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:
- 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).
- 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.
- I can watch channel9.msdn.com videos on the go!!
The Bad:
- Battery Life is around 2 hours of video playback – Good thing you can play it while it’s plugged in!
- Easy to scratch screen / no official protectors available, yet.
- 4G accessories are not worthless with the 5G.
- No 30 second fwd/backword skip. This is actually a huge problem.
- No way to insert bookmarks in videos.
- 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.
- No built in speaker.
- Almost all video content needs to be transcoded to work on the iPod.
Anyway, I love it.
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!) |