Category Archives: Hardware

iPod Battering

I love my iPod, it is an amazing piece of technology that really seems to make your life better. Those of you scoffing now obviously don’t have one, trust me, when you get one you will agree.

The only thing I haven’t been happy with the is its battery life. After six months I now lose a quarter of a full charge if I don’t have it plugged in for a day and I’m only getting about four hours of play time at 60% volume, so I called Apple support today. After the normal half hour of going round in circles I was told two things.

1. Don’t recharge using your cradle. There isn’t enough power from the USB card to fully charge the battery. Always charge the pod using a wall socket.

2. Update and reformat the pod. I assume this works in a similar fashion to a defrag. In the fifty minutes since I’ve done this I’ve transferred 2600 songs back on the unit. Thank god for USB2.

I’ll give it a week or so and if it hasn’t worked I’ll be sending it off for a battery replacement, which is actually a pot luck iPod replacement, but I want my iPod to last more than a hundred shuffles.

Little Dreams Coming True

At last, one of my longest standing tech dreams has been realised. I can finally sync my phone with Outlook. I know you’ve been able to do this for years but up until today I’ve never had the means to. Two weeks ago I got a great new Nokia 6230 so I purchased a connector cable off Ebay which arrived today. I could have used Bluetooth for my connection but this chews through battery life (more of which shortly) and a cable was cheaper than an IR usb adaptor. Now I have all my contacts and calendar information for the next 12 months wherever I go.

“But surely you had all this in your Ipaq?” I hear you ask. I did, but in an effor to simplify my life and reduce the bulge in my left pocket I am increasingly leaving it home in favour of my Hipster PDA. Another reason for relying less on the iPaq is the Pocket PC version of Microsoft Money never really synched with my desktop version and tracking finances on the go was one of the major reasons I wanted a PDA. Now I simply keep my receipts in my wallet until I get home.

While I love my new phone, I’ve even set it up so I can email photos from it direct to Flickr (see my test shot), I am not impressed with the battery. It advertises 300 hours of standby – I get 48. I’ve tried to get it replaced but am having nightmare time as Optus and Nokia shuffle responsibility. All I want is a new battery and they will never hear from me again.

iSkin

My iPod is back, and I decided to get a case for it. ‘Cos what with carrying it about, and the kids playing with it, I figured it could do with some protection, as well as a belt clip.

After looking about at the various products, and with Tony’s recommendation, I looked at the iSkin. They appear to have gone all out to design something that’s both practical and fairly visually appealing (though to be fair, nothing beats the look of the iPod itself — even down to the normally fugly things like the power supply, Apple have created something that is utterly beautiful).

iSkins are not cheap, at least not to those of us trading in the Australian Peso. A little shopping around showed a price of between A$49 and $59. Unfortunately the $49 price was at Streetwise, whom I have had recommended to me, but are not particularly conveniently located, and even if they were, have been closed this past weekend for moving. And I wanted my iSkin straight away. Likewise, Streetwise’s or Apple’s online shop could have sold me the product, but online shopping for physical items doesn’t give you instant gratification.

So I coughed up the $59 at the AppleCentre on Flinders Street. Took the skin back to my iPod, and then wrestled with it for about half an hour, trying to figure out how it opened.

See, in looking at the adverts and catalogues, I’d got it into my head that the iSkin was made of some kind of rigid plastic. It isn’t. It’s flexible, and you’re meant to get the iPod (and the instructions and other items in the packet) in and out by way of the gap for the screen.

When I figured this out, I found the instructions inside telling me so. WhyTF they couldn’t put a hint on the outside of the package, I don’t know. Would have saved me a bit of fiddling about.

Oh well, the iSkin is lovely, though I don’t think much of (and am not using) the “free bonus” click-wheel cover they included. The other downer: it can plug into its USB/firewire connection while in the skin, but it’ll have to come out to fit into the dock.

But hopefully it will keep my iPod safe from the ravages of the world.

