Ya gotta love Linux

Ok, long story short here (for a change) cause I gotta get to bed. But! But my beloved bought my an I-pod Nano for Father's Day. So nice! But she, not being a tech geek, didn't know about the whole "evil Apple, evil i-tunes, evil DRM" issue that is close to my heart. So my dilemma was this: keep this really nice present, cause it's cool and I could definitely use it, but then buckle under and use i-tunes OR return this nice present, which she would totally understand (cause she knows my tech-geekiness and is cool like that), but don't get to use the cool hardware and so forth.

Or those WERE my choices til I talked to my brother (who makes me look like a absolute luddite) who pointed out that in Linux there is probably an app for that (ha ha). And I checked, and sure enough, there is! The wonderful open source community that makes Linux Linux has created numerous programs for interfacing with i-pods without using i-tunes. Gtkpod is the one I just installed. It allows you to interface with the i-pod using its own open source software goodness. So now, dear IR's, I get the best of both worlds. I get to use the i-pod, which is a cool piece of hardware, but I also get to avoid using their evil DRM laden software. Woo hoo! And there was much rejoicing.