Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Well, I did it Friday, but I missed the outgoing truck, so it went out Saturday.

Stupid headphone jack needed replacing. It was rather odd in that it played well with my Toyota, but not with my wife's Subaru. I paid to have it expressed back, so I should have it before we head up to Colorado in 3 weeks.

It's an iPod Touch, only a little 8 gig. But it's an insanely useful device as I use it as a PDA+. I started using Palm Pilots probably 15+ years ago with a Palm III given to me by my best friend who had no interest in it. It was crazy love at first pen stroke. It became my alarm clock, address book, note pad, ebook reader, etc. I went from the III to a Vx, wore out the Vx and got a second, when that one died I bought a TX which was an utter piece of garbage. Replaced that with a Z22 (IIRC) and when that started flaking I bought a Dell WinCE PDA. Another utter piece of garbage.

Just over two years ago I heard about the applications available for the iPod Touch.

I can't say it's a perfect PDA, but it is pretty darn good. I have some specific gripes with their calendar program and the rather inflexible repeat date arrangement, plus you can't snooze alarms. I love it as an ebook reader, and recently found a notepad program that actually encrypts your entries, so now I feel better about having private information stored on it.

And now I'm without it for a week or so.

The thing is, it's a half hour drive to town or the observatory with pretty much no radio coverage, not that I'm too keen on local radio. It then occurred to me that my car stereo can play MP3 CD's....

I grabbed a box of CD-RW's at Walmart and started burning yesterday. I burned a couple of playlists that I tend to frequent, and learned that you can make playlists of podcasts in iTunes! Definite bonus, as I listen to lots of podcasts. So I make a podcast CD. And then I think about the 2,000 mile trip we're taking to Colorado, back to Santa Fe, over/down to Phoenix, then back to Cloudcroft. And I think about all those Onion podcasts sitting around...

So I make an Onion podcast playlist and copy all the unplayed podcasts into it. I plug in 8 months of podcasts, a total of 126 recordings for 3 hours taking 750 meg. Then I look at my podcast playlist: 14 podcasts, 6.5 hours, 200 meg. Huh. There must be something in the MP3 lossy compression that favors longer run times as a percentage of file compression. The Onion podcasts are between 30 seconds and 4 minutes whereas the other podcast playlist has two at 5 minutes and the rest between 15 and 60 minutes. I've always wanted to look in to how MP3 compression works, maybe one of these days I will.

One very important thing to remember when burning playlists to CD is to watch the sorting of the list before you click Burn. For podcasts, I prefer sorted by date so that I get them in pretty much the order that I downloaded them in. For music, I generally go alphabetical by song title so that I don't usually get the same artist back to back. And when doing this, make sure you use CD-RW so that they can be erased and re-recorded as you decide to make changes or add/remove podcasts.

I have odd things that I do with music, like my previous "listen to all of my music in alphabetical order." Yes, I listen to my favs, I have several cool play lists on my iPod, etc. We were driving up to my aunt's Tuesday night and I was playing a new list that I made a couple of weeks ago of songs on my iPod that hadn't been played in 2008. They actually probably had been, but I had to reinitialize and reformat my iPod when it glitched on me earlier this year. So the iPod starts playing "Too Many People" and my wife starts looking a little perplexed. Finally she asks "Is that Roger Daltrey?" I almost laughed. Instead I said "Nope. But it's from the same era, and like The Who, the band has also had two members die." Which isn't technically accurate, as I was thinking of The Beatles vs The Who. She wasn't in a trivia game mood, so finally I picked up the iPod and showed her: Paul & Linda McCartney, Ram.

I think she is still a little perplexed.

This is VERY cool, me want! iPod cases don't do anything for me, but this one stirred immediate lust.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/11/steampunk-ipod-.html