hoov.es

so i managed to do it. i got my 1st gen ipod classic (with a nonborked scroll wheel now, yay) on its original firmware, version 1.0 from 2001. why? i don't know. i wanted to. it feels special. there's something different about using an ipod 1st gen with the firmware it came with, with the hardware it was meant to be used with. it just feels right.

oh, and the hardware i used it with is a power mac g4 dual 1.25ghz MDD model i just picked up, it's gorgeous. still need to get it cleaned off though, it's a bit dirty.

but yeah – i added a new tab for files at the top of this site that i would like to preserve. if you are in the minority of people who have a 1st gen ipod and want to restore it to the original firmware, you're in luck if somehow the archive.org preserved version of that zip goes away. thanks to emma smith from reddit for preserving this and writing a tutorial on how to restore back to the 1.0 firmware, even though you probably won't even know this is posted.

have you seen a 1st gen ipod with the wheel taken off? you have now.

the ipod has been a thing basically all my life. i can't really remember a time where they haven't existed, whether when they were at their peak and everyone had one, or as some weird nostalgia item people either scoff at or mark up for much more than they're probably worth on ebay. i don't know. i guess as someone who a) loves music and b) loves vintage technology they're kind of at that intersection. they're just a neat thing to mess around with. i use a modded 7th gen classic that i put a 512gb microsd card and a 3800 mAh extended battery in, mostly because it works far better with my vehicle than to use my phone via bluetooth for whatever reason. i honestly don't want to go back.

but a few weeks ago, i found something pretty wild.

someone put up a 1st gen ipod from 2001 – the original with the actual physically moving scroll wheel and a 5 gigabyte hard drive – on facebook marketplace for $75. i offered $50. he took it.

and the thing still works. and it works WELL.

my mom bought a 3rd gen classic back in 2003 when they were new, and i remember as a little kid just marveling at it. then the battery basically went bad after just a few years. and then eventually the hard drive went out. my first gen is a freak of nature. the battery still not only works, but holds an actually good charge. enough to actually legitimately listen to music with it. and it's the ORIGINAL battery. i do not how this happens. i don't know what kind of fucking witchcraft they used to make that battery. but i am kind of legitimately amazed.

oh, and the original 5gb toshiba hard drive works fine too.

you may notice in this photo that i managed to somehow chip the scroll wheel in my few weeks of ownership, though. which made me really sad. but i ordered a replacement. so it shall be fixed. it shall be PRISTINE.

yeah i love my 1st gen ipod, even though i've basically resorted to syncing it with a 2008 imac that works with firewire because the ipod can only sync with firewire. i've fit 635 songs on the ipod with the 256 kbps AACs that i've synced to it, which is fine because it's not really my primary music listening device. plus, i don't even really mind that. i have my favorite music on it. so who cares?

there's just this magic that still rests in the 1st gen that even my later ipods can't match. somehow, apple got it right the first time. it's so simple. it's such a marvel of technology. even in 2025, it is still absolutely brilliant.

i just love spinning the wheel!!!

content warning for suicide and death and general pieces of shit existing in the world. content warning for any of the links i'm posting here. please, for the love of god, if you click on them don't say i didn't warn you.

twitter is a cruel place. i was going to say that i don't know why i still use it, but something attracts me to it like flies to a pile of shit. it's a trainwreck that i can't stop watching. it's fucking evil. abhorrent. yet i'm still there. yet i can't just fucking give it up.

this all might end up being forgotten eventually or exist in the minds of only the terminally online. i don't know if i'll forget about it. i don't know if anyone should. i don't know fucking anything. a 17 year old trans girl walked to the bridge and posted a view from the edge. she jumped. she's dead now. and the replies are full of heartless ghouls celebrating her death. evil fucking husks of lifeforms, which is probably being too generous. or simply – nazis. fascists. people who would concern troll and give me a billion bullshit excuses if i told them who and what they truly fucking are.

maybe i was born too early to live in a better world, or a worse one. reading that thread, and quote tweets of it and replies shaming how cruel these... i'll just call them “accounts” are, took up much more of my life than i wanted it to. there's a part of my brain that feels like things can't ever possibly get better. but they can. you have to believe that they can.

this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. just a hundred years ago, people delighted in sending postcards to each other of black people being lynched. the cruelty has always been the point, but now everyone gets to watch.

they only win if you're scared to be yourself. if you repress who you are. if you give into evil. we all die one day and no matter what you do or who you are, someone will fucking dance on your grave. the hardest part is learning to not give a fuck. i still haven't figured that out, but after reading what those accounts had to say about the suicide of a 17 year old girl, their celebrations of it, i think the only moral obligation i have at all is to force myself to never, ever let these embarrassments to breathable air win. to entirely be myself. at whatever cost.

you are not evil for being who you are, whoever you are.

rest in peace charlotte. you never fucking deserved this.

Okay yeah I should update this site more

hello it’s been a while

i’ve been in AUSTRALAI

the land down unda

i am recording music and i have not said musch about this, or much in general lately.

i was stuck in a creative rut for about a year because i wanted to make the worlds greatest, most ambitious album ever and had a tracklist but was paralyzed in recording it and couldn't match my vision. it got to the point where it felt like i just gave up on music.

i just realized that i wanted to keep going, so i ended up scrapping most of the songs.

i feel creatively much more free now.

worked on “morning” “radio” “acting” today.

every step i get closer i realize i have one more to take.

i want to get “morning” to a better state than it was in terms of it being album ready. it sounded cool before but i listened to this album so far in the car and it stuck out like a sore thumb, so i want it to fit a little bit better.

morning kind of has this early mgmt vibe to me but more acoustic, but maybe people will listen and think thats wrong and it sounds like something else.

