My son's new DSi and other geeky topics


My son is a middle school boy which means he likes geeky video game stuff, so he just bought himself a Nintendo DSi. Personally, I did not see the $169 value in the device since he already had a DS Lite, but since his DS Lite's touchscreen had a few problems and he loves stimulating the economy, we let him waste some of his own money. The new DSi looks astonishingly like his DS Lite with two cameras added and an SD card slot. I just received my latest free copy of PC World (more on that later) and they spelled out their likes and dislikes on the updated handheld gaming device. I cannot believe it has a built-in audio player that only accepts AAC formatted audio and not MP3. Luckily it is simple to convert from MP3 to AAC using a free utility like dbPowerAmp music converter, but to convert the 400 songs from his iPod Touch would still take a long time using dMC. Since every other device known to mankind uses the MP3 format, why couldn't Nintendo follow suit?

One thing I have always hated about iPods is how Apple requires you to use iTunes to add media to their devices and made it very difficult to pull files off of them. Once I tried using an older copy of MediaMonkey with my daughter's iPod Touch and due to an MediaMonkey incompatibility it ended up wiping the whole library off the Touch (luckily my daughter didn't mind since all the crap on the iPod was from her younger brother anyway!) I had found some software before that let you access your iPod files, but they all cost real money, until I saw the article in the new PC World about SharePod. The actual application is simply one binary file that downloads in a ZIP file along with a readme. That is it. I tested it out on my son's iPod Touch (of course, he has one now since his older sister received one first!). SharePod is not as fancy as iTunes, nor as pretty -- but it works! It lets you pull files from your iPod and put files on simply without using the massive application known as iTunes. Another great free application made available to the public, this time brought to my attention by the folks at PC World.

And if you were wondering how I received a copy of PC World for free I got it through FreeBizMag.com. The vast majority of the IT magazines they offer for free are incredibly boring, but every now and then to entice IT professionals like myself to sign up for the boring ones they offer a free "fun" magazine like PC World or ComputerShopper as an enticement. Of course, the fact that I consider PC World or ComputerShopper to be the "fun" magazines tells something about myself. Another way to earn free magazine subscriptions is to answer endless surveys at e-Rewards.com.

And while I am on my soapbox, I was looking for my freebizmag.com e-mails in my Yahoo! mail account, and I must say, their "search" function on their web mail interface works horribly. In comparison, GMail's search capabilities are a wonder in finding old messages, but Yahoo's search offering does not find anything. If they ever want to compete they truly must fix their search so that is actually returns something.

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