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Ars Technica's iPod nano Dissection
starwindsurfer wrote to mention an Ars Technica review of the iPod nano in which they autopsy the cute little guy to find out what makes him tick. A more thorough review than the one we ran last week. From the article: "At this point we were astounded that the iPod nano was still working properly, albeit with a broken display. Because we had honestly expected the iPod nano to break by this time, we were forced to depart from our planned schedule of destruction and try and run over it with the car. Surely, we thought, it could never withstand the crushing power of German automotive engineering." Update: 09/12 14:58 GMT by Z : Changed linking words to previous article for clarity. Monday fuzziness.
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3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
according to the article, you get 13 hours of life out of it. not sure if you were being sarcastic though.(since it was modded funny)
subSystm has a video if the inside of the nano for anyone who is interested
subSystm is a short version of the full episode Systm
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
The article should really be entitled How to Kill an iPod nano as I think that's the real purpose of the article. It must be fun to buy the latest gadget and then find creative ways to destroy it.
Basically the final cause of death for the iPod was to throw it up in the air as high as possible, about 40 feet, and then let it smack down on the concrete. That was the final nail in the coffin after dropping it from 9 ft., dropping it multiple times from a speeding car (10 MPH to 50 MPH) and running over it twice. Pretty durable for a little music player.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Are you crazy? NPR has given up almost none of its best shows to podcasting. This American Life, Car Talk, What Do You Know?, Morning/Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and pretty much any other of their big shows aren't podcast. There's actually very few good NPR shows available through podcasting.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
Is that an iPod in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
As an aside, that's not a coin pocket, Levi Strauss designed it for matches when he created the jean for miners to keep the matches dry.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
diamond shatters =p
which is totally what she said
Having RTFA, they did actually kill the thing first - It survived being dropped out of a car window at 50mph with nothing but scratches, and was still playing after that, plus being dropped onto concrete from 9ft then being run over by a car. Twice. It finally died when they threw it as high in the air as they could and let it land on concrete.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Actually, the Nano uses flash memory.
I'll be honest, I wasn't aware of the existence of Firewire 800, and that does reduce my confusion somewhat, certainly (that and that I *think* there are older Macs with Firewire but not USB2.0, in which case the former would have better data transfer rates). So yes, it certainly warrants mention by Ars, and they were right to point it out in the review. One thing I would point out, though, is that after what will prbably be an initial massive file transfer, songs will be being added single-by-single or album-by-album, which probably wouldn't tax either Firewire 800 or USB2.0's throughput overmuch (though the former would again be faster). In that case I think that Apple can probably justify the sacrifice of FW for USB (so they don't have to worry about PCs without FW compatibility) if adding FW would increase the size or cost of the nano beyond acceptable margins.
Firewire is a MUST for video editing - all the digital video cameras I've seen may have USB ports, but the only thing that comes out the USB port are still photos. Video only comes out of the camera's Fireware port (called iLink by Sony).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I agree that the nano targets the market that is not used to carrying their entire music collection around, which is why it is replacing the mini. But I don't believe it creates a market in which the shuffle is obsolete. The $100 pricepoint that the shuffle falls under is still crucial for many people, plus it is still smaller, lighter, and very close to indestructable during normal use. Someone who own's a full size ipod might still purchase an additional shuffle, I doubt they would purchase an additional nano.
Example: I like having my entire music collection with me when I'm walking around campus, driving in my car, etc. The size of a normal ipod isn't an issue for these activities. But for the gym (which I loathe) I need something smaller. I don't need huge capacities or a screen or a click wheel. Just something that plays enough music to get me through the 60-90 minutes of hell that is the gym three times a week. The shuffle fills this void, the nano is overkill.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
No iPod supports FireWire 800.
The ones with FireWire use FireWire 400, which is compatible with a FW 800 port the same way a USB 1.1 device is compatible with a USB 2 port, although in the case of FireWire you need an adapter cable to make the connection because the FW 800 port adds two extra pins.
