Twilight Universe
by Gregory Wild-Smith
6
For no apparent reason - I love working in the command line. It can’t do everything (no, really, it can’t) but it brings back memories of my old DOS days. The days I was still learning computers and drinking it all up like cold iced tea. The command line is so powerful and flexible, and because of that it can be frustrating.
For example - finding a simple string in a whole bunch of text files across multiple directories and then replacing that string in the text file. Tough to do simply in Windows normally, but I figured that, with the power of grep at my hands in Unix I could do a simple find and replace easily.
Not true, at least, not obviously true. The find part is easy, but the replace? It took me a lot of playing around to find out how to do it, amazingly it didn’t use grep (though it probably could). It fact it’s only one line of typing in the shell.
[Continuing my serialization of my Great-Grandfathers WWI Diary - written while he was a machine gunner in France. Also see part 1.]
Tomorrow is November 11th, and it was on this day, the best part of a century ago now, that the Great War was officially ended. It is now the day we remember, and respect, those who have fought, and fallen, in battle.
I’m not exactly a supporter of the military, but I respect those who believe enough in the cause to enlist and fight. I certainly respect those who fought during both World Wars.
In honor of these men and women, and to remember my personal connection with the war, I present the diary of my great-grandfather. Not the one who you may have seen in my restored photos, but the other side of my family. I transcribed his diary before I left the UK. He wrote it after the war, but while the events were fresh in his mind.
I’ll be serializing it in 3 parts over this weekend, the story is equal parts informative, horrific, and illuminating. Here is the beginning.
The iPod, cultural icon, modern walkman, expensive hunk of metal and plastic.
Whatever your opinion on it, it’s a safe bet that you or someone you know owns one. I myself own a 5th generation iPod (the Video) and happen to think it’s really nice. The video capability is useful, but not its main purpose, and I like being able to transfer videos on there to watch on the bus or train.
Or at least I did. I can’t anymore, at least not using iTunes, because Apple has decided to try and break my iPod.
You see one nice ability of the iPod is to be able to play videos that are larger than the screen. This way I can transfer my DVD resolution copy of say, Donnie Darko, onto it and then if I want to output it to a TV from my iPod it will look really good. This means I don’t need to worry about having an iPod version of movies, just one MPEG4 video file.
However, I recently updated iTunes (to 6.0.2) and my iPod firmware (to 1.1) and video uploads stopped working. Now I got a message that “some of the songs in the iTunes library [...] were not copied to the iPod because they cannot be played on this iPod”. I now had to get iTunes to “convert to ipod video” files that had been working (and transfering) properly before. What the hell…?
It wasn’t that the iPod couldn’t play the videos (far from it) it was simply that Apple had crippled the software. The iPod played them fine before. Is it iTunes, or a bugged firmware upgrade (v1.1)?
How Apple have worked out that removing useful functions of a product is a good thing I don’t know - the current version (at the time of writing anyhow) still has this problem. Great. Now I like iTunes as a music organiser, it makes uploading to my iPod simple, or did, so I’ll probably still use it. However the video problem meant I went looking for ways to make my iPod useful again. Not just for video, but in as many ways possible.
I was pleasantly surprsed.
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