I had, many years ago, an iPod. And wonderful though it was, one day it stopped working. You could turn it on but beyond that it steadfastly refused to even impersonate working. So, harbouring an irrational fear of getting things serviced when they're broken, I dodged another malfunction and bought a new one.

Today, I have been stuck in the house all day waiting for an electrician to come and fix the shower (ironic maybe, but only in the Alanis Morrissette sense of the word, which is to say not at all) and decided to pass the time by making his old, broken iPod work. Unfortunately, I got it working.

Bear in mind that this is a marvellous achievement because, frankly, my ability at breaking things far outweighs my ability at fixing them. This newly-functioning 2nd generation iPod is one of the few things I've actually fixed, possibly the first. In fact, I may have passed some kind of repair tipping point, because the long-malfunctioning screen on my eMac appears to be working which makes a change. This is in one regard a Good Thing: I may have gained the ability to unbreak things. In another, it's less than perfect: why would anyone need two iPods?

There is, I imagine, a difference between owning an iPod and, say, an iPod Shuffle given the differences in capacity and features. There's probably a case for having an iPod and an iPod mini, even if it is entirely spurious. All of this means that there cannot really be a case for owning two 'standard' iPods. What's the point? I can store all of my CDs on one and almost all of them on the other one, which would give me at least three copies of most of the music I own. I could gaffa-tape them together and pretend to have a 60Gb monstrosity, though that might limit the portability of the thing.

Or, I could get one of these...


[picture from/link to Engadget]