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.

Comments

Re:Where's the FM tuner???

[jwinter1]

with most of the "good stuff" from NPR being available as podcasts

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.

Re:Firewire compatibility...

[sidb]

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

Re:Where's the FM tuner???

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's your NPR podcast:

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 /tmp/NPR
wget -nv -O $FILE_NAME http://edtv.opb.org:8000/radio.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
WPID=$!
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 /user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh SFR "Science Friday" 2h
0 15 * * 6 /user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh PHC "Prarie Home Companion" 2h
0 10 * * 6 /user/joechmo/bin/record_NPR.sh CTK "Car Talk" 1h
======================

SciFri Podcast

[cbquist]

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.

Sound quality better than Fullsize/Mini?

[Judge_Fire]

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/playe rtest.htm

J

Re:What apple should do now

[fshalor]

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.