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Jan 31 2008

I am the smartest guy. Ever.

Posted by: Chris in Apple, Commentary, Life, Tech, Travel

Well folks, I think I have out done myself this time.

Really…

As some of you may know, I had to make an unexpected trip to the U.S. for a funeral. Well, I am currently on my way back to China – I am at the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Narita.

Well, on the way to the lounge, I found this neet ZoomSystems vending machine selling ipods, among other things. Here’s a photo I borrowed from anoither website, click on the image to go to that Website.

ipodvend.jpg

Just for fun, I went to it and played around with the touch screen interface. Hmm, they have iPod Touch’s. It sure would be nice to watch my videos on that nice 3.5″ screen instead of the smaller 2.5″, or whatever it is, that I have on my 5G iPod Video… Hmm, the 8GB model is US$279.99… I figured I could transfer my videos over between the two iPods during my almost 3 hour layover. The plan was perfect!

A quick impulsive credit card swipe later, I was the new proud owner of the iPod Touch. And because it wasn’t an iPhone, it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have any nasty activation issues.

Ha!!

It turns out that this bloody thing REQUIRES you to “activate”, or initialize it using iTunes. And, of course, iTunes runs only on Windows and Mac.

The world is not fair for us freedom loving trouble makers…

Here’s a picture of my currently useless iPod Touch plugged into my old Appe PowerBook G4 running Ubuntu. Oh, the irony. I just had to have Linux on this thing, huh?

Boo hoo

As you can see, it requests a connection to iTunes. Grrr…

So, I’m stuck not being able to use my new toy until AFTER my long flight – which was the main reason I bought it in the first place!

And here’s a random tidbit… For fun, I decided to scan the lounge for open bluetooth devices. Here’s a screenshot:

screenshot-browse-devices.png

Steve is my phone, but it’s interesting to note the 3 computers with bluetooth and the 2 BlackBerrys. Is it normal for BlackBerry to have Bluetooth open? Maybe it’s those people with the stupid bluetooth ear pieces with the annoying “I’m Cool, But Not Really” blinking blue light…

Oh well, time to go to my plane…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 2:05 am and is filed under Apple, Commentary, Life, Tech, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.beijinglug.org Fred

    Lots of comments! You said you borrowed the picture, when are you going to give it back?
    For the iPod touch you should have asked the BLUG and we’d have told you there is also an unlock mechanism. The procedure has to be done under Windows if I recall correctly but after that you can use Linux to upload stuff on it. So good luck with your unlock.

  • http://www.cdrum.com Chris

    Fred, thanks for the quick response! Yeah, i did some reading that I should be able to unlock it through windows. Lucky for me I have an old Dell laptop at home collecting dust with XP.

    As for the borrowed picture, seems I broke the link – will fix it when I return.

    Greetings from Tokyo.

  • http://www.cdrum.com Chris

    There. Link fixed

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