This morning we drove over to truro so that I could pick up a USB 2.0 High-Speed PCI card for my Dad’s PC to make updating his iPod rather faster and to look for a simple docking station for the iPod similar to the one I bought a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, PC World were out of the docking station, but I did manage to get him the PCI card for ~£15. A bit on the high side but still cheaper than mail-order when you factor in the postage.

For myself I got a stack of 50 DVD-R media and a Logitech QuickCam so as to make using Skype on my Linux/Windows laptop. I bought a Logitech as I thought that they were well supported by Linux and were about the only webcam other than the iSight which worked on a Mac as well. The only one I could find at a reasonable cost and with a microphone was the “QuickCam Messenger.” Little did I realise that this is pretty well the only QuickCam not properly supported under Linux. (Actually, it’s this latest version of this model which doesn’t work.) Also, Logitech don’t supply a MacOS X driver for it either, unlike their older webcams. Thankfully, there is a free driver for it under MacOS X which seems to work in everything but iChat.

After lunch I put the card into my Dad’s PC and then got on with trying to hack the two Linux drivers for “QuickCam Messenger” cameras to get them to work. Well, both drivers give the same error, or rather they get the same error back from the USB driver layer of Linux. This part of the kernel seems to think that the device has “stalled” or, having looked at the source, basically not played by the USB protocol as understood by the Linux 2.6.17 kernel.

That basically took the rest of the day.