I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw this, but it’s true. A group of hackers has managed to put togther a special version of linux that actually runs on Apple’s iPod family of MP3 players. I know what you’re thinking: Linux on a iPod? What are you ever going to do with that? Well first off you can play other audio formats not supported by Apple like Ogg Vorbis, WAV/PCM, FLAC, MOD. Then there’s other cool stuff like playing DooM or Half Life on the iPod Nano. Yea.
TechThink
An IT geek's weblog
Hi Clay! I haven’t tried this out yet, but I’ve had my eye on it. I’ve been playing a lot with an iPod video that I got over chistmas. It’s not clear to me yet what would happen to a 5g ipod. Check out my new fake ipod nano watch though at growdown.blogspot, cause it was inspired by ipod linux. I am most excited about the ipod’s use as a portable information device. Pod2Go is an ap that lets you sync movies, weather, news etc into your ipod Notes. That has been really interesting. I’ve yet to really use that info as I am still waiting for otterbox case to come so I can take my ipod out of its wrapper (i just cut a few holes in the packaging that it came in to make a temporary scratchproof membrane.) But after that, I want to turn it into my dream-come-true digital field guide. I have a DVD on order with videos of 512 birds of North America that I am gonna encode and dump on there as a bird guide. THere is also a company that makes BirdPod, where they encoded the Stokes birding by ear CDs and make a bunch of playlists for you. I want to start scanning my paper guides to get images in there. And it should only start with birds. I’d love to have a field guide to aircraft, cars, flowers, dogs, what have you. Even just thinking about audio field guides, imagine one of accents of the world, where you could try and find out what language someone was speaking, or where in the US they were from, by listening to little samples…
I digress… I like your blog clay, I’ve been keeping up, and its inspiring me to write more in mine. Hey, I should put this comment in there!
-tim
Hey Tim! Thanks for checking out the blog 🙂 That whole field guide thing sounds like a great idea for an iPod. With the nice screens on those new iPod’s I could see a lot of cool alternative uses like that. Not to mention on-the-go versions of Strong Bad e-mails!