Upgrade to a dial-up!

Well, here it is finally. Internet in my hostel room. And man, is it fast? I rejoiced when my download speed finally managed to reach 10 KBps at 2 in the morning, and average far worse during regular "earthly" hours. Yet, adaptation is the key to survival. After having paid a substantial amount for this wireless datacard (Reliance NetConnect), I am finally on the internet which is a highly liberating experience, regardless of the speed of connection. Hard to describe in words! :-)

I've been messing around a lot with Rockbox, another OS-type thing for an iPod, and was thrilled to see real video files being played on my ancient iPod Mini 2G (4 GB)'s tiny, monochrome screen. Who said that video was the domain of expensive iPod videos only?! Take an iPod nano or something with a color screen, install Rockbox and BANG! you have excellent videos being played, and with capabilities of extending the codec base. I've been trying to get hold of the various components required for compiling for ARM6-processors, which is rather hard to do without a proper source of unrestricted fast internet. Rockbox allows you to write your own "viewers", which are programs that can process specific types of files, like associating .mpeg files with the mpeg-Viewer, .txt files with the text_editor viewer etc. You can also write plugins to provide new applications. Once my development environment for ARM6 (and Rockbox specifically) gets set I can work on some of the interesting stuff I think can be put in. I would rather like some simple HTML viewers, and a Java virtual machine on it. KVM (released by Sun microsystems) does something of that sort, but hasn't been running all that well for me. Infact it has run at all.

Then I also got this idea of controlling my iPod through my PC, maybe write a simple mouse controller program in Rockbox, which can take inputs from the data-cable connecting it to the PC, and therefore permit me to move my real physical mouse of the PC to control the cursor on the iPod screen. This could later be expanded upon to eliminate the PC by writing mouse-drivers in Rockbox and then using a USB mouse and connecting it directly to the iPod via the iPod data-cable. That would make life tonnes easier for using advanced applications in iPodLinux/Rockbox.

Anyhow, more later. I am too busy sitting idle, waiting for "Google.com" to open. (*rolls* eyes).

Shashank