Well, I found out today that the Nano’s battery life is definitely more than 10 hours. I started listening to it on my way into work at 7:30am. When I got into my car at 5:30pm to go home, I discovered that I’d forgotten to pause it when I got to work, and it had been playing all day. It still had enough battery life in it to work on my trip home. Cool.
Category: Apple
More Nano cases
I don’t suppose I have any reasonable excuse for continuing to look at Nano cases. I really should have just bought one by now. Nevertheless, here are three more:
Nano cases
These DLO Cases for the Nano are nice too. I looked at a few other things reviewed at iLounge, but I didn’t see much else I liked.
The Nano itself worked fine in the car on the way to work and back today. The old iPod used to hiccup in the middle of podcasts occasionally, but the Nano doesn’t. I’m sure this has something to do with the limited size of cache memory on the old iPod vs. the relative speed of pulling stuff from the hard drive. The Nano doesn’t have a hard drive, so that’s not a problem.
iPod Nano
The battery in my old 1st gen 5GB iPod has been giving me trouble lately. Today, it got to the point where it seems to hold a charge for only about 10 minutes. I decided to give up on it, and trade it in for a 4GB Nano. I brought it in to the Apple Store in Bridgewater. They give you a 10% discount off a new iPod when you turn in an old one for recycling, so I got $25 off the $250 Nano. Not a bad deal. The salesperson thought I could have gotten more if I’d sold it on eBay, but I don’t think a 5GB 1st gen iPod with a dead battery would bring in more than $20, really, and I’d have to go through the trouble of listing it, shipping it, and all that fun stuff.
The Nano looks nice, and will hopefully be usable for listening to podcasts in the car, which is all I was really doing with the old iPod. My car charger for the old iPod won’t work with the Nano, but theoretically, I shouldn’t need one. The Nano’s supposed to have up to 14 hours of battery life. I’m thinking of getting either a Chums or Acme Made case for it.
iDevGames contest
There’s a bunch of free games for the Mac posted here, as part of a game development contest. I haven’t downloaded and played any yet, but some of them look interesting.
Open Source Mac
Here’s a nice list of open source Mac software.
MacFixIt – iBook problem
MacFixIt – Sudden loss of AirPort connectivity for iBook G4 mid-2005 series: I hope this doesn’t happen to my iBook!
MacTheRipper and MPlayer
I’m spending some time today looking around at various shareware and freeware Mac apps that might be useful on my new iBook. MacTheRipper is a DVD ripper for the Mac. This could be useful if I ever decide I want to rip a couple of DVDs to watch while I’m on vacation or something. Then, I could watch them with MPlayer.
Notetaking applications for the Mac
- NoteTaker from Aquaminds — nice look and some interesting features.
- StickyBrain from Chronos — lots of features. Can sync with iPod and Palm.
- NoteBook from Circus Ponies — big on outlining and general note-taking. Very colorful.
- MacJournal from Mariner — oriented towards keeping a personal journal and blogging.
- Formation from Radical Breeze — almost like a database program. Custom fields/forms, stuff like that.
- Hog Bay Notebook — appears to be a fairly simple notebook app. Nice-looking, though.
All of these are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, I’m still using iOrganize, which isn’t as flashy as any of these, but does the job.
iBook battery
I tried to calibrate the battery in my iBook today, but it’s 11:30pm now and it’s not quite drained yet, and I should probably just go to bed. Maybe I can try again tomorrow. Macworld has an interesting article about battery stuff too.