This weekend I spliced together a couple of USB cables to allow me to attach my USB-A devices to the USB-B port on the Console-VX. I have successfully connected my USB thumbdrive, 60Gb iPod, and Vimicro webcam to the tiny board. I still need to compile the video drivers for the camera, but it was quite exciting to see the Verdex mount and search my iPod's 60 gig hard drive.
Soon after buying my Video iPod, I wanted to put my massive library of videos onto it, so I could watch them on long trips without carrying along my entire laptop. I wrote a small shell script to perform the mundane task of converting for me, using the free, open-source tool ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org).
Back when I first bought my iPod, I needed a way to convert my Audiobook MP3s to M4Bs, the format iPods recognize as Audiobooks. I used ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org) to accomplish this task.
I decided to buy a new toy for myself this weekend. The product: iriver's H10 20GB MP3 Player. I arrived at home and charged it up only to turn it on and realize that the blasted thing would not work out of the box. I struggled for three hours searching online, upgrading firmware, and sitting on the phone with tech support, all with the same outcome: a brick which would could not get past a screen which says "BOOT 1.01 MTP Initialize." In frustration I cried out, but unfortunately for me, Staples was closed by the time I decided to return it. In one last-ditch effort, I scoured the interweb and found instructions for getting my $200 paperweight to play music.