Every iPod You Know Will One Day Die

On 10.03.07, In mac, tools, By Dan

The folks over at iPod Mechanic have conjured up the iPod Deathclock which, given your iPod’s serial number and a little information on how you use it, it tried to predict when your little friend will expire.

According to them, my 1st-gen iPod video has got another 483 days, 5 hours, 7 minutes and change left. Not bad in my opinion – I’ve already had it for a year+ and I use it for a couple of hours every day.

My 2nd-gen iPod shuffle has got 513 days, 15 hours, 33 minutes of tunes for the trails before it kicks it. I’ve had it for about 11 months, and have enjoyed it intensely – relatively cheap (especially for Apple), aesthetically pleasing, and I love the clip. Yeah, it’s not for everyone or everything, but autofill it from a ‘haven’t-heard-this-in-a-while’ playlist (using smart playlists and the last-played date), and it’s a little nostalgia machine. It also helps me resurface the ‘why-do-I-even-have-this-album’ music and get rid of it.

As per their suggestion on the site, I’m going to add a reminder on the day it’s set to die, and we’ll see if they’re still ticking away.

Via Lifehacker

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Symbolic Logic Likes an iPod

On 09.24.07, In projects, toys, By Dan

I’ve been wanting to make myself a nice little iPod case out of a book. Until now, I had been waiting for a sufficiently nerdy book to find its way to me.

I had to go to the Longmont Public Library to get a copy of Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), and thought I’d check their used books table. Nothing quite nerdy enough. In the basement, however, where they keep all of their free books, I found a book from simpler times: Introduction to Logic. Old, antiquated (this edition, not logic itself), and just nerdy enough. I spent about $2.60 on magnets to embed in it so that it would remain closed when jostled, and a little Elmers glue, an razor blade, and a little bit of time, and I’ve got myself a nice little iPod case.

Introduction to Logic

The process will invariably have to begin again when I finally decide to go for a next generation iPod, but until then.

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Heart-throb

On 12.09.06, In projects, By Dan

My latest little heart-throb has been the reason behind more than a couple sleepless nights as of late. It’s called Visual C#.

We met under the shade of iTunes’ beautiful SDK and it was love at first sight. It’s the comfort of an old friend, C++, combined with everything I love about scripting languages, and it’s really easy to make solid GUIs (graphical user interface) with it. Not that there aren’t problems in our relationship – it runs almost painfully slow, but what it lacks in speed it makes up in flexibility.

As I mentioned before, the only reason I’ve been messing around with it is because of iTunes’ API (application public interface for those playing at home; an API allows you to write your own program that interacts with the functions of another program in a publicly described fashion; for instance, Amazon.com publishes an API that allows other websites to grab information from their website using tools that Amazon.com has written). iTunes has this habit of keeping tabs on how many times you play any given song, and when you last played it, but if you play it on your iPod, it doesn’t keep track of that. Your iPod grabs the play counts from iTunes, but when you synchronize your iPod with your iTunes library, the times you’ve played your songs on your iPod seem to disappear. One way to solve this problem is to write a script using the API published by Apple.

There are a couple of other little tricks I’d like to teach iTunes, and so I’ve been putting together this little bundle of random tools with C#. It’s a lot of fun, and I figure it’s better than me playing Mario Cart.

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