The iPod was in the Netherlands on thursday night. Then poof! The delivery man appears at 11am on friday with an iPod-shaped box.

They're evidently on a big drive to get everyone's iPod to them for Christmas.

So I stared at the box for a while. If I opened the box, then I wouldn't get anything done for the rest of the day. I cracked it open. My refurbished 2G 20GB iPod looked like new, which I think is their aim. Quite pleased, as I heard the newer iPods have a shorter battery life. :)

I ordered a Mac iPod, but I knew the only difference was the filesystem they ship with: Mac iPods use HFS+, whereas Win iPods use FAT32. HFS+ support in Linux is still flaky, so I decided to reformat it as FAT32.

Only a few things stood in the way.

1. Needed to charge the iPod for 3-4 hours as they come uncharged
2. The iPod uses a 6-pin Firewire cable to charge. This can be attached to the AC adaptor or a Mac. 6-pin Firewire provides power to the device.
3. I only have a 4-pin Firewire cable on my laptop. 4-pin Firewire does not provide power to the device

So I nipped down to the local computer giblets store. They had a 6-pin Firewire PCMCIA, but not the one Apple recommend. Well I went for a 6-pin to 4-pin cable instead for £9. Note that any Firewire PCMCIA card will not allow charging (unless you use it like a bridge).

Got home and started charging the iPod (should really have started it before I went out, but I wanted to make sure I had all the parts before I started. I think it's the Lego builder in me). I spent the next 3 hours checking the clock every 10 minutes.

Then I booted into Windows XP (I know, but this was the quickest way to a working iPod). I restored a Windows filesystem, and it appeared to be happy enough with that. Dragged some existing mp3s into iTunes, and we were away!

I've been using it all weekend and it's great! Now I'm trying to figure out the best way to get all my music on and how to get it to work in Linux (I've had some success but I think I'm going to have to upgrade my kernel for a more stable solution).

• iPodlounge
• GNUpod