new ipod battery

My "old reliable" 4GB iPod Nano (purchased way back in 2005 in a moment of last-minute impulse buying at Perth Airport) recently reached a key milestone in its inevitable journey to obsolescence, as the battery charge-holding capacity crossed the sub-bus journey threshold. No longer able to rely on it to meet my audio needs for the length of my daily commute to work (even when fully charged immediately before leaving home), I was facing the prospect of having to consider a replacement.

But here's the thing: the damn thing was still working beautifully --- as it has for over 5 years now -- and didn't have a scratch on it. It seemed a terrible injustice -- not to mention an objectionable expense -- to be forced to replace it just because the lithium ion battery was succumbing to old-age charge incontinence.

So I did a little digging and was delighted to discover that an active (though still rather fringe) market exists for replacement ipod batteries. I was able to pick up a brand new one for around 23 bucks at the electronics store jaycar (aside: this was the first time I've been to this shop and I was impressed: their range of electronics supplies seems much better than Dick Smiths).

Unfortunately, installing the new battery (and getting the old one out) is a rather fiddly process. This is, of course, the downside to the iPod's lauded monolithic design. Nevertheless, I figured there wasn't much to lose, so I was happy to give it a shot (you can get it done professionally, but that runs to about $100 -- which is not really economical in comparison to the cost of a new ipod). Getting the case open took a while and required a lot of careful prodding of the plastic tool supplied with the battery). The existing battery had 3 wires soldered to the main PCB. Not trusting my soldering skills, I took the easy option and cut these, then twined the new ones around the stumps of the old, and finally covered them with a small bit of sellotape. Popped the case back on and that was it -- operation successful!

One week on, the new battery is working like a charm: I'm now recharging less than once per day -- which equates to about 5-6 hours listening time per charge, possibly more. And, equally importantly, it holds its charge for extended periods without use (like over the weekend).

So my wallet is granted a reprieve and my ipod lives to fight another day. To be honest it's a great example of my love/hate relationship with Apple products: on the one hand, it's a testament to the quality of the thing that it's still around to need the battery replaced after a few years (there's no way you'd do the same with a mobile phone, for example); but on the other hand, it's infuriating that they design it in such a way as to make changing the battery such a pain.

Here's a thought... this is a great example of where sensible government regulation could help: simply levy a hefty tax on all portable gizmos that aren't designed with easily  replaceable (i.e. without requiring tools) batteries, and implement a set of standards for lithium-ion batteries so that they are as interchangeable and universal as good old AAA and AA alkaline batteries. Apple wouldn't like it --- because they'd sell a lot less ipods and iphones --- but it would save a lot of gadgets from a premature trip to the scrapheap.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010)

Despite the lacklustre reviews, this was always going to be a must-see for me. Fortunately, it surprised mildly to the upside: it's hardly a classic, but I quite enjoyed it -- and I think the same would be true for most people who remember the original Wall Street. 

It's pretty cheesy in parts (a particular low point on this front is the testosterone-drenched motorbike ride between young hot-shot trader Shia LeBoeuf and his would-be mentor Josh Brolin), and relies quite heavily on nostalgic allusions to the original film (the cameo by Charlie Sheen as former Gekko protege Bud Fox is a shameless "where are they now" moment).

The movie's storyline is based around the financial crisis of 2008 (a fairly natural theme, one would imagine, for any film involving the finance industry to be made for the next 10 years or so..). It's fairly well-handled for the most part, although much of the trading floor and board-room scenes are overdone (the meetings at the Federal Reserve, featuring a cast of lookalikes representing the real players, are particularly cringeable -- with bankers trading insults with all the sophistication of a bunch of quarrelling high school kids). 

My favourite part was towards the end where Gekko gets back "in the game". Having spent the first two-thirds of the film on the sidelines -- a shell of his former self reduced to living in a modest (though tasteful) rented apartment -- we finally see him re-emerge in all his cigar-chomping glory: hair slicked back, getting fitted out for bespoke business suits and shoes, and talking the talk in his inimitable "they wouldn't know preferred stock from livestock" style. You almost want to cheer -- almost.

