I got a 3rd gen iPod Nano two days ago and in true tinkerer fashion, I managed to break the thing without even trying. I’m sorry Apple, but you FAIL at the “Just Works” thing.

Try this (works or rather breaks with firmware version 1.1):

1. Plug in your iPod to fire up iTunes.
2. Go to your iPod Nano’s Summary tab and choose to manually manage your music and videos. After you do this, you will end up with a clean iPod and you have to load it up your self.
3. Go to your Podcasts in your library. If you don’t have one, I suggest you get the “Mandarin Chinese Lessons with Serge Melnyk” podcast.
4. Drag any file from your podcast of choice into your iPod on the left hand sidebar on iTunes.
5. Wait for it to finish copying.

Now for the fun part. You would expect that the iPod will automagically detect that you have loaded up podcasts and they show up in your Podcasts on the iPod. But that does not happen. You cannot find the podcasts you manually copied to the iPod unless you go to the “Recently Added” playlist on iTunes. Now this sucks because for one, you cannot play the podcasts on the iPod. Secondly, you cannot erase them from your iPod since you cannot remove items from the “Recently Added” playlist. So in effect, you are stuck with podcasts that you can neither play nor delete from your device.

I expected that you should be able to manually manage your podcasts like you do on the iPod Shuffle. But this is not the case for the iPod Nano and I’m guessing the other “bigger” iPods as well. As far as I can tell, the only way to remove these podcasts is to “Restore” your device. Very funny.

Arthur C. Clarke, best known as the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and over 100 other books, passed away at the ripe old age of 90 in Sri Lanka.

Rest in peace.

• News of the death of Arthur C. Clarke.

Last week, FreeBSD 7 was released. I decided to download and install it on my laptop. The last time I tried FreeBSD was when it was still 5.3. Back then, somehow I ended up with a damaged hard drive and decided that FreeBSD does not like cheap hardware. So I went back to Linux.

I had been watching FreeBSD 7 for months and was excited by the fact that in addition to officially including the wpi driver, the Intel Wi-Fi firmware will also be included with this release. That meant that the Wi-Fi card on my laptop would now be officially supported by FreeBSD. In addition, I was anxious to try out the ULE scheduler. I was also pretty much excited about the improved SMP scalability which the pre-release docs boasted as having “peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better”.

I spent a couple of days downloading, installing, and setting it up on the laptop until I got to the point where I had XFCE4 installed and I could browse the web using Firefox. I was pleased that the install went on smoothly and I was able to set up my wireless network connection with very little effort. I was also able to set it up so that it dual-booted into Windows XP just as it was when I had Fedora Core 8 on it. There are some things that I didn’t like with the default install and a few things that made sense.

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