This week I reformatted the output files to match the color of the blog.
I also added a page listing the total play count for each iPod and a top ten albums page.
The Top Ten page is total plays of any track off an album from the entire time I track, so 10/01/2022 – Whenever I lose interest in the project.
Without further explanation, here is this week’s listening stats:
Device Plays:
This week’s music:
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Top Ten Albums (Based on individual track plays):
I am going to try to catalog what I listen to each week and start posting it here.
I put together a spreadsheet and linked it to a mail merge file in MS Publisher so I can get a .pdf printout of the information that I want. I’ll be interested to see how this works, for how long I can keep it up, and how the spreadsheet changes along the way.
My previously mentioned 4th Gen iPod Photo (henceforth referred to as grossPod) has a dying HDD. I went ahead and ordered some parts to FlashMod it, and get it running for decades more to come.
This required a series of adapters to replace the HDD with a MicroSD card:
We needed a cable to go from the IDE interface to something the board could handle, the board itself then a CF to SD card adapter. I also added a SD to MicroSD adapter, because I had a 128GB MicroSD card for this project.
(Original Drive)
IPod once the modifications are complete:
(Everything complete)
(Still a little gross around the edges)
I now have (yet another) 128gb iPod for the collection. Hooray!
Mowed the lawn today. The iPod Shuffle did not do a great job of shuffling…
I picked up a 60gb 4th Gen iPod Photo from eBay for practically nothing. The picture was kind of gross, to the point where people on Reddit were aware and somewhat afraid of the iPod.
So about 9 1/2 years ago my first iPod was stolen out of my car. I was very sad. I finally got around to getting replacement for that particular one.
For the record, I’ve had something like 4 between that one and this one. There is just nothing like the nostalgia factor, I guess.
I bought a brand new white 5th Generation iPod Video. Several years later it was stolen out of my car. My at the time roommate snagged another one off of craigslist for me. That one died a horrible death a few years later in a coffee accident. I got a different one on eBay. The click wheel did not work so I returned it. The replacement worked fine for a few months until someone shipped it to…No one really knows.
The current iPod is a 6th Gen iPod classic that I’ve been using for several years now. I love the thing enough that it has already gotten a new battery. It’s getting a new screen and the hard drive replaced with a flash card very soon too. BUT I finally got around to replacing the original iPod. At a guess I’d say the drive and battery are junk in this one. It has a battery showing up, probably tomorrow, and I’ll probably flashmod this one too, honestly.
I forgot how much I liked the feeling of the old one. The front is pretty beat up, maybe I’ll order a new front for it too.
iPod
I have owned several of those glorious things over the years. I recently came into possession of a seventh generation iPod touch. The stated goal is to cover for the Classic while it is, more or less, down for the count.
In the autumn of 2001, very nearly the end of my high school career, a friend came in with this fancy new music player. It was an amazing piece of technology from a company I had long since written off as meh in the computer world. It was a 1st generation iPod. It was a wonderful thing and after getting to poke around with it for a few moments I decided that I must have such a thing.
I had all of this digital music that a friend had given me to poke around with a couple of years before. I was carrying a backpack full of CDs around at school so I had something to listen to when it was allowed.
But this…THIS WAS A GAME CHANGER.
Problem was cost. I had bills to pay and didn’t have hundreds of dollars laying around to splurge on a music player. I was given a couple of mp3 players as gifts over the years. A D-Link DMP90 was my first one, once it wore out I was given a Rio One Digital Audio Player, and that thing was a workhorse. It got left out in a thunderstorm once and soaked more or less clean through. Let it dry out for a few days, changed the battery and it ran for another year or two.
But, as wonderful and liberating as those two were, they just could not come close to what I most wanted out of a music player.
I wanted something that could store my entire library in a higher quality than 64kbps audio.
I kept up on the iPod stuff. Never buying, but keeping tabs on the specs. I was ready to take the plunge in something like ‘04 when the 4th generation iPod hit the market. I figured 20gb was not going to quite get me what I wanted, but I figured it would work for a while.