"Funk: the Music, the People, and the Rhythm of The One", by Rickey Vincent

Funk: The Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One by Rickey Vincent

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting read for anyone who wants to learn more about the history of funk music and its major artists. Worth noting is the excellent discography which I found very useful as a guide to delving further into the funk universe.

It's not an incredibly well-written book though: stylistically, it hovers uncomfortably between a serious piece of musical/cultural writing and a throwaway hype-driven magazine article. There's a lot of flowery waffle and in some parts it seems to lose a sense of direction. Content-wise, it's lacking in direct input from original practitioners, and doesn't go into as much depth as I would have liked on the actual music itself.

Another mild peeve for me is the occasionally militant attitude of the author, an African American, towards race issues in the US and the contribution of white musicians to funk music. Quotes like "Unfortunately, any time white musicians get into a black thang, things can get messy" (here describing white scottish funksters Average White Band) seem to diminish, unfairly, the contribution of non-black musicians to funk music. And as a white boy confronted with this residual bitterness you can't help but echo Ben Folds' sentiment in Rockin' The Suburbs: "because my great-great-great grandaddy made someone's great-great-great grandaddy his slave.... it wasn't my idea!".

Nevertheless, short-comings aside it is essential reading for noobs to the genre, like myself.

A couple of interesting factoids that I learned in the discussion of rap and hip-hop music towards the end:

1. Part of the riff to Tone Loc's Wild Thing is actually a sample of Van Halen's Jamie's Crying.

2. Rage Against The Machine's Renegades of Funk is actually a (brilliant) cover of a rap song by Afrika Bambaataa from 1983.

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Ricky Gervais takes on Hollywood big names in Golden Globes opener

Worth checking out in its entirety. Absolutely priceless is Robert de Niro's embarrassed laugh at about 4:23 --- looking scarily like Max Katy.

Acting out in the basement

A few pics of the set of shelves that Handyman Gekko just erected in the garage...

Well, since you ask, it's made from 7 x 4.5 cm treated structural pine; the frame for each shelf was screwed together before attaching to the wall with 7.5cm 14G bugle head screws; next, the three vertical supports in front were attached with 6" long 3/8" bolts; and finally, the melamine shelves were screwed into place with 5cm screws.

With a fairly rough costing, the raw materials add up to about $200, which is probably more than I would have paid for an (admittedly much flimsier) made-in-china mdf + metal frame job --- but then I wouldn't have had the fun of making a racket for half the weekend, and where's the fun in that?

You don't need a Glock to shoot holes in this pro-gun drivel

For those of us not living in the US, news of each new semi-automatic gun massacre is usually cause for a mild head-shaking, muttering of "boy, what a nutcase", and then, finally, "and STILL they won't ban guns". It's kind of comforting to see this bizarre situation as an awful consequence of lobby groups like the NRA and head-the-balls like Charlton Heston; it's much more worrying when you read serious-minded academics (from Harvard, no less) writing gun-lobby-sympathetic drivel like what has just appeared on Bloomberg:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-13/strict-gun-control-will-seem-like-war-on-drugs-jeffrey-miron.html

I offer up some of the choicest cuts for your consideration:

Would these or other laws prevent incidents like the Arizona shooting? Probably not. And such laws, along with existing gun controls, not only harm responsible gun owners but may even increase violence.

Consider, for example, a ban on extended-capacity ammunition clips. If these had been unavailable, Loughner could still have carried out his attack with a 10-bullet clip, and he might have aimed more carefully knowing he had less ammunition. Loughner could have brought several guns, allowing him to continue firing without interruption. Loughner could have purchased extended-ammo clips that were sold before a ban took effect (especially since the prospect of bans stimulates sales in advance of implementation). Or he could have bought a black- market clip, perhaps just by placing a classified advertisement.

So, it was better that he had a 30-bullet clip: otherwise, who knows how many more people he might have killed by aiming "more carefully" and carrying extra guns.

And since he could have just bought it black-market anyway, what's the point in outlawing anything -- drugs for instance?

But gun controls, even mild ones, do have adverse consequences.

At a minimum, these laws impose costs on people who own and use guns without harming others, whether for hunting, collecting, target practice, self-defense, or just peace of mind. The inconvenience imposed by bans on extended-ammunition clips or waiting periods to buy a gun might seem trivial compared with the deaths and injuries that occur when someone like Loughner goes on a rampage. And if the only negative from these controls were such inconveniences, society might reasonably accept that cost, assuming these controls prevent some acts of violence.

