Why buy new? How to boost that old ipod mini for under 50 bucks

I hate to give up without a fight.  When something breaks, I do my best to fix it before giving up on it for good.  I also hate losing, especially when losing means having to pay Apple for a new iPod.

So when my beloved ipod mini, constant companion for the past four years and occasional gag post prop, died a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t mourn the loss and start to shop around for a brand new replacement.  I looked at it as an opportunity to tear the thing apart and try to make it work again.  A quick look at a few sites and I learned how I could build myself a new – and much bigger -  ipod mini for under 50 bucks.

I know the mini is old, that a brand new 16GB Nano that has a colour screen and shoots video isn’t expensive, but so what?  I don’t need a colour screen to read text, music videos have always bored me to hell, and you don’t need to shoot video with an iPod.  Who thought that one up, anyway?

Besides, if you’re used to handling the mini, you’ll find the wafer-thin Nano much too light, its feel too flimsy.

Another great thing about the mini – besides its substantial heft, smooth hand feel and functional simplicity – is how easily it can be taken apart.

Using only the two screwdrivers – one to pry the ends off and the other to remove two tiny screws holding the guts to the outer frame – I had everything apart within five minutes.

I would go into lavish detail about how to do all that, including why you also need a hair dryer for the job, but that would simply be repeating what is already available on this easy-to-follow how-to video.

I could have replaced the old hard drive with a 32GB card, but since I only need it for music and podcasts, the huge size and extra expense would go to waste.

So I swapped the old 4GB hard drive for a 16GB compact flash, and threw in a new battery at the same time.

After formatting the new flash card and charging the battery, iTunes at first wouldn’t load onto it, but after a bit of iTunes tweaking and reformatting, it finally worked.

Sorry, Apple shareholders.  Your company’s bottom line won’t get much help from me.

last day of inline skating around the hamburg alster?

There’s a lot to do in Hamburg, but one thing that’s been going on for a long time now might be gone forever.

A few Sundays a year they used to close off the streets ringing the beautiful Alster lake at the centre of the city so that inline skaters – rollerbladers if you like – could do their thing.   It was only for three or four hours in the afternoon, but if you skate well enough, that’s enough time to go around the lake a few times.

But now, because they can’t get the sponsors willing to shell out the total of €15,000 the city is asking for blocking off the streets and security, organisers are reduced to asking participants to donate a few euro each.

I gave them a few bucks yesterday, but as one of the people setting up the course yesterday said, things don’t look good.  He said they’re now reduced to holding it only once a year, and each time there are fewer people showing up.  I guess it’s just not a trendy sport anymore.

As for the city getting involved, forget it.  Hamburg would rather sink untold millions into the bottomless pit of taxpayer dough called the Hamburg Philharmonic Concert Hall.

Ah well.  We had some fun while it lasted.    I get yelled at right at the end of this video, though I can’t figure out what she’s saying…

Weekend massacre leaves thousands of wasps dead, cherry trees plundered

Thousands of wasps were too stupid to find the exit over the weekend, dying a horrible death by drowning in a trap filled with a mixture of warm water and honey. The wasps entered the trap carefully placed over the entrance to a nest they had built in the garden of Oma’s place out in farming country near Osnabrück, Germany.

“It was a wasp massacre,” said police spokesman Igott Heimweh, “but just looking at them, you just have to shake your head, cuz damn, they’re dumb.  I mean, they flew into the hole at the bottom, OK?  But then they didn’t turn around and fly out.  And once they hit that water, game over. They just flailed around a bit, then drowned.”

The bodies started to pile up almost immediately after the bell-shaped jar filled with sweet, alluring liquid was placed over the nest.  By next morning it was so full of dead or dying insects, it had to be emptied.

“‘Absolutely disgusting,’” one child with red hair was overheard to say as the dead insects were poured out.  “Iggit-iggit.”

The jar is a clever way to kill wasps without using the traditional Canadian methods of bombarding them with chemical insecticide sprays or smashing the nest open with a hockey stick to stomp on the enraged insects with lumberjack boots.

In a related weekend incident, a marauding band of cycling summertime fruitarians plundered Oma’s two nearby cherry trees.  The mostly immobile nonagenarian could merely sit back and watch as the intruders placed an extendable ladder to their upper reaches to gain access to the ripest fruit clustered on the heavily laden branches.

After stuffing as many of the dark, juicy orbs into their mouths as they could in a 48-hour period, the bandits filled their packs and set off on the train again north for an evening of cooking them up with a mixture of sugar and pectin.  Ten jars of the darkest, richest, most delicious cherry jam you will never, ever find on German store shelves are now safely stored in the basement of an undisclosed Hamburg location, to be consumed sometime over the next few months.

The railway that’s in my blood.

Exactly 30 years ago today I stepped off a Via Rail passenger coach in the middle of the night in McBride, BC, to begin training for a summer job with Canadian National Railways.

They say once you’ve worked for a railway, you might leave the job, but the job never leaves you.  The trains get in your blood.  I believe it.

I even shoot videos of them.  Here’s a westward CN train at Redpass, BC, taken on our last family trip to Canada in 2006.

Although it was mostly office work, a vital part of the job involved standing right alongside the tracks facing an oncoming freight train exactly like that one.  As the engine got close, I’d reach up and pass messages attached to a long pole to the engineman leaning out of the cab.  Once the 100 cars or so had rolled by, I’d pass a copy of that message to the conductor standing on the back steps of the caboose.

The job was called Train Order Operator.  On the CN, it doesn’t exist anymore.  The implements we used to perform it are now in museums, and some of the buildings we showed up to work in are themselves being used as museums to display them.

The caboose is also long gone, replaced by a beacon that sends vital information about the air pressure in the train’s brake system by radio to a display up in the front-end cab.

So is the first office they sent me to work on my own.    Sixty miles up the hill east of McBride in the middle of the Rocky Mountains on the edge of Moose Lake near the headwaters of the Fraser River, I’d sit in a cramped, fly-infested cube wedged between the mainline tracks running between Vancouver, BC and Jasper, Alberta, and the branch line tracks that started at Redpass Junction and ended about 550 miles west on the coast at Prince Rupert, BC.

Right on the spot you see in that video.

Wedged at the bottom of a valley surrounded on all sides by some of the finest Canadian parkland wilderness you can find, I’d sit completely alone at the height of summer in my overheated little cubbyhole and type out those train orders on a manual typewriter as the dispatcher dictated them.  Once he issued the order, I’d repeat it back by spelling out every place name and every number letter-by-letter, bundle the order in a string along with a clearance – an OK from the dispatcher that the train crew had all the messages it needed to get down the next stretch safely – and pass it along to the train.

The trains would roll by the mainline tracks about once an hour on busy days, but all I’d do is step out of the office and watch the wheels go by.   If there was a smoker – a wheel whose bearings had drained of grease or otherwise heated up so hot it might melt and fall off – I’d get on the line and tell the dispatcher in Kamloops, so he could radio the train to stop and have the crew check it out.

I had no messages to pass to them because the trains on the high-traffic main line were all controlled by a dispatcher hundreds of miles away using a centralised traffic control system installed in the 1960s. But on the low-traffic branch line they still used train orders, a system whose roots reach back 100 years to the beginnings of railroading, when the only way to communicate was by telegraph.

Aside from this post about falling asleep at the wheel, I’ve been waiting 30 years to write about my time on the railway.    This is the first of an occasional series.  Expect delays, derailments, and trips down side-tracks.