Fooling with the iPod

I run Linux on my laptop. I have a windows installation under VMware. My iPod had a music collection from my old Windows installation on the laptop, which is long gone. I had copied all the music to the VMware Windows installation, but 'it's not supported' to connect an iPod to Windows via Linux. A while back, I did some things that allowed the iPod to talk to VMware to the point that the Windows installation knew the iPod was there and opened iTunes. (I thought this was pretty good, but the key phrases here are 'did some things' and 'it's not supported'.) Anyhow, at that time, the iPod would never actually talk to iTunes properly to update the thing.

About 6 weeks ago, I meddled some more in the 'did some things' category, and anytime I plugged the iPod into the laptop, and the VMWare windows detected it, Windows would crash. (Blue Screen of Death. Every time. The windows guys around that time started to say that people rarely saw the blue screen any more. I laughed and crashed my installation.) Anyhow, more things were meddled with, and now, in the Windows installation, I can crash it in any of the following ways: Plugging in the iPod, opening anything that plays video, and opening anything that plays audio. I use it for cheap parlor tricks. I would reinstall, but SOMEDAY I will get a new laptop. The moral of that story is: don't let the Operating System Engineers fiddle with their laptops if that's their primary machine. They could get bored and 'do some things' to it. Or: Keep those Linux/UNIX guys off of Windows. It's just bad for everyone all the way around.

I plugged the iPod into the Windows installation at home, and convinced it that I really did want to copy all my music onto that machine. This actually worked. I copied 7GB of stuff onto the machine last night. I don't know if this is a common thing people do, but I was impressed, at least.

Today I started ripping the Chronicles of Narnia CD's we got the girls for Christmas onto the iPod. Once that's done, I need to get the Wilford Woodruff manual and the January Ensign onto it.