My very generous former employers gave me a cute little iPod Nano as a going-away gift. I had been avoiding iPods because they need special software (iTunes) and I was afraid they wouldn’t work well with Linux. A few years ago, I bought an iRiver IHP120, thinking it would be easier for a geek like me to use. It turns out that it wasn’t: there’s some weirdness w/ the harddrive makes it lock up every so often for a minute or so while you’re trying to copy your music. Also, that 20GB hard drive is almost too huge: trying to keep all my shit organized on that thing was like staring at a sink full of dirty dishes every day.

Anyway… I booted up the computer, plugged in the iPod, and… beauty! The system picked up on it right away, and you can even browse your music collection and add to it right from the file browser, something which I don’t think you can do even on a Mac!

As for Amarok, iTune’s feature-heavy and strangely-accented European cousin, the iPod integration works very well. The user interface is a little confusing and takes a while to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very easy to add music to your player. There’s even a sweet plugin you can download that will automatically convert your OGG files to MP3 as they’re uploading. Music in other languages (with weirdly accented letters) comes through perfectly on the iPod, something that was a constant source of frustration with my iRiver.

In short: I’m hooked! I finally understand why people love the iPod so much, and after four years of struggling to get Linux to do some of the things that other people take for granted, I’m delighted to find so much thought and effort put into this. (Also, I’m in love with SuSE’s new mounting properties tab.)

Editing bitmaps with Gimp, vectors with Inkscape, and browsing thumbnails with Konqueror… and guess what? It’s all free! Five years ago, I would have either had to a) pirate Windows software, or b) use some awful shareware thing that would have cost too much and crashed too often. This is the future, people!

Apparently afraid that his title of World’s Geekiest Man is in dispute, Bill Gates impresses upon us the teh awesome h4×0r power of his three screen computer. That’s right, folks, the richest man in North America doesn’t just get one Blue Screen of Death, he gets three. Or as Bill himself explains in exquisitely boring detail:

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

What, no fourth screen for hot pr0n?! Also, for anyone who hasn’t used a computer any time in the past 10 years (but yet is somehow reading CNN.com,) Bill explains what an “in-box rule” is (you can practically see him air-quoting as you read it!)

I also find it sad that Bill’s encouraging people to blow big bucks on three flat-screen monitors (and, one assumes, the 10 feet of desk space needed to hold them all) when the competition offers a way to do that with one monitor… for free.

Things are not good for Microsoft right now– they just delayed the launch of their next version of Windows, named “Vista,” which promises an improved graphics engine, integrated desktop search, retractable cupholders, anti-lock breaks, and the ability to send you mother flowers if you forget her birthday. The new launch date is February 2007, fully a year six months later than expected. Poor Microsoft, chinks are really starting to appear in their armor.

Now apparently it turns out that they’re planning on rewriting vast parts of what already is done. This is exactly the sort of opportunity that competitors like Novell and Apple have been praying for– it’ll be fun to see if they manage to sieze the day, as it were. Novell in particular will soon release an updated OS with a graphics engine called XGL– very similar to the “Aero Glass” interface that Vista will have (and of course Apple’s Quartz Extreme which has been around for several years now.)