One of the great things about working for O'Reilly is that I get to check out the latest books. Yesterday I got a PDF copy of iPod: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition, by New York Times Circuits writer J.D. Biersdorfer. My mission: to extract some of the tips and present them in HTML so you can see them too....

I see TIME has a breath-takingly stupid list that pupports to be "the greatest and most influential records ever." Not one non-English-language record. Not one record from continental Europe. Not one from Africa. Not one from South America. Not one from Asia (I don't think the Plastic Ono Band counts). Australia/Pacific gets one for AC/DC. Only four non-US artists in...

I spent the last month making my own home-made USB control surface: a Velleman USB IO board, a multiplexor board of my own, some home-made pressure pads/ribbon controllers, and various pots, switches and plugs for external pedals and controllers. Looks good in a brown leatherette upholstered box. I'm working on programing the USB to MIDI software so that it can...

Is there anyone out there in reader-land who has a PC, a Zune, a USB Sniffer and some development experience? I'm dying to see what's going on during a Zune sync so that I can figure out how to simulate that with the Mac/Linux command line. The addy as always is erica@mindspring.com. Thanks....

Browsing through my Funny folder today, I came across this bizarre press release from 1999: TOKYO — Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. will market a digital still camera that supports the 340-Mbyte Microdrive introduced by IBM Corp. earlier this month. Microdrive will enable a digital still camera to store over 10,000 frames of VGA pictures, or 7.5 minutes of JPEG...

At nine feet long, the IK Multimedia StealthPlug guitar-to-computer interface is possibly the skinniest way to go digital. The StealthPlug is a cable with a USB plug on one end and a quarter-inch guitar plug on the other. In between, there's a little arrowhead that converts the analog guitar signal to digital and the computer's digital signal back to analog...

Device Certificate after the jump....

Here are the folder and device properties specifically for my Zune, plus its supported filetypes. I'm guessing the Sync partner is the one computer that my Zune hosts to. Biff is the meta-syntactic name I selected as my Zune ID. The Bytes/Free bytes are accurate. The Battery level seems low as it reads as fully charged on the device and...

This one is really long, so I've hidden most of it behind the jump. Here are the Playable File/Object Types and the object properties supported for each one....

Supported operations: 1001: Get device info 1002: Open session 1003: Close session 1004: Get storage IDs 1005: Get storage info 1006: Get number of objects 1007: Get object handles 1008: Get object info 1009: Get object 100b: Delete object 100c: Send object info 100d: Send object 100f: Format storage 1010: Reset device 1014: Get device property description 1015: Get device...