A scary process

First of all: I'm out of the hospital, and free as a bird. Being more or less "caged" in a hospital, in a room 3x3 meters, for five consecutive days, gives me a bad case of cabin fever. Considering the mate I'm with, which has been pumped full of chemotherapy, has to drag an IV stand around, has to pee every 2-4 hours, has lost his hair and can't move without crutches, I have no right to complain (plus, I volunteered for it). But I will anyway, because this is my blog and I do whatever the hell I like on it. Being there to keep him company is the least I can do, and I want to be there, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm bloody chuffed to be out of that hospital, even more happy that I probably won't have to go back there for a while, and particularly ecstatic about not being waken every two hours with the words "we need to take a walk", meaning I had to get out of bed and help him with his IV stand across the hall to the bathroom. My mates surgery, and subsequent rounds of chemo and radiation, will be when I've started school, meaning I can't stay with him for his chemo anymore. And a very selfish part of me is dancing at that thought.

Jailbreak
Right now I'm in the process of doing something criminal and illegal - I'm jailbreaking my iPod Touch. Basically it means "cracking" the firmware that Apple provides for iTunes and the iPod devices, opening it so you can use 3rd party software and "unlicensed" or unoriginal applications. After endless readthroughs of tutorials using quickpwn, which refused to work with my firmware, I got a hold of a program called redsn0w, which is just a little excecutable run through the command prompt. And 1-2-3 voila, my iPod was jailbroken. This process looks damn scary, since you have to first put your iPod into DFU mode and then surrender it to the will of redsn0w, and just watch it, hoping your entire 'pod won't burst into flames. It didn't, and everything works beautifully. I just wish I'd discovered this BEFORE I tried to use quickpwn, and had to restore my iPod, resulting in a total reformatting and loss of everything I had on it. All my apps, my music, the videos, the pictures of Depeche Mode, all gone... *sighs*

Why am I doing this? Because I want to play bloody FLAC on my iPod dammit! FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and is a digital music file format like MP3, WAV, AAV etc. The difference is that it is an uncompressed form, meaning that while a "normal" MP3 file can play music at for example 92kbps, a FLAC plays at 3mbps. The result is music with far far better sound quality. Normally I wouldn't bother much with it, I haven't before, but this is again one of these things I just... get totally caught up in, stuck, hung up, and just HAVE to test it out. And of course it all comes back to DM. I seem to blame them for everything these days. But. On the Sounds of the Universe box there's a lot of dvd material, and over 2 hours of footage from their studio sessions while making the album, which I've of course watched a few times, along with video from studio sessions during Playing the Angel. All of this has made me realize the complexity of what they're doing, the amount of sound plonking, twinking, twiddling, fiddling, playing around and processing that goes into making an album is just immense, especially for a band like Depeche that's always been very "electronic" in how they work, starting as a pure synth band. In short: when you're fanatical about a band in which the main songwriter has a fetish for buying synthezisers and drum-machines on E-bay, you really have to make an effort to get the best listening experience. And I am.

Now, off to download their discography as FLAC tracks. It'll just take 7 hours, and eat up 5gigs on my 8gig iPod...