I took the family shopping in Iloilo City the other day and while I was waiting for the store to release the DVD Player I just bought, I looked around their stalls. Looky what I found… iFakes: Fake iPod Nanos and iPod Shuffles on sale. I think the “Nano” sold for around Php 2,000. I took a quick snapshot with my camera phone, you never know if the store you’re in has a “no photos” policy. Good thing this camera takes really large pictures. You can see that they copied everything except the logos and the iPod name. They call it “MP4″. Wow! That’s one heck of a lot better than MP3!

Earlier I was contemplating on whether or not I should buy a new iPod Nano for myself. I found some stores selling real ones for about Php 10,000. I have seen fake iPod Shuffles that are indistinguishable from the real ones. In fact, the top shelf in the photo I took… those are fake iPod Shuffles. They look like the real thing, even up close (well the fake ones have the buttons rotated 90°). They sell for about Php 1,000, more than half less than the price of the real ones from the Apple Store.

I don’t know whether I want to be irritated or amused. The bargain hunter in me tells me that the “MP4″ is a better deal. Case in point with the iPod Shuffle:

iPod Shuffle:

• Made in China, for Apple.
• Expensive, at the time I bought it, I ended up paying $25 more than what I would have paid for it if I bought from the Apple Store.
• Plays MP3, MP3 VBR, AAC, protected AAC, WAV, AIFF, and Audible formats.
• Has the Apple logo on the clip.
• Comes in 1GB and 2GB models. I have the 1GB model.

“MP4″ iPod Shuffle clone:

• Made in China.
• Inexpensive, only costs around Php 1000 ($25).
• Plays MP1、MP2、MP3、WMA、ASF、WAV formats.
• No Apple logo.
• Comes in 4GB model.

But wait, there’s more…

• Has a tiny LCD screen squeezed into the thing that displays ID3 Song Title and Lyrics among other things.
• 7 Equalizer (EQ) Modes: Natural, Rock, Pop, Classic, Soft, Jazz and DBB
• Flash read rate at 8MB/s
• And get this: the damn thing has FM radio built-in!

Not convinced? I found a product page here.

It’s irritating because I paid a premium for a MP3 player that sports a logo on its clip, and that’s about all it has going for it. It’s amusing because the fake one has more features packed into its silly little package than the real one. The fake one is slightly larger and has a different button layout but it’s still roughly the same size and if you don’t see the “screen” on the thing, you’d think it was the real thing.

So I was wading through the posts on Proggit today and I found a short but useful post on Haskell error handling. It is quite refreshing to find some Haskell examples that is not about printing out the Fibonacci sequence or calculating the factorial for an arbitrary integer.

Okay, so now I’m typing this in Windows XP. I plugged in the iPod and when iTunes started, it complained that it cannot read the iPod and asked my permission to restore it to its factory settings. Ugh! So I gave it permission, it downloaded the firmware(!) and restored it to factory settings. Thankfully, it’s usable again. I just noticed there’s an option to “Enable disk use”.

Maybe I need to enable that for it to be usable under Linux. At this point, I’m wimping out and I’m not going to try this thing under Linux. Though it’s still under warranty, I doubt that “bricked by Linux” is covered by the warranty. Perhaps this is just another reason to buy a Macbook Pro.

I got a new iPod Shuffle the other day. I never really saw the need to have a stand-alone music player until recently when I went to pick up my wife from her class. I was sitting in the car for more than two hours with nothing to do. I don’t have a car stereo yet and my Motorola V3x can play MP3’s but it has a limit to what it can play. Anything with a bitrate of over 192Kbps will not play on the V3x. Most of my collection (which I ripped from CD’s that I actually own, thank you very much) are in VBR and “Very High Quality”. It also sucks when you’re just humming along and suddenly the music stops because there’s a call or a text message.

I have the nice little 2nd gen version. And of course, the first thing I did was look up “ipod shuffle linux” on Google. Apparently, Apple likes Linux a lot less than it likes Microsoft as there are a lot of iPod Shuffle owners with a lot of complaints that it does not work under Linux. I have been using iTunes 7.6 on Windows XP to load the thing with some music. It appears that the Windows version of iTunes is buggy as it consistently seems to crash for no apparent reason. Thankfully, I haven’t ended up with a corrupted iPod firmware yet.

I run Linux on my desktop every day. It sucks having to reboot to Windows XP just to change the songs on the iPod Shuffle. So today I decided to take the risk and plugged in the thing while I was running Linux. Surprisingly, it appears to work without problems. There’s the little iPod icon on my desktop, Rhythmbox started and I can browse the files on it.

I read somewhere that Banshee has a nicer interface compared to Rhythmbox so I fired up Banshee, and there it was on the sidebar. Banshee popped up a notice that my iPod was not recognized and asked if I wanted to submit information about my device, which I did. Finally, Banshee complained that the iPod database on the thing was in a new format that it does not recognize and asked if I wanted to regenerate to an older format. I regenerated the database, ejected, played a few songs with no problems.

Next, using Rhythmbox, I tried erasing the existing songs and load it with some other songs. Tried putting on about 500MB worth of stuff in there and it took longer than usual and I was getting some entries on syslog:

Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179189] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel
Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179259] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel
Feb 18 10:47:24 iwojima kernel: [ 6471.179729] VMBlock warning: DentryOpRevalidate: invalid args from kernel

The indicator light kept blinking orange, I left it as it was for a few more minutes and it kept on blinking. I clicked on the Eject button on the Rhythmbox toolbar and removed it from the dock. I plugged in the earphones and tried to play but it still played the old stuff that I had already erased. I think I may have missed something so I plugged it in again, Rhythmbox comes up again and when I check the songs listed they are the songs that I thought I had already erased, plus the songs that I loaded. So I erased everything again, tried loading in two albums making sure to load something completely different. This time, upon loading the second album halfway through, Rhythmbox started to complain that there no space left on the drive. I ejected it and tried to plug it in again. This time Rhythmbox would crash.

Feb 18 11:08:44 iwojima kernel: [ 7748.924343] rhythmbox[8986]: segfault at 000000000000000c rip 00002aaaabb13299 rsp 00007fffd1a4c100 error 4

Banshee can no longer see the device too. Uh-oh! At this point the thing keeps blinking orange until I eject it by right-clicking on the desktop icon and ejecting it from there.

Time to reboot to Windows…