Here's Apple's page confirming that the current full-size iPod has FW 400, not 800: http://www.apple.com/ipod/color/specs.html
Greetings,
A few years ago I learned a trick from my local Swatch store. I had scratched the face of a watch given to me as a gift; a keeper mainly for its sentimental value. The face had several scratches, some looked deep. I steeled myself to pay $50 to replace the watch's face (an $80 watch) and headed to the store.
The clerk was very helpful and passed on one of the best tips ever: Put some toothpaste on the polycarbonate surface, rub softly with your fingers, and wipe off with a moist cotton pad or paper towel. Scratches be gone! I've used that trick on mobile phone screens as well, with excellent results.
I hope that helps,
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Here's your NPR podcast:
/tmp/NPR /dev/null 2>&1 &
/user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh SFR "Science Friday" 2h /user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh PHC "Prarie Home Companion" 2h /user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh CTK "Car Talk" 1h
This script records your podcast. Call it record_NPR.sh
=================
#!/bin/bash
PREFIX=$1
NAME=$2
LENGTH=$3
if [ -z "$3" ] ; then
echo "Usage: record_NPR.sh "
exit
fi
FILE_DATE=`date`
FILE_NAME=`date '+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M.mp3'`
FILE_NAME="${PREFIX}_${FILE_NAME}"
cd
wget -nv -O $FILE_NAME http://edtv.opb.org:8000/radio.mp3 >
WPID=$!
sleep $LENGTH; kill $WPID
sleep 3
tagmp3 set "%A:${NAME} %a:NPR Records" $FILE_NAME
#update_RSS.pl "$PREFIX" "$FILE_NAME" "$FILE_DATE" "$NAME"
echo "$NAME was recorded"
===================
Stick it in your crontab, and you are done:
===================
0 11 * * 5
0 15 * * 6
0 10 * * 6
======================
Search for it. It's used for this exactly. It's great on CDs/DVDs too.
Your phone doesn't scratch on the display because if you look closely, the display is covered by an hard plastic insert. The rest of the case is a softer (actually more durable) plastic. Apple doesn't seem to want to insert harder plastic over the screen because it would require a bumpy frame around the display. The Mini had the harder plastic, because it was made of metal elsewhere.
Also note that since Apple doesn't use an insert over the display, their displays show rainbows when viewed through polarized glasses due to the stresses resulting from injection molding. Again, the Mini didn't have these.
Nobody makes large plastic things like phones scratch proof all over because "scratch proof" plastic is more brittle and much more expensive to shape. If your phone or iPod body was made of it, the keys would chip the corners off it in no time.
Well, they don't make affordable things "scratch proof". It's usually only used in small areas like the inserts over displays on your phone. This means you don't use much of it, and making flat sheets is cheap and easy.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's $59+$7 s/h to have Apple replace the battery. At that price, you may as well buy the Applecare contract at $59 and just figure the battery will need replacing within 2 years. They'll swap it out under warranty when it can only hold a 50% charge.
I'm asking if there's sane ways to just dump mp3s and AAC files onto the Nano and other recent iPods and make them play with minimal pain-in-the-assedness.
As far as I know, you can still (a) create a playlist or smart playlist of all the songs you want to have on your iPod, then (b) drag-and-drop all those songs onto the iPod icon in iTunes.
Better yet, set up Autofill in iTunes (this requires some actual thinking) to pre-shuffle some music every time your sync up. Apple's iTunes sync page covers it pretty well.
Not so - all of SciFri is podcast each week. They do cut the program into 2-6 segments though depending on how many topics they're covering - so you have to make sure you get all the parts.
The article incorrectly states that the sound quality is the same across the iPod line.
This test and actually, just comparing by the ear, shows interesting results from a number of players:
http://home.comcast.net/~machrone/playertest/play
J
You can buy some stuff called "Moly Coat" from grainger and other places. It's a spray on coating used on gears in teletypes in the 70's to keep them from wearing out. I've been using it on maglight lenses and some optics stuff to keep things from scratching.
