iPod downgrade

I recently downgraded from iPod touch to my old iPod 5G.

Photo by ®em©o

One of the biggest problems of the iPod touch were usability problems. For instance, I was not able to control the slide in small enough increments to effectively rewind or fast forward. While this might not be a big issue with a 3 minute song, it was extremely annoying when listening to a 2 hour podcast and wanting to rewind some seconds. With the dial of the 5G I am able to fast forward or rewind very precisely.

Another usability problem of the iPod touch is actually a feature: the accelerometer. It will automatically rotate the screen when rotating the iPod and there is no way to prevent it. Well, at least I didn't find any. This made watching videos while lying in bed a serious pain in the butt. With the 5G I can just hold it any way I like and watch my videos without breaking my neck.

Plus, there are no buttons on the iPod touch, except for volume control. If I want to pause, I first have to "wake" the iPod touch (or even worse: unlock it) and the same goes for resuming. All of this is just one button press on the 5G. Same goes for skipping a song, or jumping back to the one you just heard.

I also had sometimes the problem that I wanted to listen to a particular song and I navigated through the menus of the iPod touch only to accidently click on one of the categories at the bottom of the screen while trying to select the last item in the list. Sure, I occasionally misclick on the 5G too, but there I can correct the mistake with the back button. On the iPod touch I have to nagivate through the menus all over again. Same thing when the song is over: on the 5G I can come back to the same position by default when pushing the middle button (to play the song again or selecting the next album of the same artist). On the iPod touch, you will instead have fun finding your song or artist again in huge scroll lists.

But those are only usability issues. Another huge factor for me is the closed system that Apple not only does everything in their power to control how you modify it, or which apps you can install, it also applies a censorship policy that would even have been prude in Victorian England. Of course there is always the possibility to jailbreak it, but any system update will also remove the jailbreak and that is quite annoying.

So the only real choice for me was to "downgrade" to a real mp3 player. As a small bonus, I also got a 120 GB replacement harddrive which is double the amount of space on the most expensive iPod touch.

I only found two small downsides of the 5G compared to the iPod touch: the audio quality is not quite as good and the iPod is not as responsive. But those two downsides are nothing compared to the major annoyances of the iPod touch/iPhone system.

New Project

Partially inspired by the Greedy Goblin, I have decided to start a little project, or enterprise, if you will: a new character in World of Warcraft, on a fresh realm, with no gold or support whatsoever and focus on earning gold.

As it is not yet possible to play goblins yet, I decided to go for the next best thing: a gnome warlock.

Money on the Street

So I was wondering how it could be possible to earn money if you had no job and no assets, like as a homeless person. The first thing I came up with, was finding lost coins on the street. Sure, you could probably not earn a lot. But how much would be possible? I decided to give it a shot and went out one afternoon to explicitly search for money.

Walk of Life by BlakJakDavy

For half an hour, I was not able to find anything. Apparently I had decided to search for coins right after the whole city had been cleaned. But then I got to the railway station and found something. No coin, but a banknote over 10 euros. It was my only find this day, but the result was pretty amazing for only 1 hour of work.

10 euros is probably enough to put it in the bank and earn interest. I just have to find out if this is possible without paying any fees.

More hamster for the buck

Apparently I was wrong in my initial assessment that the price of my hamster was 135 dollars because it turned out he (well, she to be correct) was pregnant. She gave birth to a litter of six and while I might not be able to make much money with my new hamster wheel power production facility, I actually made a better deal than expected.


Total cost of acquisition: 135 dollars (or around 29.39 dollars per hamster).

New Hamster

So my bank has this nice little scheme: Not only are they trying to steal my hard earned doubloons by charging me fees for nearly everything, they are also trying to create the impression as if I was earning something when paying their fees by giving me some "points" in return. Those points, each of which cost me around 2 cents, can then be utilized to buy massively overpriced rubbish in their shop. Like an iPod nano with 8 GB for around 1000 dollars worth of points (current price at Amazon.com is 135 dollars).

Anyway, at the end of last year I had to get something as my saved points were about to expire. Yep, not only are they nearly worthless, they also expire after some time. It appears that I made quite a deal here.

I finally decided to invest my points in a gift card for a local garden center where I used it to buy this cute little dwarf hamster:

Commander Norton. Total cost of acquisition: 135 dollars.

Now, I wonder how long it would take him to become profitable by selling hamster wheel power to an electric utility.