Toys!

I’ve had my Christmas, dunno about the rest of you lot…
I finally managed to talk myself into buying an iPod. I figured that the trip to Europe is going to involve long plane flights, and also that I was going to have to spend a couple of hundred on memory cards for my camera.
So I bought myself a 60GB video iPod – white, of course – plus the camera connecter, AV cables, iTrip and power supply (Why do I have to pay extra for a plug-in-to-the-wall power supply?)
Unfortunately, despite claiming to work with “All iPods with a doc connector”, the iTrip (an FM transmitter, mostly used to let your car radio tune in to the iPod rather than fiddling with cassette adapters and stuff) doesn’t actually use the doc connector, and doesn’t work with my iPod, so I guess I’ll be returning that tomorrow.
There is a version out that does in fact use the doc connector, so I’ll have to see if I can find one – or maybe the RoadTrip, which combines iTrip with a car charger and a car doc. (Not sure about that one, as the cigarette lighter in my car is deeply recessed, and it might not actually fit).

Aaaanyway – I haven’t had much time with it yet – fiddled with the menus and generally admired it, and Caitlin found the games of course.
I did copy all my photos on to it – and the screen is absolutely wonderful for viewing them on – I wasn’t sure how good it’d be. The slideshow on a TV with the AV cables isn’t bad either.

Now I have the long process of getting music on to it. I currently have 17 DVDs full of FLAC encoded files with all the contents of my CD collection. I have them converted to ogg vorbis for playback on my laptop, but that’s no good for the iPod, so now I’ve got to go and re-encode them as mp3. It’d be OK if I’d had the disk space to put them all on hard drive to start with, because then I could just leave a process running over night, but I guess switching 17 DVDs is still better than switching a couple of hundred CDs.