iPod Touch — Making it better

I have had an iPod for well over a year and felt there were many more things I could do with it. Below I explain a few:

1) USB Drive
Apple failed and did not add native functionality for the iPod Touch for use as an external hard disk. After some work I found two applications that do this. On a good note, my 20GB of free space can now be used for storage. On the down side, there is no synchronization tool. Only manually copying. I will point out I chose a utility that uses the USB cable to copy. I wanted to drag and drop on the desktop.

iPhone Explorer

2) An eReader – PDF File Reader
About a year ago I got a book, 300 pages, in PDF format. Sure, I can read this using Adobe, but I wanted to take in on my iPod Touch. This took a little learning but it can be done.

First, you need iBooks from Apple. Go to the Apple Store and search for this FREE application. It is slick, looks like a bookshelf and will read PDF files.

Second, depending on the file size you MIGHT need to doctor the file. My PDF was too large so I had to download Calibre, a FREE utility that will convert PDF files to the epub format.

Not I can flip through this 300 page book, have book marks, and read it on my iPod Touch.

3) Home movies
This summer I bought a Kodak Playsport video camera. This thing is great, I can take it underwater, take pictures, or take movies. For me, it is easier to pull the card and plug into my computer to copy movies.

I tried dropping the videos (.mov) into my photos folder and also tried to add them in iTunes. To no avail. A little reading brought me to the root of the problem – I needed to convert the videos to the itunes format, m4v. This application is free, it worked, but until registered it leaves a watermark on the screen. AVS Video Converter