Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
An unfortunate click of the play button on the remote. Some ignorance when looking at the display. 182 songs played overnight without anyone listening. Including things that were on the "not played for six months"-list and won't get back there in ages.
Well, good thing the pod was in the charger ...
(No, I don't care enough to hack up an Applescript to lessen the playcounts one step. Fortunately.)
Today's nice feature that I for some reason haven't used before: selecting to play tracks in random order and just pressing play. Voila, random order play of my entire music collection.
Since the previous note on this page I've had my corded remote replaced without any problems. I've also got a just as trouble-free replacement of the firewire cable, the plastic cap of which came loose for no good reason at all. For that replacement I called the phone support since the first report somehow hung around in the web based system and wouldn't let me report any new problems. A bonus (if there was any connection) of this was that the second replacement arrived a whole lot faster than the first one.
Hit my first problem with my iPod last week. Suddenly I got the classic sound glitches normally produced by an abused cord. Sure enough, a little testing revealed that the cord connecting the remote to the iPod itself had given itself increased abilities in affecting your listening experience. Touch it in the right place, manually or, for best annoyance, by just moving about, and there would be crackles, pops and even volume losses. All after less than a month of ownership and, if I may say so myself, very careful usage. Even my heavily abused 8 year old Sony headphones haven't suffered this kind of cable problem (although the extension cord I sometimes use with them has, maybe extenstion cords get some different kinds of abuse?) yet. It seemed like a second rate cord to me, but it felt nice it happened now and not on the 91st day after purchase ...
So I made a quick error report through the web-based support on Wednesday night. On Monday afternoon a support person called for some clarification, apparently I wasn't clear enough about just where the damage was. After clarifying things he said sending a new remote was going to be mailed to me. No unnecessary discussions, feels good.
In other news, I want to think of another name for MyPod. I happened to discover there's a piece of iPod software with that very name, and I guess it wasn't all that creative in the first place either ...
I think I've found out how the .Trashes folder works now. When you drag a file from the iPod to the trashcan it ends up in this folder, not the trashcan on the computer. Disconnect the iPod without emptying the trash, and the files remain inside the hidden folder, taking up your space. Reconnect the iPod and the folders appear in the trashcan again, at least on a Mac. I may have deleted my files on a PC, perhaps that's why they didn't show up in the Mac trashcan. At least I think they didn't :-) ...
It was temporary stuff sticking behind. Just connected MyPod to Terminus and looked through the directories. Inside the directory .Trashes (the dot means it's by default invisible to Finder on the Mac) was almost 2 gigabytes, all the things I deleted after transfering them the other day. All I wonder now is when those files would have been removed if I hadn't taken care of them myself?
Also discovered that iTunes says it has exactly one file more in its library than the iPod has. Very interesting, but doesn't feel like it's worth the amount of work to find out which file :-) ...
MyPod is filling up, and about two gigabytes more than expected actually. iTunes states one size of my music library (a bit more than 9 Gb), and Finder confirms that figure. However, once inside MyPod everything in there together takes up more than 11 Gb. Now, where do those extra 2 Gb go? I have MyPod FAT32 formatted, but surely it can't all be filesystem inefficiency?
Can it?
Or maybe it's temporary stuff sticking behind? I moved a few gigabytes of files yesterday, maybe it doesn't bother to clean up too much before the space is needed?
The negatives I've been able to think of so far:
Uh, that appears to be it so far, but I haven't done any tough tests of field usage yet. I look forward to doing so though, and to integrate mobile music into my daily life in general. I'd like to import things from my Palm to the iPod, having addresses and calendar in one more place can't be a bad thing. However, my good old (and deteriorating) Palm doesn't have any interface common with Pomum that can be used to synch with. So, unless I can find a USB cradle or cable that works, I'd have to keep the information up to date in two places for it to be any use. That doesn't seem too appealing. But in any case the Palm feels like it might die any day, so maybe the problem will sort of solve itself in a natural way. We'll see.