So there we have it: we need to balance the tragic slaughter of innocent people by a madman, against the inconvenience of all those saintly gun owners who "own and use guns without harming others"! Seems like a fair trade doesn't it? But hang on, what exactly can you use a deadly for, apart from harming others? Luckily, the author offers some examples:

Hunting: oh that's okay, because there you're just gunning down innocent, possibly endangered, animals. And you need the 30-clip because just having a gun wouldn't give you a fair chance.

Collecting: umm... so why do you need bullets?

Target practice: what are you practicing for?

Self-defense: so, if you shoot someone in self-defense that doesn't count as harm? Tell it to judge, honey!

Peace of mind: this weaselly catch-all is the best of the lot -- and doesn't really need any further explanation. Go ask the shooting victims and their families about how much "peace of mind" a country full of gun-totin' rednecks gives them.

But mild controls don't always stay mild; more often, they evolve into strict limits on guns, bordering on outright prohibition. And this isn't just slippery-slope speculation; a century ago most countries had few gun controls, yet today many have virtual bans on private ownership. Some of these countries (the U.K. and Japan) have low violence rates that might seem to justify strict controls, yet others experience substantial or extreme violence (Brazil and Mexico).

So clearly, there's no discernible pattern here. I mean, it's not like you'd expect the UK and Japan, as first-world countries, to be more similar to the US than Brazil and Mexico, is it?

More broadly, comparisons between states and countries --as well as social-science research -- provide no consistent support for the claim that gun controls lower violence.

Australia, post Martin Bryant, would seem to be a good example, wouldn't it?

Beyond being ineffective, gun prohibition might even increase violence by creating a large black market in guns. So if gun laws follow the path of drug laws, we can expect more violence under gun prohibition than in a society with limited or no controls.

As mentioned above, by this argument nothing should be outlawed -- clearly a contradiction for a country that outlaws a fairly tame and ubiquitous substance like mary jane?

Gekko likes: Zadie Smith article on Facebook

Very interesting (though quite lengthy) article on Zuckerberg and Facebook (ZS was actually at Harvard when the Facebook prototype Facemash was released in 2003). She does a great job of articulating some of the reasons why we should be skeptical of Facebook and the social-networking era it has ushered in. The conclusion:

The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

Inception (2010)

I enjoyed this smart, stylish sci-fi mind-bender from Christopher Nolan (of recently-rejuvenated Batman franchise fame) starring Leo di Caprio. It takes about 10-20 minutes to get going, but after that moves along at a decent clip giving you just enough time to keep up as the rather convoluted plot unfolds. Thematically, it's strongly redolent of The Matrix films (there's even an "Architect" --- remember the bearded Papa Smurf fellow from Matrix Revolutions?), but the atmosphere evokes more the melancolic, mild dystopia of Minority Report or AI.

One of the better films I've watched in a while (and much better than the disappointing Surrogates -- another sci-fi flick that I watched not long ago). Recommended.

The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music, by David Buckley

The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music by David Buckley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well-written and researched biography of the band, focussing on enigmatic lead singer Bryan Ferry. I found this considerably more comprehensive than another biography on the band that I read a while back (Unknown Pleasures, by Paul Stump), and it's also more recent, being written in 2004.

The major shortcoming for me is the paucity of direct interviews with the band members -- we get plenty (indeed, often an excess) of opinionated quotes from lesser known associates of the band and various other hangers on, presumably quite happy to get their two cents on the record -- but what's glaringly absent are the opinions that really count. I'd love to read lengthy discussions/confessions from Ferry and Eno regarding Eno's acrimonious departure from the band after the second album, or Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger regarding the latter's wooing of the former away from a hapless Ferry. But probably even the most clout-wielding journalist in town would be unable to elicit such information, so it's not surprising that it's well beyond the author's reach. That being said, the author does provide a balanced, and at times starkly critical, perspective on Ferry that would perhaps would have suffered from greater collaboration with the singer.

I'd like to see a second edition (though not sure if I'd bother to read it), updated to include Ferry's latest solo effort, Olympia -- which is actually quite a decent album.

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