Category: Gadgets

iPod earbuds disassembled

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The other day my iPod ‘stock’ earbuds stopped working correctly.  At first I thought it might be something wrong with my ear, since the volume on the right side was so much lower than the left.  I swapped the buds around and the low volume followed – so it wasn’t my ears.  Next worry was that my iPod had gotten sick, but a quick check with another set of headphones and I knew I was ok.

While the stock iPod headphones aren’t anything special, I’ve grown to like them.  They are actually well matched to the iPod itself which I find to have background hiss when used with better headphones.  Most of my listening is done at about 1/3 volume anyways – I did enough damage to my hearing as a teenager, I like to pretend I’m smarter now.

Of course I had to take them apart to fix them.  Initially I had no idea how to open them up, searching around found me this posting on taking the older style apart.  It wasn’t until today that I found this video – but I had already figured it out myself.  In the picture above, you can see the two parts.  A little pressure with your thumb nail on the  joint and it will pop apart nicely.

Once I had them apart – I tested them to see if the problem was still there, so I could poke at the wires to see what was wrong.  They worked fine – no fiddling required.  So I simply popped the earbud back together and its been working normally since.  I suspect that the two wires had gotten twisted and were rubbing causing a short, but who knows.

Sometimes things just need to be taken apart and put back together.

Exit Review: Nokia 6585

img_0760This post is inspired by Bunnie’s Exit Review of his Blackberry, he also did one for his Thinkpad T60.  The concept is a good one, often our new gadget purchases are based on our personal past experiences as much as they are influenced by our friends and “the latest new thing”.

From the picture above, you can see that its had a hard life.  The paint is rubbing off on the corners, the keypad is starting to show black plastic under the chipped keys and the screen is held on with some scotch tape.  This phone has survived countless high impact falls to the floor, a few to pavement- and a handful that resulted in a yard sale style disassembly upon impact.

This was my 3rd Nokia phone.  When I purchased the 6585 in late 2004 I was switching from a GSM based carrier onto a CDMA carrier, my reasoning here was for improved coverage.  At the time, GSM coverage at my home was spotty (it has improved since).   I was attracted to the form factor (4.17” x 1.77” x 0.80”), and battery life (standby time 6 days).

Via eBay I did pick up the headset (with integrated radio antenna) which served me well.  Both the speaker phone and headset voice quality were such that I could be on a business conference call and people couldn’t tell that I wasn’t on my office phone.  As for extras, there wasn’t much to rave about.  The web browser would quickly drain your battery.  The screen 128×128 resolution and 4096 colours was poor.  The embedded java was only MIDP1.0.  The radio was a neat addition, but I never used it.

This phone does have an IRDA port on it.  This let me synchronize my contacts with a PC with the Nokia PC Suite.  I could also store pictures (low quality due to the display) on the phone to customize it.  This was also the first phone which I did any amount of text messaging with, and found the predictive T9 input to be fairly usable.  I also found the alarm clock to be invaluable when traveling – hotel alarm clocks can be challenging when you’re jet lagged.

I probably would still be using this phone had the battery life not degraded to the point where it needed charging daily to be reliable at all.  It was far too common to hear the sad ‘dee doop’ Nokia low battery sound from my pocket.

While the 6585 didn’t offer a lot of whiz bang features, it did work well as a phone.  The PC connectivity is something I can’t imagine not having now.   My new phone is another Nokia, more on that in a future post.

Nintendo DS Lite (NDS)

Gaming is what got me into computers, I was facinated by the idea that it was possible to create your own games.  I started out with the Commodore-64 which let me play lots of games, but also gave me a chance to learn a lot of programming.  My next computer was a PC (386sx) and by this time I was more focused on programming than gaming.  Later on after university I picked up a Nintendo 64, which in its day was a ground breaking console.  This was also around the time that id Software was reinventing the PC gaming market with Doom and later Quake – this resulted in many late nights sessions at work where we’d setup a network game after hours.

Having met some seriously fanatical gamers, I can’t call myself one.  I like to play from time to time, but the constant hardware upgrades and time investment keep me from being very serious.  In late 2004 I picked up a GameBoy Advance SP – it was a great way to kill time in an airport.  Ken had purchased a few MovieAdvance carts, which let me play some homebrew and movies (poor quality, but this is a 16MHz ARM chip!).  For my birthday in 2006 Jenn got me Nintendo DS Lite, and it is so much more than just a simple game machine..

When I got a copy of Super Mario 64 for the NDS, it completely blew my socks off.  Here is a game that in 1996 was one of the coolest looking (and fun) games I’d ever played – and now 10 years later its running on a handheld.  Of course there is also the well known side scrolling New Super Mario Bros and of course The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass which are must have games on the NDS.  Moving a bit away from games, the BrainAge series are very addictive – and the web browser gets regular use by me.

In my opinion a must have is one of the many flash cartridges for the NDS.  I bought an R4DS from consolesource.com back in early 2007.  The flash cart world is a bit odd, there is a very strong homebrew scene – but an even stronger pirate community.  The flash carts themselves live in a gray area, and are illegal to sell in some countries.  Some of companies making these products tend to seem a little shady as well, often creating cheap knock-offs so there is an element of buyer beware.

The R4DS takes a microSD card, which is almost hilariously small.  Let’s take a quick look at some of the software I have loaded on mine today.

There is plenty of other stuff as well, but those are a few highlights – every one is worth the time to download and install.

I also use the NDS as a reading light – so while I don’t play games every day, I do use it almost every night.  The new DSi looks very tempting, but I suspect I’ll wait until the price comes down a bit – and we start to see more software which is unique to the DSi.  I can’t wait to see what the homebrew community cooks up for it.