About $10/can, but it'll stop those scratches on the metal. I've used it on laptops more resently and seems to really help.
-=fshalor
unless other nano pods are employed by ars-technica to dissect another nanopod, this would be a necropsy, not an autopsy.
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NPR is not directly responsible for many of the programs you mention as they are created and produced by NPR member stations. These programs set their own policies for making podcasts available.
NPR itself has to deal with rather complicated set of factors. They have a bunch of dues-paying member stations who pay quite a lot to get programs like All Things Considered and Morning Edition. The member stations are not too keen on NPR making free podcasts of these programs available. They pay the bills and lose listeners in the process.
These member stations also have to pay for programs like Prairie Home Companion and This American Life. This is perhaps why these programs are available for sale and can be streamed but not downloaded as a podcast.
Yet, there is evidence that NPR is moving toward having podcasts of is news programs. They recently dropped their deal with Audible.com, which was selling their programming. We have yet to see what will replace this service. It may very well be podcasts, but they will need to work with member stations to do this in a way that doesn't undermine the whole system. Sponsorship of the podcasts is one possibility, and Jobs has said that he sees the podcasts on iTunes moving in this direction.
Best in the business? When my IBook's hard drive started failing (bad blocks), Apple's technical support refused to speak to me without having my credit card number first, so that they charge me after "deciding whether my problem was covered under the warranty", even though it was obvious that the problem was.
When this was finally resolved, Apple returned the Ibook with not only a new hard drive, but also a new screen and new optical drive. However, my DVD/CD-RW drive was replaced with a much cheaper DVD-ROM drive, even though Apple claimed to have replaced it with the same component, thus requiring me to send it back again. Is that "best in the business" technical support, where the company doesn't even trust that I know what is covered under warranty, and then replaces components incorrectly?
During the three years I used the IBook, the power cord had to be replaced FOUR times because the cord would break near the tip of the very thin cord. When an ethernet card pulled up slightly on its plugin, the ethernet stopped working completely. Is this considered durable?
I also had a Powerbook from around 1996 or 97 (not sure, but it had a trackball instead of a pad) that broke around 2-3 years after buying it (new) because opening and closing the lid caused the monitor cable to break due to a design flaw. This was apparently a common problem.
That said, I have very old Apple desktops (Apple SE, PowerMac 7100?) that work perfectly. Perhaps Apple desktops are built to a different standard?
Exactly what I was going to say. The Constainer Store has some. Use the #2 polish, then buff it shiny with the #1. The #3 is probably too abrasive!
Doesn't matter that iTunes hasn't improved, because you're still an idiot. Seriously, iTunes is a lot easier to use than Creative Mediaplayer. There's a preference setting in iTunes so you can export and import mp3s by default, instead of AAC (which is a useless format anyways) I've drag n' dropped mp3s from PCs and macs directly to both Creative music players as well as iPods as removeble disks with no problem. I've also used the trial edition of Anapod, http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod xpod and vpod on Win98. But iTunes is just so easy to use, I found I don't need a replacement, free or otherwise. You're Geek card is revoked! Go buy a portable CD player, kid.
That pocket was originally designed for a pocket watch AFAIK. On a side note, (or useless trivia, you decide) the rivets on the pockets are so a miner's pockets don't rip off when he stuffs too many gold nuggets in them.
If the iPod is the only device connected to your computer (as is the case with many users), you are 100% correct. USB2 is more than good enough.
If, however, you have a lot of USB devices and a lot of Firewire devices in a computer room which looks like something out of Serial Experiments Lain then the more devices you can get on the Firewire bus and unplug from USB2 ports, the better.
So the short answer is USB2 is fine for most people, which is why it makes sense for Apple to ship their iPods that way. Some users are much better off with Firewire, but those people can probably afford to spring thirty bucks for the alternate cable.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.