Having accidentally snapped the USB connector off my first gen Shuffle, I required a new one for the gym.

I ummed and arrred about getting the new style or the previous style as I have a habit of breaking the Apple headphones and there aren’t that many for other manufcturers that support the new style with the controls on the earphone lead.

Still, vanity prevailed and I bought the new style one in order to improve my lagging street cred!

I guess the reason is that I have been quite busy recently. Not one thing in particular, but lots of little things here and there! So in no particular order:

• I’ve hurt my shoulder rowing
• Saw “The Darkness” the other day in Brighton – Amazing
• A particularly fabulous person bought me “Alice Cooper – Classicks” – he still rocks.
• At work, I’ve been pimped-out to the Web Development department – expect a rewrite of this site soon!
• Volunteered to do the London to Brighton Bike Ride this year – should be fun!
• It’s my birthday this Friday – Rich, doesn’t seem like a year ago you came down for my last birthday! Feel like doing it this year?
• Broken my second iPod in one year
• Bought iPod shuffle (see above! Can’t break the HDD in that little bugger!)
• Plus many more things I have forgotten about!

I created a new CD for my car last night. Now, my stereo is good enough to let me burn MP3s on to a CD, and then plays the tracks. It can even read ID3 tags (it appears to have some issues in this area, but it seems happier with just ID3 v1 tags). So, last night, I stayed up late, burnt 13 albums (that I own) to a CD. I even validated some of the ID3 tags myself and corrected them using WinAmp, because they all appeared to be missing.

When I got in the car this morning, the tags were missing off all the tracks that I corrected, plus all the tracks on Albums that I ripped previously. Only the ID3 tags on albums that I ripped last night remain – and as yet, I haven’t imported them in to iTunes.

So, here’s what I reckon is happening: iTunes is removing ID3 tags (the bastard). WinAmp has a bug in it which means it doesn’t read or write ID3 tags properly (having not started WinAmp in a while, I got a message about upgrading to v 5.91 – I’m currently using v5.05 – so there might be a slight difference in version going on there!)

Has anyone else experienced this? No? Just me then….

Anyway, this whole thing has got me thinking about my MP3 collection, and what to do with it when I build my MythTV box. I’ll probably store all my MP3s on that box, seeing as it is going to have a couple of monster HDD drives, so I will be able to share them out using NFS and Samba, plus play them through the TV (if I should ever want to – although I can’t imagine that being likely).

So this would be a good time to look at the collection, reorganise it, check the filenames, possible organise it into artist directories, clear out duplicates, may be re-rip albums into a higher bit-rate, check ID3 tags, see if I can get information on all of the songs, etc.

That means that I can then clear out iTunes (apart from the songs that I have purchased), and rebuild the library in there, which should then populate correctly down to my iPod as well.

Just got to build my box then!

This site, http://www.mp3tunes.com is selling MP3s for 88 cents (US) a piece. They are all legal downloads.

The downside to this DRM-Free download site is that there are no big labels on their listings yet, and therefore the songs that they have may not be to your taste. But, if you’re in to your little-heard-of artists, then this may just be the site for you!

And as they say,Works with all players.

Yahoo! Mail. I couldn’t access it, not from 3 computers and 3 different browsers

Except, I could access from outside my house.

This lead me to believe that it could be a problem with NTL, my broadband provider.

Bingo!. Here, Here, and also Here confirmed this, and also put up a cure.

Usually they succeed (e.g. iPaqLinux), but it you install it then you’re definitely invalidating any kind of warranty that you had.

In this instance, it’s now the iPod that has been victim to the hackers. However, this project seems a little different to the others that I have seen.

Not only do they have a decent website (for once), trivial I know, but the real killer thing I like about this project is summed up in these few words Our bootloader allows for you to choose between either iPodLinux or Apple’s firmware each time you turn on your iPod.Genius! They have realised, unlike many other projects, that you may only want to tinker with Linux every now and then, and they have let you turn it off! Bravo!

When I eventually get my iPod, I’m still not going to install it though…