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Pure Geek #1 

Time for some totally geeky behaviour right now so if computers and/or groovy musical devices ain’t your bag, then you can ignore the following.

Okay, still ready for some geekiness? Cool. And what better way to start than to present you with my new desktop. Click here for the larger version. I’ve been inspired while checking out Nazarin Hamid’s ultra-cool site Weightshift. He motivated me to turn my boring-ass Windows XP interface into a sexy, OSX themed, Mac. 4 hours later (which included various other tweaks) and my desktop now seems more approachable, cleaner and organised. OSX, particularly version 10.4 ‘Panther’, looks much classier than any PC interface, even with the use of customisable themes such as Windows Blinds or many others. Of course, you can\rquote t get any better than buying a Mac yourself but when I paid less than half the price of a brand new G5 setup, the visual difference isn’t all that significant. What’s underneath the bonnet however, is an entirely different kettle of fish. I used FlyakiteOSX to change my PC into a Mac and so far, so good. It’s all done with a click of a button and can be uninstalled if you experience too many problems. I’ve noticed a couple of bugs, but it’s the easiest way to experience OSX on a PC. Future versions will no doubt be flawless.

To continue with the geeky coolness, I recently received a 4G iPod as a surprise gift. I know! How lucky am I? Well it’s a thing of beauty and if you don’t own one yet, you can’t call yourself ‘cool’. Well ‘geeky cool’. Apple just released their newest iPod family member- the iPod Shuffle. It’s got the advantage of having flash-based memory storage as opposed to a hard drive so it’s great for jogging and moving around with. The downside is the storage capacity (only a gigabyte max) and most frustratingly, no screen. But it is much cheaper than the iPod mini or the iPod Photos.

Anyway, my iPod is pretty much perfect except for the fact that I have a Windows-based machine and well’85 Apple doesn’t like Windows so it’s bound to fuck over Windows users, here and there. In particular, getting Windows to recognise the damn thing. Initially everything worked well but since tweaking Windows a little, I can’t seem to get iTunes to recognise the iPod. The iPod charges through the firewire port fine, it just doesn’t show up in the iTunes window. This isn’t rare as evidenced here, here, here, here, and here. It seems when someone has a solution, someone else comes along saying “Yeah but it still doesn’t work!”. The most frustrating thing is when nobody helps them out. I’ll take a wild guess but I think my problem has something to do with the firewire card I have. I’ve tried connecting various digital video cameras to my machine and had the same problem. I’ve looked on forum after forum and never had any luck reconfiguring my software. I’ve tried reinstalling the software, etc, etc’85 and still no go. And I’m not enough of a geek to fix hardcore Windows XP problems. I might be wrong of course, but I guarantee that my firewire card is the problem. I tried using the USB 2.0 connection from the iPod to my computer and it worked perfectly. No problems there. It’s times like these that maybe a Mac is the overall solution in the end. Connect any iPod to a new Mac and you’ll have no problems. Connect a video camera to a Mac and “bam!”, it works first time. And even though Mac have just released the cheaper Mac mini (don’t forget to add a keyboard, mouse, monitor and any necessary cables to that bill however), who can justify the price?

Man! Well that’s enough geekdom for now. If anybody has a solution to the iPod issue, I’d love to hear it. Things should get back to hooverdust normality in the next post.