1) Not recharging
Turns out that if I leave the dock plugged into my CD burner (which is a firewire hub), the iPod stays on all night and the battery? Dies. If I take it out when I shut down my Mac, all is good.
2) Web Pages -> Notes
Still doing it by hand. Sucks ass, but … there you are then. I’ve been using a program called Book2Pod to convert my text to notes, and it works as well as anything else. The only ‘issue’ I have is that if my iPod is idle (as in I haven’t accessed it as a hard drive recently), it’ll crash. Which sucks, but once I figrued that out, I was cool.
3) Mac iPod on a PC
I’ve given up using my iPod on a PC. Seriously. If I have soemthing to add to my calendar, I email it to myself. Other than that, it’s fine. The irony is if I wiped my iPod and made it a PC iPod, I’d be fine on Mac and PC. But. I hate Windows, and I won’t do it.
The iPod rocks. I can listen to 10+ hours of music (I’ve never tried more, and the 10+ was at a gaming session). I can listen to two hours of music and read Notes or play Solitare, and the battery gets no more than half-way down. That’s of constant, always on, use, without ever going into ‘sleep’ mode where it just plays music. This is power using! And it rocks.
I don’t really use the Photo capacity, though I did throw some pictures of my family on there instead of having it in my wallet.
So in the anti RIAA front- no, really, just the music/technology front:
Yahoo! wants to make an MP3 Player/Music store. More on this when I see more than a headline (thank you, Bloomberg, now please write some better software).
Sony’s new MP3 players are ‘attacking’ the iPod. One is a tiny ‘stick’ and has a gig of space and a 50 hour battery life of a AAA battery. Uh huh, I find that hard to buy, if it has an FM tuner and a display, sorry. They claim three minutes of charge for three hours of life, using these new ‘Stamina’ batteries. The others that I’ve seen look like CD players, all round and such, though now that I’ve found a good picture, they fit in the hand, so I’d say they were about a 1-2″ diameter. The difference between Sony and iPod? I knew you’d ask. Sony’s using Flash memory, which is essentially a floppy disk. iPods use a hard drive which is … like a hard drive. They each have their own foibles, frankly.
Now all that said, I don’t mean to be an iPod elitest. I think competition is healthy for the economy as well as for technology. Innovation rocks. I like the iPod for form and function. Do I wish I could easily replace the battery? Yes. But as my friend learned with her Zen, that has drawbacks. A battery leaked, corroded the player, and it died. It was under warrenty so she got a new one, and had it in a bag with her iPod. The bag was dropped. The iPod? Kept working. The Zen was dead.
These are extremes. I’m sure people are happy with their MP3 Player of choice. I am. And I love iTunes. Is it perfect? No. I’d love to be able to store my playlists in folders so that I could have Artist -> Album, and then sort by release date. But.
Ah well. I’m done rambling on for now.