30GB iPod from the dumpster

Sometimes there are things that really leave you gobsmacked in a good way. Today seems to be one of those. Everything seems into flow and fall into its place and some things fall – strangely enough – into the dumpster. Checking our electronic trash at work from time to time brought me a lot of useful things for my projects. From sorted out old CRT screens down to cables and cases, hence quite a few good things turned up, but today it must have been christmas. I spotted a 5th gen iPod in the trashbox and thought I just keep it for our museums project… Apple has revolutinionized the music industry with this, right? To my surprise the box was not empty and to an even bigger the surprise the enclosed iPod 30GB seems to be in quite a good shape- some scratches and some spots … okay, but quite good to put it on display.

I hooked it up to my mac and it stated “low battery” and displays backlight beeing off. I waited and waited and finally it came up. A quick launch of iTunes showed that it kept all its files on there … WOW, that thing seems to work. After formating it and putting some music on it was time to check if there’s probably some trouble with the music output (e.g. the jack) itself. No! All just working fine and the music came out to the hooked up speakers. All buttons working and the clickwheel operating just as it supposed to. Damn it! Finnaly I got an iPod. Back in the day I opted for an iRiver 320, as it was an open system and a little hacked firmware in the name of Rockboxx was just released, making the player play tons of formats, including SID (C64 music) and MODs (Amiga modules) and lots more. Most people won’t even call it music, but nerd that I am, this is the music I grew up with and that is some kind of timemachine to go back to easier days. 😉 Anyway, my iRiver is still running, with an new battery that I popped it lately but it has one big drawback and that is the flimsy buttons to operate it. Don’t ask how often it cam close to an desaster when trying to choose a new song, while driving.

A quick question to to big G revealed that Rockboxx can be put on iPods as well, now. Wow… what a day. After reformating the Pod under virtualPc with the PC version of iTunes, I could install it. Rockboxx needs a Fat32 partition and this was the easiest way to get it. The actuall High Voltage SID Collection cosists of  more than 42.000 SIDs, but as one SID file is around 2kb the whole collection is only about 230MB. And so WOW again… all the music from the c64 on one tiny iPod, with good navigation – expect me to have some loud SID-music-drive-home-session, tonight.

But honestly: Although there is a lot of wining about sinking living standards, but when I find something like this in the trash bin I can’t follow these trend. If you throw away something like this you must have still enough money to buy a new one. On the other hand 5th gen is about 6 years old now… and there are more shiny things out there. Whoever, however: Thanks, anyway!

iPod - with packageing, right out of the dumpsteriPod with low battery warning... but running at leastiPod, with Rockboxx installed, playing Rob Hubbards "Lightforce" ... yeahhh

 

 

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