Tuesday, January 23, 2007

My "New" iPod

About a year ago I was in New York working and visiting my brother and his wife. My brother, a Mac user, and a bit of an early adopter, was on his second iPod and offered me his old one. It was a 10 gig Gen 1, a classic! The only problem was that the battery life was about 30 - 45 minutes. My wife had wanted one for some time so I figured that she could use it. When I returned and presented the gift to her she thought it was great, till she charged it and took it to workout... kerplunk, kerplooey. It died!

I charged it and listened to music (compliments of my Bro, 4 gigs of songs) for about an hour while around the house. I decided that I would take it, I set it down in my home office and forgot about it because my PC didn't have a firewire card. Fast Forward to yesterday. I needed headphones for the office, I knew that there was a pair by that old iPod... I grabbed the iPod & headphones and headed for the office. I not sure what came over me but I was going to make this classic iPod work. A quick trip to Micro Center at lunch to pick up a Firewire card, only $9.99, for my PC and I was off. While the iPod was charging I began to download iTunes for my PC and home I went. This morning I installed iTunes and it immediately recognized the iPod and wanted to format it for my PC. No wait! I have to get the songs off first. A quick trip to Major Geeks and three failed attempts with freeware/shareware (YamiPod, iPod Rip, and Media Monkey) I found XPlay. XPlay allowed my Mac formatted iPod drive to be mounted by my PC. I then just used windows explorer to copy the music files to my hard drive. I also used it to print the playlists.

I then allowed iTunes to reformat and upgrade the iPod to the latest software. A few clicks later and I'm in business. The iPod is charged, all music is synchronized, I recreated the playlists that were on the iPod (hey, they were good). I know your saying, but you can only listen to it for 30 minutes... iPodbattery.com offers replacement batteries for $15.95.

Oh yeah, the headphones. The reason I needed them at the office is a co-worker wanted me to listen to a clip from "Coast to Coast", a show he listens to in the middle of the night when he can't sleep. This night was about UFO's.... wow

Monday, January 08, 2007

Keep Hope Alive

Car and Truck of the Year for GM. With the doom and gloom here in Detroit it is nice to hear a little positive news every now and again.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/auto/20070107/NYSU03807012007-1.html