Yep
I picked a new route this morning, and measured it with the help of Yahoo Maps, so I hope they have accurate distances. According to them if I run up Twin Peaks and back down from my apartment it’s 3.1 miles.
IF, on the other hand, I run back down the other side of Twin Peaks and down Market Street, it looks like an even five miles. And that’s what I did. 5.0 miles in 51:34. Didn’t break the 10-minute mile, but I have Twin Peaks as my excuse.
Also my iPod. I had the desire to find out how many pieces the iPod would smash into as it repeatedly conked out on me today. yeah, it’s a real nice transportable music player, but if it’s so delicate that running screws it up, I’m not there calling it “portable”.
I’ll try one of those arm holder things. My housemate has one and she says she’ll lend it to me. If that helps I’ll buy one myself because it’s no fun having a digital music player that’s even flakier than a CD player.
I bet it has to do with their cache refreshing. I bet almost anything that they fill the memory up with files and then don’t bother to try to replace the music that’s already played with the music that’s going to be played next until it’s all empty. At which point it goes back to relying on being a spinning disk that doesn’t like being jostled.
Apple, get it together and release a digital music player that’s not based on rotating disks. Moving parts my ass. What a ripoff.
Other than the fact that I can only get about 30 minutes of play out of my iPod when running, I love it.
My cheesy little Kodak MC3
My cheesy little Kodak MC3 still works like a charm; it’s scuplted to fit nicely in a hand, and runs for 5 – 6 hours on rechargeable AAAs. Despite lots of runs with sweat running down my hands, it’s still going strong.
I only have a 128 MB card in there now; my 256 card went into my Nikon D70. I’m going to buy a 512 and a couple of gig cards this week (I hope)
I was just going to ask
I was just going to ask Splicer if he’d looked into those flash-memory based players. I think that’s what I’m interested in. What does flash memory max out at these days?
I killed my hard drive by dropping my laptop once — so I’ve been kind of hesitant to invest in an Ipod ever since.
SanDisk claims to have 4GB
SanDisk claims to have 4GB cards out, but it’s hard to find anything over 512MB. ONline vendors claim to have 1GB cards for $150 or so.
There are two problems with just loading up bigger cards. First, my experience with the Kodak MC3 (which I still think was a great device) is that the bigger a card I put in, the slower the whole device got. That was only looking at the difference between a 64MB card and a 256MB card. Ouch! Hopefully other players don’t have the drawback of having to slow down to use bigger memory address spaces.
The other problem is the same problem on a human level. It’s hard to keep more than a few songs organized without a good system that does the organization for you. Most players suck at this. I think the iPod sucks at it, frankly. Despite all the gushing about what a perfect user interface it has, I think Apple only failed to suck as bad as the rest of the competition.
I liked the MC3 a lot, but I
I liked the MC3 a lot, but I never figured out how to make a playlist that it would recognize. There was no option to listen to a particular album or have songs in any particular order. So yeah, it’s OK if you want to just listen to shuffle play and pick out the songs you want to hear before you leave the house.
With a 256MB card I was already running into the problem of not being able to find songs i wanted to hear quickly and easily. “Shuffle play or the highway” is really bad if you want to hear a particular CD.
I just saw a Sandisk
I just saw a Sandisk commercial and they showed a 4 gig compactflash card. Wild.