Saturday, October 25, 2003

Panther, and fun with iPods

So I had this plan...

I wanted to reformat my hard drive while in the process of upgrading to panther, but I'm entirely too lazy to copy all my data over the network, so I needed access to a firewire hard drive of some sort...

Hey, I thought to myself, an iPod is just a tiny firewire hard drive, and a 20 gig one will hold my home directory just fine...

So I went off to the apple store last night for their panther roll out thingy, and I picked up a copy of the OS and an iPod, since i'd been planning on getting one eventually, and hey, this is a perfect excuse.

Then, the fun begins.

So my brand new iPod apparently does not like talking to my powerbook. I've been able to get the powerbook to recognize it twice, for stunningly brief periods of time, but before I can actually copy anything to it, it vanishes. I'm really hoping it's the cable, or failing that, the iPod itself that's bad, as I would be unthrilled if there was something wrong with my powerbook.

Anyway, I gave up on the reformatting idea, in the short term anyway, and just installed panther over my existing install (what, did you really expect me to wait a day or two to install it?), and I must say, it's damn cool. Everything is faster than before, or at least it feels that way, and the new features are just entirely too damn cool. I'm finding myself searching for reasons to use the 'fast user switching' stuff, even though I'm the only user on this box, just because the effect is so slick.

And now I'm waiting for some stuff from work to finish up, so I can go back to the mall and get the guys at the apple store to either tell me what I'm doing wrong or replace something or other in order to make my new toy work.