Day: March 30, 2007

This was going to be a bit of a review of the nipod, but at the moment it’s a bit of a damning indictment of the poor thing. I don’t know if it’s a dodgy cable, or a dodgy nipod, but it’s not working.

Well, that’s not strictly true. It *is* working, however it isn’t connecting to the PC. Annoyingly it’s now got 4 gigs of music on it, more or less, which – if it goes back – I won’t be able to delete first.

I’m hoping bloke from e-bay will send me a reply today. Currently my opinion of it is shaped around the fact that it’s phenominally slow at dealing with a directory simply filled with the equivalent of 4 gigs in folders of albums. I can’t *actually* use the menu to select an album at the moment, because it flips out having listed them. So I can only listen to the tracks in order. Which is annoying. I also, because I was having a fiddle, disconnected it, and wandered about with it before going through and making the folder names all make sense (so some are album names, and some are artist names).

Its power on time is a bit long too, but, well, until I’ve actually got a 100% working one I’m a little unwilling to go any further on the whole, what’s it like. It looks a lot like an ipod though, which is fun :-)

How come you never visit? I mean, all you’ve got to do is swim the atlantic…

Appologies for the spamming today, but I’m at home and doing some odds and sods, and keep proding the computer. I’m gonna go bath and watch BSG in a bit though, so you should be safe for a while.

So I booked my holiday, at long last. A week in July in the Lake District, staying on Helvellyn. With Kathryn. Probably going up mountains in a Viva. Wish me luck. The minor’s a bit lighter than the Viva, otoh, the Viva’s more…uh… new? By a whole 2 years… um, yeah. Although, while Kathryn’s away I might see if can get a week off and commence the engine work on Rebecca.

Hrm.

Need to check Kathryn’s away dates.

Uh, I’ve also applied to join NHS Professionals; hopefully I can get some extrashifts in in my copious free time.

And Iappear to have filled up my nipod. Heh. James was making sarky remarks about the size of my music collection compared to my 4 gig nipod, but hey. After a few attempts, I started cutting down the quantity of albums by the same artist (max = 3 (radiohead), max norm = 2 (elastica, garbage and a few others)). I also probably ought to reencode some stuff at lower bitrates, ‘cos 256kbps VBR mp3s are probably a bit high quality. And probably make it work rather hard.

Now I need to source an appropriate USB cable and build a convenient approx 12-14 volts DC -> 5 volt supply. Since that seems to be what the charger outputs (it just charges straight off the USB port). That way I can have it charging in the car. Anyone got any neat suggestions?

So I got my mp3 player, and let me say, interface wise apple have nothing to worry about. The knock off looks pretty darn good. It’s got four clicky buttons instead of the ipod turnywheelbuttonthingie, but the clickyness is pretty positive and it’s done quite neatly.

However, the interface is, well, somewhat painful. It’s not so much the layout of it, though that doesn’t wildly help. No, it’s more the fact it’s clunky. And it’s quite astonishingly crayon+child style design ugly. Thankfully the ugly is reduceable by the use of the alternative style, which is merely not beautiful.

Sound quality is fine though, at least through the supplied (white, ipod style) headphones, the display quality is surprisingly good – and it appears to play video, which it says it does – I’m tempted to see if I can squish down my music video so I can put that on there to show some people at work who were asking. Unfortunately, the built in supplied radio – not good; attrocious, perhaps, but not good. And it does buzz a bit when displaying menu items, with the radio on. Which is, uh, not really a huge problem, but faintly annoying.

I have singularly failed to actually move yet this morning, from the sofa. It wasn’t aided by the nipod’s failure to connect to the computer, after much fiddling James suggested that maybe it was just a shonky cable. Squishing the USB connector to make it tighter revealed an astonishing improvement.

I was faintly considering going into London to get my mom’s birthday present, but, uh, it’s already midday and I’ve not done the things I needed to do this morning. So, uh, that’s not going to happen, really. On the plus side I’ve found a new bookshop that I’d like to visit. On the minus side it’s possibly going to close. I had no idea GLBT bookshops were such an endagered species. I used to love browsing and buying at the Green Leaf book shop in Bristol, right across from where I used to work. On a long break I’d nip over, buy a book and head back for my coffee.

But if it’s still open I intend to head in when I get to London next week. Apparently, CC&K is also threatened with closure too, which is a bugger. I want some art from there, so I may have to see if I can get that next week. Of course, that does mean me working out what day I’ve got off? I fear…. bugger. Poor scheduling on my part. I shall have to head in after a late. Should just about be do-able. Assuming I can find somewhere to park.