it’s not smuggling if they aren’t paying attention

At the best of times, I’m a pretty soft touch for interesting gadgets, and when “my”:http://off.net/diary/ “good”:http://www.loolix.com/diary/ “friends”:http://joeshaw.org/ start acting as “enablers”, well, there’s not a lot that can be done. So I came back from Boston with a shiny not-quite-new iPod, and now I’m stuffing its abundant music hole with the most reckless of abandon. (2.8 gigs of Tragically Hip bootlegs from the year 2000 alone!)

On the way back, I clearly and righteously marked my toy’s value on the customs form, and was then somewhat surprised when they didn’t ask me to pay any duty; I had exceeded the 48-hour limit by a fair margin, and was three days short of the next allowance up (which would, in fact, cover it). I didn’t think it was my job to tell them their jobs — though I am often assertive about such corrective measures, I am pretty much never thusly inclined when dealing with customs and/or immigration officials, duty-owing or no.

I’m enjoying the iPod (30GB, “refreshed” with full warranty, touch-wheel, dock, middlingly-slim) quite a bit so far, which should not surprise anyone familiar with the concept of “new gadget honeymoon”. Tyla seems to like it too, which is an endorsement of a subtly different kind. If the Linux firewire support doesn’t go completely asshat on me tomorrow when I try to attach it to my desktop at the office, I will consider it an unqualified success.

posted 09 October 2003 @ 03:10 • tagged •

5 comments to “it’s not smuggling if they aren’t paying attention”

  1. Mike Hoye
    entered 10 October 2003 @ 11:05 am

    I’m interested in hearing about the firewire results. Yay? Nay?

  2. Shadow3333
    entered 14 October 2003 @ 5:40 am

    No problems here on RedHat 9 kernel 2.4.19-18

    I use gtk pod to manage it all

    http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/

    and another good link with all the info you need

    http://www.cs.duke.edu/~geha/ipod/

    Good luck Mike

    Martijn

  3. Mike Shaver
    entered 14 October 2003 @ 8:37 pm

    I’m running what is effectively Red Hat 9’s 2.4.20-20.9, and I would say that my experience was pretty much asshat:

    EIP is at findentrybyguid [ieee1394] 0×32 (2.4.20-20.987k.17_bdevel.200310021431bigmem)

    and so forth, etc., etc. I’ll try asking Google for help later. I know that others have it working, so I have some hope.

  4. Shadow3333
    entered 15 October 2003 @ 3:45 am

    Hmm strange, maybe it has something to do with your firewire card? i have a pinnacle DVplus (Texas Instruments chip), everything works fine here, I’ll check and boot with my 2.6 test 7 kernel and see how that works out.

  5. Mike Shaver
    entered 15 October 2003 @ 10:22 am

    lspci says I’ve got me a

    02:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host Controller (rev 46)

    and I don’t know much more about it. I get a small number of these when ieee1394 loads, but it does at least get as far as detecting the iPod:

    ieee1394: SelfID completion called outside of bus reset! ieee1394: Device added: Node[00:1023] GUID[000a270002508759] [Apple Computer, Inc.] Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000

    Ah well.