[PLUG] Ipod shuffle

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006 22:36:20 -0700 (PDT)
Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net> dijo:

> > It has been working fine. OK, occasionally it just stops for no reason 
> > and you have to hit the Pause button to get to to continue. A flaw in 
> > the design -- it always happens when walking, never when it is just 
> > sitting. In other words, there is some kind of a motion detector in the 
> > thing that parks the disk or something when you move it too fast. Except 
> > it is too sensitive.

> There's no motion sensor.  There is, however, a circuit that cuts to pause 
> when the headphones are removed. 

Sorry, that is not what is causing the problem. It happens with seven
or eight different headphones, including the original iPod headphones
and two more purchased from Apple. You can't convince me that I have
that many bad plugs. Besides, the same headphones work fine on all
other equipment. Furthermore, this particular problem is pretty well
documented on the internet. 

Mind you, you may be right that there is no motion detector. Instead it
may be the bad hard drive connection that m0gely pointed out. In either
case, it will stop suddenly and hitting the Pause button restarts it
every single time, without fail. If it were a headphone connection
problem at least some of the time the Pause button would not restart it.

> > And then there is the problem of mounting and unmounting, and the ease 
> > with which you can totally hose the database. Not a very robust bit of 
> > software. And if you do hose it you have to use a Windows XP or 2000 SP4 
> > computer to restore it, because the restore utility will not work on 
> > anything else.
> 
> That's not strictly true, either.  First, there is a utility to update the 
> firmware (and reformat the disk) that doesn't require iTunes available 
> from Apple.  If you want to do it under Linux, there are perl utilities.

Yep. Been there, tried that. The Perl utilities did not work. They were
designed for an iPod on Firewire. If it's a USB iPod, no go. At the
moment I can't find the link to the utilities to see if they have been
updated.

> Did you try a hard reset?  On my model, you hold down the center button 
> and menu button simultaneously for a few seconds and it resets.  That's 
> always worked when it's locked up.

It's not locked up when it stops playing. Hitting the Pause button
makes it continue. No reset is necessary.

> Do you really think the world is out to get you?  Do you think people 
> design products to shut down and wipe your disk out of spite?

No, only Apple is out to get me. Actually that is not entirely true.
They don't care about me at all. They just want to be sure they get as
much money out of me they possibly can. And the kid at the Apple store
had only one goal: Get me out of the store so he could wait on the
backlog of customers waiting in line.

> I assure you that the kid at the Apple store doesn't care one way or 
> another what you do with your iPod.
>
> What happened was a side-effect of updating the firmware and the iTunes 
> database.  If you mount your iPod now and compare the file structure to 
> what it looks like when you've initialized gtkpod, you'll see what I mean.

Yeah, I am home from tonight's meeting and I plugged it in and went to
mount it. Unfortunately I am unable to mount it. As far as I can tell
it no longer has FAT32 file system on it. To verify, I plugged it into
my Windows 2000 computer, which told me it was not formatted.

Well, I have to go back to the university tomorrow, so I'll take it
back to the Apple store. How much you wanna bet they will tell me they
are unable to format it FAT32 and it's my responsibility?