Archive | November 2005

iPod 5G Video – review

There are dozens of excellent iPod 5G reviews out there, so I’ll just chime in with some quick comments.

The Good:

  1. Portable Video – I’ve watched over 20 hours of video, including Smallville season 1 (transcoded from DVD), in places I don’t usually watch TV (car repair shop, bed(without waking my wife up – yay headphones, while eating lunch, on the porch, etc).
  2. The packed-in slip case is very nice. It adds nothing to the weight or dimensions of the unit, but makes it safe to carry the 5G in your pocket with your keys.
  3. I can watch channel9.msdn.com videos on the go!!

The Bad:

  1. Battery Life is around 2 hours of video playback – Good thing you can play it while it’s plugged in!
  2. Easy to scratch screen / no official protectors available, yet.
  3. 4G accessories are not worthless with the 5G.
  4. No 30 second fwd/backword skip. This is actually a huge problem.
  5. No way to insert bookmarks in videos.
  6. If you stop a video and play another, sometimes it seems to remember where you stopped that first video and other times it doesn’t.
  7. No built in speaker.
  8. Almost all video content needs to be transcoded to work on the iPod.

Anyway, I love it.

XBox 360 Faceplates

Not sure if these will be for sale…
xbox360faceplates-thumb.jpg
Full Size

DS Wifi Homebrew

Stephen Stair is almost done with his Homebrew Wifi project for the Nintendo DS.

Field of work Completion Level
Receiving data: 100%
Transmitting data: 100%
Interrupts/Data Queuing: 100%
arm7/arm9 communication structure: 100%
802.11b implementation (arm7): 100%
API for other wireless functions (arm9): 100%
IP selection code (dhcp/static/etc): 100%
Writing my own TCP stack: 90%
Test application (basic irc client): 30%
Additional Testing: 50%
Ad-Hoc Mode: 30%
Documentation: 100% (verified!)