heavydog

I’m onto my second (actually, 4th, but for the purposes of this story, I’m only counting the two iPod colours) iPod from Apple. I got an iPod colour over a year ago now, it all worked wonderfully until I dropped it on the floor. Then it started making tractor noises and I sent it back.

Apple, bless them, sent me a refurb unit. But within 2 weeks, this refurb unit was doing exactly the same thing. Being that it was out of warranty then, there was not a lot I could do.

So, what I have to do now, is bang it on the desk, gearknob, knee or wall of what/whoever I am nearby and it works, for the most part.

Except, now it doesn’t work as often. It will have days where it freezes after every other song and requires a reboot - which is fucking annoying. Sometimes it boots into Linux, which is cool, but won’t play music because there are podcasts on there (WTF?), so I have reboot it back into the Apple OS.

So, I have a ?400 semi-useful paperweight now, which works when it wants to. Bastard thing.

I did the only thing I knew would make me happier: I attacked it with a dremel.

First I stuck some sticky-backed plastic over it, cut out the shape that I wanted to remain shiny, then used one of the brush things on my dremel to scuff it up.

I got a bit impatient after a while as it was taking too long, so I tried one of the more abrasive sanding bits, but that was a bad idea, you can see where I did that, it scuffed it differently and you couldn’t sand over the plastic (which you could with the softer brush).

Still, it’s come out OK and to be honest, I’m not that bothered, it’s destined for the trash anytime soon, unless I can get a replacement hard drive, but I don’t really want to fork over the money to Apple, as then it feels like I would have bought the same thing from them twice.

I’ll wait until the 20th April …