I spend between ninety minutes and two hours commuting every day and there are basically only three things that you can do to prevent that time from going wasted, or to just make it pass faster. Reading, listening, or thinking.

Useful thoughts usually do not appear during tiring weekdays (at least not for me). As for reading, I often buy an (English-language) newspaper for the train ride (mostly Japan Times), but during rush hours there is not enough space in the cars to even open it. Books work, and I think one day I want to have a Sony Librie, although it is quite expensive and Sony goes out of its way to cripple it with DRM.

I am not much of a music listener. I have bought less than ten audio CD in my life (half of them as gifts), my personal music library is minimal, underused and consists mainly of MD recorded by friends with more musical taste than I have. I do have a nice portable MD player, but Cissy appropriated it to study Japanese on her train rides. I also bought a miniature radio (another old hobby of mine, buying miniature radios), but the stations here play much less music than I expected, and talk to much (and that in Japanese). In addition to that, reception is horribly bad (the only strong signals are the audio track of the TV channels) and of course even more so on a moving train (or a subway). Another problem to point out is that Tokyo is just full of shamelessly loud background noise, so you have to get special headphones that shut out everything or pump up the volume real good (and maybe end up deaf in a few years).

Anyway, I did end up buying an iPod Shuffle last week, on the day before Apple reshuffled its iPod line-up and slashed the prices. I originally planned to mainly use it for the dialogue from some German TV comedy shows my brother records for me, but of course the day of the price drop saw also the release of iTunes 4.9, bringing podcasting to the me and masses.

So here is my current podroll, which adds up to enough content every day to fill the commuting time, but let me know if you have additional recommendations:

• Adam Curry: Daily Source Code
• Cinecast (that would be my favourite so far)
• Illumination Audio
• Kino im Kopf - Die Filme der Woche von M94,5
• MacCast
• sushiradio.de - Kanal Musik
• SWR3.de Podcast - Topthema (and I am so waiting for Tagesschau, which after a successful beta should launch later this month)
• The Chris Pirillo Show
• this WEEK in TECH
• Wanhoffs Wunderbare Welt der Wissenschaft

Concerning the Shuffle itself, I have mixed feelings. I am not totally wowed by it, but it is definitely worth the money. It is still reasonably cheap (compared to other players), the 1 GB should be quite enough for me, and is amazingly light (22g). I am a little unhappy that my USB keyboard hub seems not to recharge it properly (I have to plug the Shuffle in the less accessible back of my Mini), that I cannot recharge it over night (because the Mini goes to sleep mode after a while and powers down the USB devices), and that podcast synching only fully works with iPod and iPod Mini: What should happen is that when I plug in the Shuffle, iTunes starts, downloads the latest episodes (this actually works), and then replaces the episodes I already listened to with the new ones. That last part does not work, so I have to do some drag-and-drop. But that is not difficult, as it does correctly identify which episodes I have not yet heard and marks them with a blue dot.

So if you are more into music than I am, consider to spend that extra money on a regular iPod or the Mini. This will also give you a screen where you can see cover art and shownotes. The Shuffle is definitely on the absolute low end featurewise.