SciTE + UTF-8 / iPodLinux

One of my favorite source code editors under both Linux and Windows is definitely SciTE. It's a small, compact text editor built to demonstrate the powers of Scintilla, a source code editing component for Windows and GTK+, but it soon grew to be a useful editor.

I use it almost exclusively (although I get some of the work done in Dreamweaver when I'm at work), but one thing bothered me – I couldn't make the UTF-8 support with the Croatian diacritic letters, like č, ć etc., to work correctly on Linux. The SciTE manual helps, but isn't very clear on this subject, so here's a way to enable that… Copy these lines and insert them into your SciTEUser.properties file (go to Options -> Open User Options File or manually edit / create the file ~/.SciTEUser.properties):

code.page=0
character.set=238
LC_CTYPE=hr_HR.UTF-8

That's about it. You can find other character set numbers on the SciTE documentation page.

I also found some time to try to install iPodLinux to my 1st generation iPod mini, and it wasn't successful at all. I tried to install the app both from Linux and Windows following the instructions on their website, but after the installation, the iPod just wouldn't boot – it showed some error icon on the screen with the Apple iPod support page URL written underneath.

I managed to bring it back to life using Dark and Mysterious Ways – by formatting it with the HP USB format utility (to FAT, not FAT32!), reinstalling the iPod software from the iPod CD, formatting it again when / if prompted by the iPod installation and restoring the old iPod firmware version (the one I got on the CD, from 2004 :)). Only then would my iPod finally boot – then I installed the latest version of iTunes and updated the firmware to the latest version. Simple firmware restore using the latest version of the firmware wouldn't work.

After the iPL installation failed for the second time (even from Windows), I decided it ain't worth the hassle of taking the above steps every time, so I gave up for now. I can't wait for the release of Rockbox software for the Mini 1G, but I hope it will work better than iPL.