Reasons to be Cheerful #5: Sullying Apple's Little Darling

So in preparation for Henley, I went off to Curry's to find the cheapest, crappest CD walkman they might sell me. Except it turns out that such a thing is a hopelessly antiquated request nowadays. If you want to hear music, it has to have been put through a perceptual coder of some kind. Because, y'know... progress and that.

Now, ownership of such a device was, technically, almost inevitable at some point in my life, but I had resisted until now because I wanted to support the first person to come up with a really good competitor to the iPod. No matter how good the iPod is, I don't think it's at all healthy that nobody at the moment wants to even try to directly compete with the iPod. If you want something with more than, say, 8Gb of space on it, and which plays mp3s and so on, but you don't want some big clunky video player, then you are quite literally stuck with Apple. The iRiver gave them a run for their money for a bit, but sadly no more.

So, when I discovered that my only option was with one of Apple's ubiquitous little bits of kit, I'm afraid to say, I caved, and bought one. In order to make myself feel a little bit less dirty, I have brought it straight home and made it talk to some open source software, syncing it with Songbird over a connection managed by Ubuntu.