1. Review: Why the Netgear WG311 v3 Sucks (72)
   Slightly dodgy network card that Netgear don’t seem that fussed about fixing. Bad on XP, it got worse on Vista (see number 4).
   
2. Playing iPod Video on Your TV (45)
   Seems to be a lot of people looking for instructions for the iPod Classic. Here’s a tip: sell it.
3. Server application unavailable: installing IIS on .NET 2.0 (44)
   Seems to be a common problem. Sadly Microsoft’s error message is about as relevant as ever.
   
4. Installing Vista (AKA More Netgear WG311 Misery) (31)
   Even more messed up. Thank goodness for Linksys!
   
5. Thunderbird/Outlook/Google Calendar Integration (25)
   How to integrate your Thunderbird calendar at home with your Outlook in work, via Google Calendar.
   
6. Orange Answerphone (Voicemail) Number for PAYG (23)
   Such a simple problem. Who knew it would be so hard to find?
   
7. Stop Monitor.exe Hogging CPU (20)
   Why can’t people just give you a standard installation instead of trying to do everything for you? Help sounds good, until their useful tools start killing your PC.
   
8. How to run IIS Web Server in Windows XP Home (20)
   Microsoft’s official line is it can’t be done, but it’s not that tricky.
   
9. Making Firefox Scroll With Syanptics TouchPad (19)
   Discovering the solution to making Firefox scroll on my Acer Aspire laptop.
   
10. NAS or Home Server (17)
    I deliberate over whether I can justify spending the extra to build or buy a home server before eventually deciding that a Linkstation Live will meet my needs for less than half the price.
    

Maybe if my N73 breaks I’ll consider upgrading, but since I’m spending a tenner a month on pay-as-you-go I can’t really justify jumping to £35/month for the N95 8GB or to £44 a month for an iPhone.  Maybe if I hold out long enough…

I’m talking, of course, about Apple’s abuse of it’s dominant position in the digtital music market with it’s iPod/iTunes combination. Apple are trying very hard to make sure you can’t use anything but iTunes to manage your iPod, but more on that later, for there are other activities that annoy me more. For example, when I received my iPod I went looking for a mains adaptor to charge it from a standard outlet socket. Apple seemed to think I’d be content to pay £25 for this, but luckily I managed to get a third party plug for a fiver or so off the internet (you’ll not find too many in Curry’s though), probably because the manufacturers haven’t paid a whack of money to be “Apple Authorised”.

How many companies do you know that actually strip features out of their latest and greatest product versions or try to hide them from their customers? Well when I eventually realised I could play videos from my iPod through my TV using a standard camcorder-to-RCA cable (you know, with the red, yellow and white connectors for your TV), although Apple employ a dirty trick designed to make you believe you can’t (as I’ve mentioned previously). You can get round this with a cheap iPod specific AV cable (a fiver from Amazon or eBay), but with the new iPods, this won’t work. The new iPods are designed in such a way that they will only work with Apple authorised cables incorporating an authentication chip. Since Apple charges a whack for this authorisation, you can bet your ass this will drive up the price of cables, with the only winners being Apple.

Unfortunately this isn’t the only area where Apple try to shaft their customers with the new generation of iPods. The new range have also had extra measures added to ensure they only work with iTunes. This means that if you have a third party client (which you need if you’re running Linux because there is no iTunes for that OS). Apple have introduced a new feature to the iTunes database that calculates a number using data about the songs in your library, but only Apple knows how this number is calculated and without it the libarary appears empty. Obviously this poses problems for other clients which won’t be able to see your music. This is not only a problem for Linux users, but for anyone who doesn’t want Apple trying to sell them DRMd music when all they want to do is transfer songs they already own from their computer to a portable MP3 player.

“There seems to be no reason for this change except to break the functionality of alternative jukebox software. It will not limit copying or restrict attempts to strip digital rights management code from tracks. It will not stop people adding non-DRM files they have downloaded from the internet to their library. All it will do is stop the third party players working and force anyone with an iPod to use iTunes.”
Bill Thompson

I’m sure this will be overcome sooner or later (which only makes it worse) but it’s the principal which is rotten, and it’s not just playing video files and charging from the mains that Apple don’t want you to do; good luck if you want to share or stream music from iTunes to a non-Apple device. So the next time you have an Apple fanboy bashing Microsoft (something I’m not averse to doing myself), tell him to look a bit closer to home while he’s at it.

Please note that this entry is about my 5G iPod Video.  Information may not apply to other models like the iPod Classic.

Getting video files to play on your TV from your iPod is actually a lot easier than I imagined it would be. If you have AVI files that you couldn’t be bothered burning to VCD/SVCD or DVD, a much friendlier alternative is to play download them to your iPod. There are two hurdles you’ll have to overcome, but in reality, the process is much more painless than converting the files to MPEG and burning them to a CD or DVD is.

Converting Your Video

Before you put a video on your iPod you will need to convert it to an iPod friendly format. For this I recommend the free program, Videora iPod Converter. This will convert your DivX or Xvid AVI files into an iPod-friendly MPEG-4 file; I recommend the highest bitrate 1500kbps setting.

That’s it; easy! I’ve found that the time taken to convert a video file using Videora is slightly less than the play time of that video. A 2 hour video file should be converted in about 1 hour 25 minutes.

Playing On Your TV

When Apple released their video iPod they released a special AV cable for it that would connect your iPod to the red, yellow and white AV sockets on your TV, allowing you to watch the videos on your iPod on a larger screen. As it turns out, this was a bit of a scam. All they did was take a standard RCA-to-AV lead (commonly used for connecting camcorders to TVs) and send the video over the red cable (which usually carries sound) instead of the yellow one. This means that you can use a standard RCA-to-AV lead if you have one kicking about – just connect the red plug to the yellow socket, yellow plug to the white socket and white plug to the red socket. Scumbags, eh?

Don’t panic if you, like me, don’t own a camcorder and don’t already have an RCA-to-AV lead. You can buy one specially colour-coded for iPods (so red goes to red etc.) off eBay, where I got mine for £3.73 including postage!

Then it’s really simple, just go into your iPod video folder and set the Video Settings to output to TV, connect it up and you’re away.