Latest moan from you and me - 2016

Oh!! So you've met him?

 

Hi @Fern4 and @"M"

Dynamic breakfast duo Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford are looking for a quick sale on their six-bedroom Surrey mansion, after slashing the asking price to £3.5 million

 

Petulant electronics!

Whilst I am not an expert, I do have a reasonably good grasp of most things electronic, and have been blessed over the years with being able to coax many things back to life. A few weeks ago, I dug my old (but little used) iPod Classic 120gb out of a drawer - mainly because I now have a car that has the ability to connect to an iPod, and the fact that I can also use it in my office

Initially, all seemed well, but there wasn't all that much on it and our iTunes library was in something of a disarray, so I set to and sorted out the entire iTunes library - - everything was correctly tagged, all album art was correct, and everything that was part of an album was all in one place as the album (apparently iTunes is really picky and will scatter songs all over the place with the minimal of excuses); both mine and Mrs C's iPod were sync'd and off we went. Mrs C's (used daily) iPod continued to perform just fine whereas mine developed a touch of Alzheimer's and would skip over tracks as if they weren't there, or generally wander off on its own wee path and then get lost.... whenever it was connected to the car, it was even worse, throwing its toys about to such an extent that it even caused the car stereo to freeze up and then need to reboot.

After about two weeks of re-formatting, defragmenting, and generally faffing about with it and reading around on the internet, I arrived at the conclusion that the hard drive inside was effectively Donald-Ducked. I then went on to discover that these old iPods can be revived and brought up to date by modifying some of the internals to allow it to take an SD card - - so that would make it faster to use, immune to vibrations, extend the battery life (less power being used) and ultimately more reliable as there were no longer any moving parts...... sold!

So, I bought a 128Gb SD card, the relevant electronic adapter modules, and even treated it to a new internal battery - - - about £70 all in, but I thought it was worth it in the long run.

Whilst waiting for everything to arrive last week, I decided to get bold and start opening the iPod up to see what challenges lay ahead - - what a right royal pain in the bum they are to get into!!! Anyway, once I was in, it was relatively straight forward and when the stuff arrived on Saturday I had it fitted and all back together in no time, then connected to the PC and copied all my music onto it. All seemed well when tested on headphones on Saturday night, so I was happy.

Yesterday, it played for a while at work, but stopped once - - I had been out of the room, so wondered if it might just have been the album coming to an end, so didn't think too much of it. Come time to get in the car, it continued to play fine for the first wee while before lobbing its toys all over the place. I tried it more than once, and the same happened. Now NOT happy at all.

A bit of reading last night suggested that the car problem is quite common with modern cars, and some even suggested that it should settle and become an infrequent problem - however, this offered me no comfort and led me to the decision to order the bits needed to build my own 250gb portable storage drive to use in the car. Still, I can always use the iPod in my office.....

Errrrrr..... No. It skipped/missed/froze up so many times today that I felt like bouncing the damn thing off a wall.

As I type, it is lying in pieces once again whilst I try a last ditch attempt to get it to work (forced overwrite of the MBR), and if that fails I have a very expensive heap of electronic scrap.

Modern technology is great, but such a pain in the rump when it goes wrong.