My friend has a iPod that stopped playing the mp3s it holds. The proprietary Mac and Microsoft software he normally uses, like the obvious iTunes or other iPod rippers of sorts, did not recognize his iPod either.

I had a hunch Ubuntu would have something to offer to save his music collection. While I was expecting to have to do a few console tricks, turns out the included media software read and fetched the mp3s off his iPod without any problems.

The only thing we haven’t tried yet was to actually try and ‘reset’ the iPod using the open source platform. My guess is that while I could get his mp3s back, we were going to have to return the songs to the iPod using iTunes in the end.

Because the process of saving the files on my Ubuntu box, sending them over to my Mac and re-include them to the freshly wipe iPod through iTunes would have been too lengthy, my friend wanted to try a few other things first. At least now we have a back up solution, though.

Feels good to be a nerd with social skills.

The main Linux image editing software equivalent of Photoshop is called Gimp, which a lot of people already use. I’d like to be one of them too, may it only be to have all my web design related software at the same computer, but they are making it very hard.

The thing is, at the moment Gimp is very unintuitive when you switch from Photoshop. I read some people (some from Quebec I think!)  are working on a new user interface for it. Hopefully the project will come to be because a new GUI would help a lot.

For starters, it wouldn’t take much more than modal windows… Having to go through the taskbar in search of your color palette panel is really frustrating.

I am, however, keeping an open mind on Gimp.