When there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
A guy on Ebay saw that I bought this FM transmitter and asked me what I thought of it. I’ve been happy with it. Here’s what I wrote:
I got mine for my iPod as well. I tried two different transmitters that I got at Best Buy and neither one worked very well but they were only $20 whereas this one was $36 including shipping. I thought with 3 batteries and a claimed range of 150′ that maybe the Linex would have more oomph. It is adequate, but not powerful.
This is a review I posted on Amazon for a FM transmitter that would let me play the iPod over any FM radio. I gave it one star.
I use a cassette adapter with my MP3 player in the car, but was hoping to have something I could use in the house that would let me keep the MP3 player close by for skipping songs, pausing, picking albums, and changing the volume. Wiring the MP3 directly into the stereo I had to get up any time I wanted to do those things.
One of the iPod’s more dubious but highly geeky features is the ability to store addresses, appointments, and notes just like a PDA. The iPod’s lack of any decent way of entering text means you can’t enter anything so you still need your Palm (or Outlook if you are Palmless) to actually enter all the info. So that means you need a way of dumping the info from the Palm (in my case) to the iPod.
When I got the iPod I also had to get Apple’s iTunes (well, not really; I wound up sticking with Windows 98 and using Ephpod to get songs onto the iPod, but I did set up a Windows 2000 hard drive and load iTunes on it).
After a number of weeks I finally got all the security patches in place for Windows 2000 and felt like I could take iTunes for a spin on the internet and download some songs. 99 cents per song is really pretty reasonable. I’ve bought entire albums before because they had 3 good songs. The problem with downloading is you don’t actually have something to hold. I think that tangible ownership is an important part of having music, but maybe I’m just old fashioned. Cover art used to be giant and double albums (and plenty of single albums) would open up to even bigger artwork in the middle. CD covers just aren’t as impressive though some of the disc graphics are kind of neat.
Tidbits this week and last week had gift ideas for iPod owners.
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07480
Since I don’t know any iPod owners except for me, I bought myself a gift (in ultra-violet):
http://www.radtech.us/podsleevz.html
The Tidbits guy likes it because (among other things) it takes some of the sensitivity away from the buttons.
One other accessory that is pretty neat is podlet that you connect to the top of the iPod that receives signals from a remote control. So that way you can hook up the iPod to your stereo and then skip forward, back, pause, control the volume, etc. with a remote. This guy suggests connecting the iPod to . . . . a PAL for a dynamite portable audio system. And he has a picture of it (the trouble, as he points out, is that while you can control the iPod from across the room, you can’t actually see anything on the display from across the room):
http://www.danfrakes.com/writing/images/TidBITS/iPodTivoliNavPod.jpg
It’s as if there is complete closure in the world. No doubt he has some way of turning the iPod into an Apache server so he can host Movable Type web logs too while listening to Lyle Lovett and Randy Newman.
