Mindstab.net

Well, the good news, I bought and iriver T30. It's a cheap flash mp3/ogg player. $100 for 1GB. Nice. Solid design and solid player. I'm pretty happy with the unit and getting happier but there was one slight 'thing'. The iriver in Europe and North America ship with a firmware that needs Windows Media Player 10 in order to transfer music. That's obviously bad. However it does ship with a USB Mass Storage device in Asia. The community badgered iriver and as of June 2006 there is official upgrade/crossgrade support. The one hitch still is you need a Windows computer to do the firmware upgrade. I did my upgrade at school.

Go to http://www.mtp-ums.net/ and follow the first link to the irivier MTP < -> UMS page. Grab the installer and play around with it. It took me several tries for some reason (it may have something to do with me finally saying my player was from Europe instead of the US?). It was finicky, but I did finally got it. I first ended up having to upgrade to the newest firmware (1.22 -> 1.71) and then it let me crossgrade from MTP to UMS. Now I plug in this super cheap and ultra small (fits in my change pocket) unit and it shows up as a harddrive and I can just drag and drop my mp3 and ogg files. It's perfect. I'm quite pleased.

Now, I've started toying around with setting up a GIT server. It would be handy for me at least. I'm most of the way done getting it working how I'd like but during the process a 'chgrp' command got away from me (ok, I screwed up) and a few things on the server are a little off. I can't use 'su' until I go home and log in manually and reinstall shadow. And then I'll need to reinstall qmail which has stopped accepting mail. Hopefully that's all that I broke but I may reinstall some other packages for good measure to make sure permissions are back to normal. So if there is a bit of instability over the next couple of days, it's my bad. Hopefully no one but me will even notice ;).