HAPPY JAR 2025

 For the New Year (2025), I am going to try the idea of collecting happy weekly notes in a jar.  Failures and disappointments affect me more than they should, I think having happy notes will balance things out.

I consider Sunday January 5 to be the end of the first week of 2025.  The happy note will be about the re-discovery of my iPod Classic music player.  I love listening to music but haven't done much of it lately.  Sure, I have a sizeable collection of music files on my cell phone, but with all its notifications the listening experience can be interrupted.  My first music player was actually one of those iPod with FireWire connection.  It served me well but one day a leftover dish of spaghetti meatballs spilled and killed it.  It was not that healthy at that point anyway, the battery didn't hold well.  Plus, I think I already had an iPod touch.  The iPod touch was basically an iPhone without the phone functions.  It too eventually wouldn't boot up any more, I still have it somewhere around the house.  One holiday season, I decided to treat myself to an iPod Classic, bought it in person at the late TekServe on 23rd Street near Sixth Avenue.  Used it for a while then somehow I decided to just use my phone instead.  Many years later, the current phone's Lightnight connection is finicky and I can no longer easily sync with a computer.  I think it may be possible to sync wirelessly but I don't remember what needs to be done for that to happen.  It doesn't help that my Mac is old, too.  What got me really interested in the iPod Classic is that through my work with running a local Buy Nothing group that has a regular in-person meeting, I end up with an expanded collection of music CDs.  I also have some music CDs from my sister and brother.

The first thing I tried to do was to connect the iPod Classic to my Windows 11 Lenovo laptop.  It has plenty of room and is newer than the poor Mac.  Installed iTune sometime ago, now is the time to put it to work.  Nope, it didn't happen.  Either the iPod Classic need to be updated, something or other, it seemed to be too much work.  Back to the Mac, luckily it recognized the iPod easily.  Hooked up an external disc drive and away I went.  I already imported a few CDs via iTune on the Mac and enjoy them on the go.  One minor issue is the iPod has no built-in speaker so I need to have a headphone handy, or an auxiliary cable to connect to the car stereo or external speaker.

I shall title the first Happy Jar 2025 note "Re-acquainting iPod Classic".  Happy New Year!

Life, Out Of Touch

My iPod touch is dead. About a year into my ownership of the thing, the battery started to deplete rather faster than usual. If left on overnight, it would be totally dead the next morning. I think the normal thing would be for it to go into sleep mode and be usable the next day. Not so with this iTouch of mine. I made do with charging it often and brought the charger with me to work so that I would have something to use on the commute home. The strategy worked for a while, until the battery wouldn't charge any more. Connecting the Touch to the computer normally would also charge it as well as sync its content, but no such luck. My iPod touch really bit the dust.

The natural thing to do is shop around and buy a new one. I still can afford one, but there are two problems. One is that I was hoping that Apple would finally give the Touch a still camera. Many times I had the Touch with me and wanted to take a photo but didn't have a camera. My cell phone has a camera but getting photos out of it is such a hassle. A Touch with camera would be handy to have and not a hassle at all with syncing.

The other reason, a loftier one, is that as a self-proclaimed environmentalist, I should not be so quick to buy new things and immediately discard things as they become defective. Better to make use of existing things and repair the broken stuff. With that in mind, I took my second-generation, 10-gig iPod out of retirement and use it for what it's best at - music and podcasts. There are no useful apps like the American Heritage Dictionary or fun game like Trivia Pursuit, but it helps me keep up with This American Life and other podcasts. I even added The Brothers Karamazov audiobook, free from http://librivox.org , to the old iPod. I get an extra point, too, for re-using the 2G iPod in that it can only sync via FireWire 400, which is not available on my Mac Pro so that I have to also get the PowerBook G4 out of mothball whenever I need to sync the old iPod.

I do miss the dictionary on the Touch as it helped me many times when I play crossword puzzles. It is time to make more use of the Abest Chinese PDA. I bought it years ago primarily to use as an electronic Chinese dictionary but it also has the Oxford English dictionary. The lack of backlighting is painful, but again I just need to learn to make do. I even thought about getting the Handspring Deluxe out of retirement to use its address book, calendar, and notes.

One iTouch function I cannot replace is its photo storage. It was nice while it lasted to carry around my entire photo collection. A short while before the Touch expired, it could no longer store all the photos, music, and apps, so I had to cut back to just the last twelve months of photos.

I plan to make do with the old iPod, the Abest PDA, maybe even the old Handspring PDA, for a few more weeks. In the mean time, I plan a visit to Brooklyn's First Apple Authorized Repair Shop, the Mac Support Store, in the Gowanus area, to get the battery replaced. However long that takes I don't mind. Once the Touch is all good again, then I'll be able to carry around twelve months of photos again, and more.

iRealLife

Click on the picture to see a bigger version with the text more readable.

iPod Lost Its Touch

The Wife got me an iPod touch Xmas 2007. It was a pleasant surprise as we usually don't give each other presents. We both just agree that presents are for kids. For whatever reason, she made 2007 an exception and I was happy with the new toy.

While not as connected to the Internet as its big brother, the iPhone, the iPod touch, or iTouch, or even just touch for short, still proved to be useful. At work, I regularly hopped over to the local public library to use its free Wi-Fi to check email and post to Plurk and Twitter. Similarly, at home when my Son needed company as he grudgingly practices music, I would be in the room with him and catch up on the latest news on the web. On some occasions, I even updated apps on the iTouch using Wi-Fi while at home. I believe in distributing the work and don't want to tie up my laptop with every little things I do. The iTouch is perfect for email and updating social networks.

A few days ago out of nowhere the iTouch could no longer connect to any Wi-Fi networks. By default, when I'm home it should connect to my Westell DSL router. Sometimes when I first enter the house the iTouch would already be connected to some neighbor's open network. Perhaps the neighbor lives somewhere between my house and the subway station. I actually dislike that because performance is lower when I'm on the neighbor's network. These days, the iTouch is totally blind to any Wi-Fi networks. I already tried resetting network settings and then all settings. I am reluctant to erase data on the iTouch since it is unlikely if the touch cannot even see any networks to start with. Also, all the laptops in the house can see the router. A quick search on Google reveals that it is not a new problem but there seems to be no answer. I will have to make a trip one of these days to see if the Geniuses at my local Apple Store can help.

It is very tempting to use this problem as an excuse to just go out and buy a new touch. But that's just consumerism. Buy, buy, buy, don't fix! Instant gratification! Must have it, now! I will try to live without portable Wi-Fi for a while. It won't be easy, but I'll try. I'll try to make use of the touch for what it's still good for. I certainly can still listen to music and podcasts, albeit mostly in mono as the headphone jack stopped working properly some weeks ago. To hear stereo, I would have to push the headphone plug into the jack to have better contact. Hmm, wonder if the problems are related... Maybe with all these miniaturization, pushing too far into the jack somehow loosen the Wi-Fi antenna? Who knows? Anyway, I still can use the American Heritage dictionary to help me play crossword puzzles in the newspapers. I would learn a little about history, geography, or the arts, when I play x-word, but not when I squander time on Wordscraper and other Facebook word games. I still can use the touch's calendar function to keep track of daily events, sort of like a diary, except I don't write as much because of the painful process of using the on-screen keyboard.

In a few months maybe I'll succumb to the temptation and just get a new touch. It better be a newer model with a camera. The second generation with the speaker and larger capacity does not justify the upgrade. In the mean time, I will say no to consumerism and make the most of the less touchy-feely iPod touch...