“radio” was on the scrapped album.

i've realized i can use logic pro and insert my voice demos into it and use them as a baseline for recording fuller versions of anything i write. technology can actually be pretty amazing sometimes.

i think i have a tracklist down but i'm still debating some things. it's 99.9% recorded though, i think. it just needs a mix. and thats always fun.

stay tuned...

#recording #album #music #something #hashtagyoloswag2012likeaboss

Windows 11 is legitimately horrible, outdated pile of shit adware that feels like it's built on a house of cards a speck of dust could collapse. I don't get how anybody can still use Windows as their main operating system, unless they either a) game, b) need some stupid fucking esoteric application from 2002, or c) have no idea how to use anything else. Windows was never necessarily a great product, but Windows 11 is the same exact fucking thing as Windows 10 except with an incredibly lazily tacked on new UI and 100x more advertising.

It's the ads that fucking get me. It's not their computer, yet Microsoft still feels the need to constantly advertise in every single one of their shitty apps that are basically nothing but chromium wrappers at this point. Checking the weather in your city? Well, thanks to Windows 11, there's an app for that – and that app just so happens to be PLASTERED in banner ads that came straight outta 2005! If you open up Edge on Microsoft's insistence, you get taken to a web portal that reminds you of your shitty 85 year old racist ass grandma's facebook page!! And people fall for this shit because they don't care and they don't know better!!! There was a generation of maybe 10-20 years of kids who were taught how to use computers but now we're creating an entirely new generation who don't fucking know shit and it's our fault because we're managing to fall for this shit too!!!

Windows 10 was able to hide its flaws because at least its UI elements managed to blend in and with some tweaks it could be usable, but on an internal level 11 is so incredibly outdated that Microsoft can't for the life of them mask it anymore. They'll never be able to pull off a full UI overhaul for as long as they have to include every shitty little 1994 feature 6 people in some dinky little office in Billings, Montana use twice a year. Windows in 20 years will be the exact same fucking pile of shit it is now, built on an even older infrastructure that will be even more broken and adridden. But you can game on it!!!!!!!!!!! Windows 11 is unstable as fuck and annoying and adware and spyware, but you can play games on it and also saying anything bad about it means you're an idiot who has no idea how to work with technology whatsoever.

I don't even use any Linux distro right now as my main OS, but at this point I'd rather main fucking arch than deal with 11. The underlying OS is stable, and best of all it's free and open source and you won't be advertised to unless you use Ubuntu or something. Using a good Linux distro feels like using a legitimate computer operating system. The problem with Linux as a desktop OS for me is that a lot of the time, in my experience, I've just had to deal with fucking around with the command line rather than doing the shit I want to do, and realistically 99% of people will not want to deal with that.

Including me. I'm a horrible Apple user. After being subjected to Windows 11 for almost a year I finally just gave up. I tried out fedora but it just wasn't for me, then I just said fuck it and bought a M2 MacBook Air that I use docked with a nice desktop setup. I use macOS daily and OH NO that means I'm a horrible sheep apple user who is fucking stupid, has no idea about anything and must be computer illiterate. Apple has flaws as a company and that's obvious and macOS isn't perfect, yet it's the closest thing to having an OS that just fucking does what I want it to do and doesn't annoy me and that feels legitimately stable and easy to use. I just hope that doesn't go away one day with how fucking enshittified basically every aspect of all software is becoming nowadays.

This server runs on linux though. As it should.

#rant #windows11 #macos #linux #apple

having your own website is freeing. having your own space that completely belongs to you and nobody else is incredible.

like. i have an entire website that’s dedicated to me being a weird transspecies centaur. that’s dedicated to the weird shit that i think about and want to write about. with a domain name. my own services. in 1999 that wouldn’t have been a shock to a lot of people, but now it’s like

everything has to be social media. everything has to be judged by terms of engagement. maybe my brain is poisoned by it because i like the idea of my content being engaged with. but there’s no algorithm here (on this site.)

on google there always will be though.

i remember being a kid in the 00s and reading weird personal blogs. i love nathan lineback’s toastytech.com and how pissed he got at internet explorer (for the right reasons that many have conveniently forgotten by now). i loved looking at sites made by individuals. but its like… people have stopped giving a shit except to conform to what the algorithm decides. to conform to whatever stupid bullshit is out there, to conform to whatever the popular opinion is even if it’s marketed as being “non-conformist”.

that’s what all this far right shit is. i remember alex jones and his rise to popularity and his constant warnings against the police state, except now he’s totally on board bringing about that same totalitarian dictatorship. i dunno. i feel like a fucking loon for thinking people are valid for being transspecies or transrace or whatever but like. it’s like full on bigots are okay with saying the type of shit they say. it’s something.

at least twitter is finally proving its irrelevance, but i need to follow better bluesky accounts. i love boomer liberals because they actually seem to care about shit, but the twitter algorithm is perfectly fine tuned for me and bluesky is like boomer/millennial liberal heaven. it feels like hamilton just came out on bluesky.

i dunno.

should i add a comment section? comment below.

trying to think of things to write. i want to write and update this site every day, but i know i'm inevitably going to forget. maybe this should just be like free association subconscious writing or something. i don't even know what i'm talking about.

i want to make The Commitment!

also happy december. i almost forgot to say that. it's like almost christmas and stuff.