Colour

A bunch of new PCs arrived at work. It would seem that in Wintel personal computer colours, black is the new beige.

iTunes.com.au

I know rumours of an Australian iTunes store have been around for ages, but it looks like in the past week, Apple has registered itunes.com.au

Domain Name: itunes.com.au
Last Modified: 23-Mar-2005 22
Registrar ID: R00010-AR
Registrar Name: Melbourne IT
Status: OK

Registrant: APPLE COMPUTER AUSTRALIA PTY LTD
Registrant ID: ACN 002 510 054

No web site responding as yet.

Josh’s freaky Compaq PC

I’m using a Compaq D5S/P1.7/20j/p/128c/6 AUST

I’m getting whitenoise in the soundcard at work. It’s there all the
time, but drowned out by music. It stops when I have the left mouse button
depressed to select cells in Excel, but releasing it resumes the whitenoise.
Clicking on or selecting stuff outside of Excel doesn’t affect it. Outlook
selections don’t stop it, but selecting stuff in Word stops the whitenoise –
but again, only while the mouse button is held down. Another thing to stop
the whitenoise is dragging splitter bars around in Visual Studio 6. So it’s
not the mouse per se. And just recently, these “fixes” have stopped
working. Stopping a particularly long build restored the fix. Popping up
task manager shows that it seems that the white noise goes away when the CPU
goes to 100%, unless there’s disk activity. Got any suggestions how I can
fix this? And, preemptively, I don’t intend to load the CPU at 100%
permanently for my listening pleasure.

MS on iPod

Microsoft has a page about buying Flash-memory-based MP3 players. One could be forgiven for thinking they’d written it specifically to discourage people buying iPods. First it says Flash-based is better. Then it says you should make sure you have voice-recorder and FM (so not iPod). And you should have a display (there goes iPod Shuffle) and of course concludes that you should look for WMA support. No surprises there.

iPod progress

Well the response when plugging the iPod into my computer at work was the same as that at home: nothing. It appears something caused the battery to stop working.

So I rang up Apple support, and after they had me attempt resetting it again, put me on hold. When the guy came back he proclaimed it to be a battery problem, and said it would need servicing. Sigh. He then gave me the URL for requesting service. I clicked through to this, only to find their server down, returning a 500 error. Terrific, this gets better and better!

Apple support web site error

A couple of hours later it was working. It leads you through various disclaimers including having you read a long list of terms and conditions in a small font. (Why do they put it in a small font? It’s a web page fer chrissake – it doesn’t use any more paper or bytes to be in a normal-sized font.)

I tapped in all my details and ended up with a form to print and take with the iPod to the post office. There the bloke scanned off the form, and gave me a PostPak and bubblewrap to put it in, and sent it off, postage-free.

Unlike when you get a battery replacement, apparently they will actually fix your iPod, rather than sending you a replacement one. And the bloke said it may take up to 14 days… which is a helluva lot better than some repair places.

So now, I wait. Sigh.

iPod woes

I don’t smegging believe it. I’ve had the thing less than a day and it’s playing up.

Yesterday during a spare moment at work, I set up iTunes on my work PC. All okay, set up the iPod, copied a dozen songs onto it, all good.

Took it home and tried to set iTunes up on my home PC. When it came to plug the iPod in, it wouldn’t play ball. The small print says it needs a high-power USB2.0 port… which to be honest I’m not sure my computer has. I’ll be looking into that.

But anyway, at this point the iPod stopped working. It now only does anything if it’s plugged into the mains, through the dock or directly. The battery indicator says it’s charged, and it plays merrily, until it’s plugged in. I’ve tried resetting it a couple of times, which it’ll do if it’s plugged in, but otherwise, nothing, nada, zilch.

You smegging what?!?

Assuming it’ll respond to the work computer again, I’ll do a full factory restore on it, and/or try refreshing its software. If that doesn’t work, however, I’ll not be very bloody happy. (I’m not particularly ecstatic right now, to be honest.)