Last night, in preparation for my trip to San Francisco, I decided to rip a couple movies onto my iPod Touch for the flight. I had never done this before, so it sent me looking for a solution. Now I know that Google makes it’s living on ads, but it’s a little disheartening that I had to sift through dozens of pages of paid solutions, where there is an absolutely perfect one for free.
Handbrake is an open source application for Mac OS X that accomplishes this task quickly and easily. It even has format options to set up for iPod Touch, iPhone, Video iPod and PSP automatically.
I set up two movies last night, Mr. Brooks and Hot Fuzz, and it took about an hour each. It created files about one gigabyte in size and I was set.
I copied them into my iTunes library, synced the iPod Touch and I was set. I tested the movies and they looked fantastic and had perfect audio sync.
So, Arnan talked me into checking it out. I went to Jailbreakme.com on my iPod Touch and installed it’s installer app. I went through the restarts and up it came. I downloaded the community repositories and started surfing through the apps.
I installed the To-Do List application and it didn’t work it, it needed the BSD libraries to work properly. So with that I browsed the rest of the available applications in all categories. There is a Terminal, SSH Client, Apache Server, PHP Runtime, Games, Female Cycle Calendar (are you kidding me?), and much more to choose from but shortly after I redownloaded 1.1.1 and restored my iPod Touch to factory. Why do you ask? There just wasn’t anything on there vital enough to risk the stability of my iPod Touch.
I can dig the concept, and if there is stuff that comes along that is really cool I might consider it. I would do some research online first and see if there is something on there you really can’t live without. If not, wait until Apple releases it’s SDK in January and watch the apps roll in from legit sources.
Later in the evening, the ease of restoring it led me to re-hack it and I tried a bunch of applications. As you can see now I have a ton of things to play with and all of them seem to work perfectly except IRC. I have yet to get any of the three IRC clients to work.
Since my coworker Dan got his Apple iPhone, I have been trying to share my cell connection on my Macbook Pro laptop with him via WiFi. Since I got my Apple iPod Touch my efforts have doubled. The problem is that it just doesn’t work!
You would think that Apples to Apples (heh) it would work just fine. I share the connection with the sharing control panel. It doesn’t matter if I use open or encrypted connections, the devices connect, they just will not browse the web.
I am not sure what the problem is exactly but two out of two leads me to think this must be an issue.
I have tried using different channels and changing around the WiFi settings 10 ways from Sunday with no luck.
I have managed to get it working once un-encrypted, but as soon as I tried to enable WEP, it died again. BUMMER! I should be able to walk around the office and chat and surf with my iPod Touch to my heart’s content but alas, nada.