There was a lot going on in those days and, for whatever reason, I ended up not getting an iPod that year.
I was super excited in ‘05 when a version with a 30gb drive and color screen released. I decided that year that my tax refund was going to be what finally got me into the iPod world.
By February of 2006 $300 would get me an iPod with 30gb of storage space AND the ability to play videos. I really could not see how, outside of upgrading storage, any new features could be added in a worthwhile way, so I went ahead and got one.
I considered getting one with a larger storage capacity, but ended up getting a 3 year, no questions asked warranty with it. That iPod saw a lot of use.
Like a lot of use.
A week before the warranty ran out I made good on that. The battery was down to ~half capacity and the screen had a few dead pixels on it. They shipped it off, and I got it back a week or so later with a new screen and battery.
That thing was still going strong when it got stolen out of my car in January of 2013. A month and a half shy of my 7th year with it. Fun Fact!™ I’m still bitter about that! My at-the-time roommate was nice enough to source a replacement for it on Craigslist a few months later. That one met its end in a puddle of coffee in the car. I don’t think I still have the pieces for it, but, now that I think about it, I may…
Six years later.
The replacement to that one was, I think, shipped to AT&T by one of my not so smart former co-workers and that was the end of that chapter. Shortly after, I managed to source another one on eBay for a reasonable sum – a 6th generation iPod classic with 80gb of storage. Again, that thing sees near daily use. Things got dicey for a while a couple of years ago when the battery decided to give out. Post battery replacement, it has been going strong.
Recently, the internal drive started acting up. I decided to take it out of daily use for a while in order to assess my options. While I would love a brand new iPod classic with modern features such as rapid transfer, flash storage, and Bluetooth, I have to settle for the fact that Apple is not going to do that for me. I snagged a 32gb iPod Touch, but it is… meh. Sure, it has Bluetooth and flash storage, and the things transfer a little faster, but it doesn’t have any character. It is seriously a phone-less iPhone, and that makes me sad.
Pink Floyd released PULSE on Blu-Ray.
Finally.
After much consideration, I will be making sure that I have a copy.
I have been watching a bunch of {insert whatever group here} reacts to {insert talented classic rock artist here} videos on YouTube the last few months.
It entertains me that people are still discovering this stuff and finding it both enjoyable and relevant, despite being outside of their typical comfort zone. One of the videos I recently watched was “Kids react to Led Zeppelin” and one of the kids said something along the lines of “I don’t like real instruments in music.” He got torn apart in the comment section. He is allowed to have opinions. As much as I might enjoy Zeppelin, he is allowed not to.
Many of the videos are reactions from the MSG concert from their The Song Remains The Same movie. Many people consider that to be the high point of their concert albums, but I disagree. How The West Was Won is, for me, the superior concert album.
Aside from the stellar engineering to get that album to sound completely flawless, everything just jived. They start the album out with so much energy and enthusiasm with the blistering Immigrant Song/Heartbreaker/Black Dog combo, that you could almost walk away after the first 3 songs and feel like you robbed them when you paid for your ticket.
From there they just keep firing, practically non-stop. The show clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 1/2 hours and you just wish it would never end.
Someone really needs to do a reaction to that entire album. All in one sitting, because that is how it really has to be.
I guess it is time to dump the contents of my MS Works blog onto the actual blog.
Here we go!
This is me, writing a blog entry in Microsoft Pocket Word on my HP Jornada 728 HPC. I must say that typing is somewhat cumbersome on the tiny keyboard and the screen is kind of crap since the backlight appears to be shot, but using outdoor brightness settings might be the solution for that one.
Anyway, I’m mostly doing this to test the syncing capabilities of this 20 year old computer and Windows 10. Also, because what better way to start off 2022 than by composing a blog entry on a piece of hardware that debuted in 2002!
I installed a copy of Windows XP in a virtual machine hoping to get an old copy of ActiveSync working, but Windows Mobile Device Center detected the thing after like a week of looking.
Whatever, I’ll take it.
