Sure those new video-enabled iPods are cool, but you already have an iPod and don’t want to have to buy another, right? Fortunately for you, if you install iPodLinux on that iPod, you can play videos with a bit of a catch. Since the older iPods have greyscale screens, you’ll be seeing videos this way. Additionally, you can only play uncompressed videos, so that each movie will probably end up being about 4GB in size. I’ve had no problems running this on my iPod and you don’t have to get rid of your original iPod firmware to use it. You can find full details on the iPodLunux video player at the wiki page, as well as instructions on how to convert videos to view on an iPod. Get the iPodLinux installer for 4G ipods, right here.

So you bought an iPod Nano or Video, but want to use your old dock with it? It’s not very hard, and with a little bit of modding, you can do it in just a couple of minutes. How you ask? From the article: “All it takes to turn an old Dock (in this case, the one that came with my 3G iPod) into a wanna-be Universal Dock capable of accepting the Univeral Dock adapters that come with the new iPods. Sure, it won’t work with the remote, but it’ll get your iPod working with your stereo or just sitting pretty next to your computer, and if you start with a Photo dock, I don’t see why the video out wouldn’t work too.”

I’ve been using iPodLinux on my iPod for quite some time (even though the 4G iPod software isn’t officially supported), for many reasons, but mainly because I like to do geeky things (and what’s geekier than Linux on an iPod, right?). Recently, a couple of developers managed to port a GameBoy emulator to the iPod, and I must say, it works pretty well! The framerate is still a bit slow, and it’s not very easy to control your character via the scrollwheel, but it sure is cool. Please note that this is alpha software, and only works on 4G greyscale iPods. If you’re brave enough to try it, head on over to the iBoy project page over at Sourceforge and test it out. You can also find instructions on how to play, as well as some images and videos of gameplay action over at the iPodLinux wiki.

While photophiles are sharing their photograph collections on sites like Flickr and Shutterbook, many camera phone users are trying other options. Most people don’t carry their digital cameras around, but chances are, they do carry their camera phone (I know I do…EVERYWHERE). There’s a pretty cool service called FotoChatter which makes sharing pictures from your phone super easy. FotoChatter runs as either a Java application or WAP site on your phone (depending on what your phone supports). You can then send photos to friends and get comments back via text messaging. The one downside is that all friends must have a FotoChatter account, but if you just want to share some pictures quickly, it’s a fun service.

Many MP3 players support lyrics files (.LRC), and did you know you can use these to view RSS feeds on your MP3 player? With all the web-enabled devices today, I’m not sure why you may want to do this, but it’s a cool little hack nevertheless. pyLyRSS is a little Python script which does the conversion for you so you do need to have Python installed. No graphical interface yet so you’ll have to run it from the command line, but it will run on Windows, Macs, and Linux. You can get instructions on how to use pyLyRSS from its home page.

So Apple announced the video iPods last week and everyone’s excited about it, though it’s a little disappointing that it only supports h.264 and MOV formats for video. After all, most of us are used to converting our movies into Divx or Xvid format. Many of you also have TiVos, and wouldn’t it be nice to be able to transfer those videos onto an iPod? Engadget has put together a nice guide with details on how to do it. You do need a series 2 TiVo and a TiVoToGo subscription, but it definitely looks like a worthwhile project to get into. All the software used for the conversion is completely free and readily available though for Windows only (at least DirectShow Dump is).

Popular gadget site, Engadget, has a pretty handy guide for converting a DVD to a format which can be used on the new video-enabled iPods using some free (or almost free) software. Unlike the previous guide we mentioned a few days ago, this one is for Windows users. All you need to get started is DVDx (free) and a copy of XiliSoft Video Converter (shareware, USD35) or any AVI to MOV converter.