Category: Apple

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.

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.

new iBook

My new iBook showed up today! So far, so good. Migrating information from the old iBook was really easy, using Tiger’s Migration Assistant. It took about an hour over FireWire. Now, I’m letting it run Software Update. That looks like it’ll take another hour or so. When all is said and done, I should have an iBook much like my old one, only with a bigger screen, faster processor, bigger hard drive, etc, etc. Much less hassle than I’d have migrating a Windows machine.