look; and it allows finer tuning of settings (for example, I can choose whether or not it stops playing when headphones are unplugged, set how long it waits before going to sleep, &c). Using it under Linux (or any OS) is simply a matter of mounting it as a drive and then copying files directly to its filetree, rather than using a specific piece of software. Without a doubt, Rockbox has increased my ability to use this piece of hardware the way I want to.

Anyone developing any kind of web app with Rails should definitely pick up a copy of Rails Recipes. Even for a relatively simple app, I consistently find myself saying "I wonder if that book has anything I can adapt to do this task" and then it has, not something I can adapt, but something that is exactly right for the task at hand.

It's really a lot like Rails in general -- once you're working in it, it's so obvious that of course not every developer should have to reinvent the wheel for every part of an application when nearly every web app has these same parts. I'm a little bothered, though, that it seems so innovative -- duh, there should be a framework that makes it easy to develop the stuff that everyone is developing, and duh, just like I don't have to figure out how to make bread by trial and error, I shouldn't have to figure out how to code an AJAX preview by trial and error. I guess I need to get better at training myself to think DRYly, so this kind of process will seem as natural as it should.