Some updates to my FrankenFiiO collection. The V2 is now been turned into a V4, with the V3 serving as the one I actually use. The V4 was just a project to see if i could actually fit an amp inside a pice of wood 18mm thick. Turns out I can, yei.
The iPod Touch sounds bad, but iTunes has a lot of songs I couldn’t get before - it’s the dilemma between good SQ with old songs or poor SQ with new songs. To get the best of both world’s I had to go line out + amp. I’ve ordered a FiiO E5 but since it won’t be here for weeks i had to make something work in the meantime. The Fiio E3 sounds good and I had two, but it lacked a volume control. Enter the Frankenfiio.
I’ve actually never had an MP3 player that didn’t have some sort of button mess or other shit on the side. When I realized my new iPod Touch was free of this, a lot of possibilities opened up. First I did a wall mounted dock for syncing. Second, I found I needed a bed stand so I made one for that, and third I just made a wooden case for the thing. Enjoy pics after the jump.
When you write for a site called anythingbutipod, the last thing people would expect you getting is an iPod. I did however aquire an iPod Touch 1 gen 8GB for relatively cheap, and my thoughts are kinda half and half on this one.
It’s been a while since I’ve used an iPod for more than a few minutes at a time but my preconceptions about the thing was rather spot on. Sound quality sucks, although that’s something I knew already. It’s overly simple and lacks a lot of advanced features. iTunes however, surprised me. I uses a lot of RAM, hangs, annoys me and all that, but now that I’ve trained it it’s rather useful. I don’t use the touch as much for music as I do videos , podcasts etc and that’s where it really shines. Podcasts is handled very well via iTunes and it’s nice to be able to browse all podcast and for video podcasts have them all WORK (my sony only supports up to 320×240 resolution). Once I set it up right it deletes the episodes after I finish with them and it fixes all the copying to/deleting from shit.
Furthermore, music videos. I love how you can tag them and have them appear with the albums in the music browsing section and how the non-fullscreen viewing means it’ll work like video album art. Audible integration is also great, another thing I don’t have to do manually. Having iTunes actually synch shit is rather nice as I can change tags and such and have the app fix it on the player without deleting/disconnecting/reconnecting/transferring to avoid stupid MTP database problems.
Bottom line, I like the Touch because of iTunes based on what I use it for. It’s still an aweful music player because of the sound quality and the fact you’re locked to iTunes (it should have been optional, not everyone knows how to train it and out of the box it’s rather stupid). I’m not exactly going to give up writing for ABi as people shouldn’t buy iPods for music (which is what’s most commonly the use for an MP3 player) but I’m falling in love with it for my use which basically includes everythign BUT music. Might have to get a bigger capacity one.
Kevin, Matt and James from Mobiletechroundup was talking about MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) not being mainstream in episode 153 and even though they made it very clear they were speaking only about maintream consumers they still joked about getting hatemail because of it. This is a trend I’ve seen a lot of recently including with my audio format roundup article and other articles on anythingbutipod and on other sites. The problem seems to be articles that are based towards mainstream consumers, and the people that aren’t in this group disagree and “go to war”. The question is if the reality we’re facing is the Internet witout any mainstream consumers. Read on for more.
DealExtreme was one of the first stores I saw that carried the so called world’s smallest USB flash drive. As you can see from that link, there are now a lot of different flash drives on the same webshop that claim to be the world’s smallest. Guess what, neither of them are - by a long shot. if you look at a microSD card, those are way, way smaller than those flash drives. Add a USB interface to such a flash module, and you have a flash drive that could disappear in the USB port. As far as I know, no-one has - so I (kinda) did so myself. USB geek has something they call smart cables which are USB chargers that can hang on your phone. The smart cables also have tiny microSD readers inside the USB plug of the cables. Turns out, THIS is (as far as i know) the world’s smallest USB flash drive. Of course I had to rip out the USB part and after removing as much of the casing as possible I had a very tiny device that read my 2GB microSD card with no problems whatsoever. Remember this is a card and a card reader, meaning lots of casing that doesnt need to be there. Shouldn’t be a problem to make a flash drive smaller than this, instead of claiming the giant “world’s smallest” flash drives are the world’s smallest. Hit the jump for more pictures.
Don’t you just hate USB sticks that really do stick out like crazy? I like things that can be plugged in and left there, which is why I’m using a memory card in the Aspire One’s expansion bay for backup/file transfer and a logitech VX Nano mouse which has a tiny receiver. Unfortunately things like USB sound cards, the good Bluetooth adapters (not counting those tiny Bluesoleil only things), large flash drives and so on stick out - a lot. There are adapters to angle things, but they also stick out - just look at this ugly thing! I realized that if I wanted an adapter that would actually do what it was supposed to,I would have to make it myself.
Manually updating websites suck. After starting writing for anythingbutipod I never bothered to update my own site anymore due to it taking forever doing it in notepad. I finally pulled myself together and am now going wordpress for all it’s worth. Having spent all day transferring the worthy worklogs to blog style there are now a shitload of old projects listed with today’s date, so just bear in mind that they are frmo a long time ago. Any post after this entry will be new and have the correct date with regards to when they were made.
My now more or less dead hobby due to lack of customers/lack of effort to get said customers: glass engravings. This is just a few, I have more pics on my beloved PC but this should be enough to give a rough idea of what I’ve done. It’s not very hard, you just use a dremel with a diamond needle and draw on glas. As always, pics after the jump.
This project was the first multitable I made and since then I’ve made new tables to replace it as my needs have changed. I’ve gotten a lot of comments on this thing over the years so that’s why I’m including it now that I’m transferring stuff to blog style. As Bert Monroy of Pixel perfect says, it’s not the end result thats important but how you get there - a multitable like this is useful for a lot of people and all you need to do is use a little imagination and figur out what YOU need. Hit the jump for pics, pics and even more pics.