Dave Winer's difficulties with his iPod illustrate one thing: even for the technically literate, the blocks on fair use can be a royal pain. Now, I've had numerous people tell me that you can manage music/podcasts (etc) from multiple (I think it's up to five) machines if:

• You have the iPod formatted for Windows instead of for Mac (otherwise, your Windows machine will see it as read-only)
• You change from auto-synch to manual

I haven't tried that though, since it didn't seem obvious. What I did is buy XPlay, a nice little application that lets me manage the iPod from my laptop (which doesn't have my music library - the disk is too small and too filled). When I travel, I grab podcasts from BottomFeeder, and then use XPlay to move them over to the iPod. No fuss, no muss - I'd recommend XPlay to anyone. It's less than $30 too!

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