Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Apple’s iPod Shuffle Sucks

Posted in Apple, iPod, iPod Shuffle by Elliott Back on March 11th, 2009.

Apple’s new iPod shuffle sports a nice 4Gb of space for just $79, but you’d be a fool to buy it. Why? It no longer has any controls or buttons on the iPod itself, relegating those critical controls like “play/pause” or “next/previous track” to a new set of proprietary earbuds:

Small gets smaller.
The new iPod shuffle is amazingly small and even easier to use. The controls are now conveniently located on the earbud cord. It’s so easy, you can use it with your eyes closed.

ipod-shuffle

So any shuffle buyers will be stuck with Apple’s crappy $1 headphones that come with it. Or, they can choose to shell out $79 more for a pair of Apple iPhone In-Ear Stereo headphones that will work in the shuffle. Either way, a losing affair.

iTunes With Low Memory

Posted in Apple, iPhone, iPod, iPod Shuffle, iTunes by Elliott Back on March 4th, 2009.

This is kinda neat, I think my iTunes ran out of memory. It stopped being able to correctly render images, and everything just kindof showed a default placeholder “broken image” picture:

itunes-low-memory

I have 4Gb of physical memory in my computer, and at the time, only iTunes (dead) and a web browser (alive) open. So strange that iTunes ran out of memory and started rendering garbage. Pretty picture, though!

Custom iPhone Paint Job

Posted in Art, Graphics, iPhone, iPod, iPod Shuffle by Elliott Back on March 29th, 2008.

If you’ve ever thought about getting a Pink iPhone for yourself, look no further than Colorware PC, who will let you pick out a custom paint job for your iPhone in the colors you want. For example, a classic AdSense like blue/green/white job looks like this:

custom-iphone-green-blue-white.png

The cost? Just $200 and 2-3 weeks of processing time, plus additional time to ship it there and back. Looking at their gallery of samples, the painting appears extremely high quality, precise, and on-color. They even off pantone matching for those colors you absolutely need to have. Behind the scenes, they use a custom UV resistant plastic coating they call “X2″ and (probably) paint robots to precisely paint your device.

They also can paint notebooks, macbooks, iPods, PC computers, the Sony PSP, your blackberry, an xBox or PS3, and a host of other commercial products.

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