While I was in New York recently I had the opportunity to hang out with my friend Ben. Ben works as an arborist for the city of Brooklyn and is currently working to negotiate sidewalk alterations that will be helpful to older trees which are starting to strain against their concrete boundary. It’s pretty cool stuff. But that’s not what I want to share with you about our conversation.

Ben, who besides speaking for the trees isn’t a Luddite or anything, referred to our current technological existence as the post-wonderment age. It used to be, when you’d be out walking and consider seeing a movie or a band or whatever you’d say something like “I wonder what’s playing at the movie theater.” Now, instead of wondering, we just whip out our post-wonderment devices and beam the information in. This observation got me thinking about how easy it is to access information today (even with my non-phone post-wonderment device: an iPod Touch).

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. –Albert Einstein

In the absence of knowing something, we imagine multiple realities and possibilities. We can make plans based on whichever variations of these possibilities seem most interesting to us, creating multiple futures. When we lack the time and space to actively wonder about something, I wonder what happens to our ability to innovate and generate new things.

One of the excuses I use is not being at my rig that often since I got my iPod Touch. I’ve now configured the WordPress app for the Touch. So let’s see if that helps.

My main iPod tether is the 12″ PowerBook which doesn’t sport USB 2.0 which means I can’t update this rig beyond iTunes 7.4 without disabling the ability to connect my iPod to my PowerBook. I wrote previously one why I hacked the iPod Touch if you need more gory details.

The long-form is that I’m caught in that crossfire of wanting a truly portable mostly-creative machine (something His Steveness did deliver today) and also keeping a powerhouse machine (for the renders and the jobs that clients will just let me do my way). The real stickler is the “personal media” and the meaning/value behind the worklife/lifelife conundrum. Probably another post in there somewhere.

Anyway. No way in hell in hell I’m giving up my Pigshooter just to pay 20 bucks to have google triangulate me on a map. I bet it doesn’t work for shit in Vermont anyway.

But had Apple done this two months ago (and also not invalidated my 12″ Powerbook’s USB slots for syncing my iPod Touch) I would never have hacked it in the first place.

So I have some specific situations that matter when evaluating whether this post will be of interest to you.

First off, I bought the iPod Touch when it was first announced.

Second, I live in a non-ATT region (I would have bought the phone if I could have but didn’t want to deal with all the heavy bricking that was going down at the time).

Third, I have an 12″ PowerBook G4. This last point is important as this particular machine doesn’t have USB2 ports. I didn’t read the specs close enough before buying. I love this machine for its portability. I will probably upgrade at some point. But I keep my big iron in my desktop and prefer my laptop to be a portable communication device with light production duties. The 12″ G4 Powerbook was perfect.

If you have USB2 ports and you’re happy with your unhacked iPod Touch then no need to continue.

Ok so now that we got that out of the way… to the meat of this.

After buying my Touch I immediately loved it. Nice large screen. Plenty of storage for me (I sync it every few days or so and rarely listen to more than 3 or 4 gigs of music each day).

Then I upgraded my iTunes to 7.5 and my iPod Touch firmware to 1.1.2. Big mistake. After the upgrade (which I was looking forward to because it gave me one of the few things that had real tangible utility: adding calendar events in the iPod Touch) I kept getting the following error when trying to sync my iPod: 0xE8000025.

So I tried some restore action to try and get the iPod straight again.

But still I kept getting that damn 0xE8000025 error.

I finally figured out that it had to do with the iTunes 7.5 and/or the 1.1.2 firmware upgrade for the iPod Touch. Apple doesn’t currently offer a portable that entices me to leave my 12″ Powerbook behind. So I took the next best alternative: downgrade iTunes so my iPod Touch would work again.

Just to be safe I also downgraded the iPod Touch to 1.1.1 (if you google for iPhone1,1_1.1.1_3A109a_Restore.ipsw you will find instructions on how to do that, sorry for not having an easy link for you).

But in order to patch the security flaw that 1.1.2 brought, I had to resort to hacking my iPod Touch. It’s hairy. But it was worth it.

Anyone else hack their iPod Touch? What are your favorite resources for getting the job done?