fouldsy.com

With a break in the weather yesterday afternoon, I went for a wander to try out the Nike+ iPod Nano gear. I was taking the iPod anyways with going for a walk, and thought it would be cool to give the Nike+ kit a try too. Just set it up to go for 10 minutes (although I forgot to stop it and let it run a bit longer since I was enjoying the Danko Jones track!), then got home and plugged it into iTunes to see what happens. Zips you off to register at nikeplus.com (though it is optional), then brings up a very flash website to display all the data:

Granted it was only 10 minutes on + off (I ain’t built for running’!) so covered about 1.37km, but for more serious runners this would be pretty serious piece of kit. Even just in terms of their website and how it handles the data was pretty impressive from a coding + design point of view (see, there’s the real me – none of this running malarkey!).

It maps out your pace, timings, distances travelled, etc. so you can clearly see in the screenshot where I was jogging for a minute, walking for a minute, jogging for a minute, walking for a minute, etc. Doesn’t seem to play nice with Firefox for setting up goals, but you’re meant to be able to define what you’d like to achieve, and it then compares your workouts against what you should be achieving at intervals to reach your goal which could be fun. It’s a neat piece of kit, and might encourage me to start jogging, but even just as a way to track my walks it’s cool, and sure Kat will find more of a use for it since she’s into her running (though maybe not in Alaska…).

As I head out and do quite a lot walking and stuff, thought it would be cool to play around with the Nike+ gear for the iPod Nano. The idea is a little sensor sits in your shoe, effectively acting as a pedometer, which relays data back to your iPod to calculate distance travelled, average speed, total time, calories burned, etc. For runners, it seems very popular as it’s able to track up 1,000 workouts, with the ability to sync back to iTunes and also to nikeplus.com so your times can be shared and let you compete against friends anywhere in the world. I ain’t quite daft enough for that kind of running though!

Kat got me the cool armband for the iPod for my birthday rather than having it sitting my pocket and banging against keys + money when I’m out + about, or you can wrab the band back on itself and works like a soft case to fit in your pocket or whatever. The Nike+ sensor fits nicely into the Nike running wallet (with a bit of padding to stop it sliding around) which clips onto the shoelaces of your shoe, and doesn’t look as daft as it might appear!

Tempted to go out and try it this afternoon, but am knackered + feeling very lazy today! Think I’ll just leave it until tomorrow, do some studying for the OS X Server exam instead, and give it a whirl when the birthday cake + sweets have worn off

Well, have gone a whole week of bouncing the iPod Nano in + out of my shirt pocket and rolling it around on the passenger seat of the car and still no scratches (or cracked screen!) Once the battery has cycled through a few times am hoping the battery life will increase, but have been very impressed with sound quality – can really get the sub going when it wants to!

Haven’t got udev working quite right to assign it to /dev/ipod rather than whatever sd* device it wants, which means having to manually “eject /dev/sdb2” or whatever from the command line as gtkpod can’t figure out the device correctly to eject it. Haven’t really looked at it though, so is probably something simple!

Have found the 1Gb version more than enough to handle what I’m using it for too – is easily holding half a dozen albums and 3/4 daily podcasts without running out of space which is all I’m after. Sync’ing a few albums was more to see how quick it would transfer (a tad on the slow side, but I think that’s the USB ports not running at USB2 ) and playing with different EQ settings. All worked pretty well!

Definately glad I went for it, though smugly read the Archos AV500 has won yet another award for best portable media device in the past week!

I’ve finally accepted the fact that I may as well give into the marketing crap and get an iPod Nano. As much as I love my Archos AV500, it won’t exactly slip into my shirt pocket and all I’m using it for is listening to podcasts on my commute to work or on my lunch break. Whilst on holiday or once in the US the Archos excels with being able to watch movies on it’s 4″ screen or connect to a TV to watch in full-screen, and the fact it’s 60Gb drive can hold all my music collection comfortably. But, as there’s some pretty decent offers on at the moment, managed to pick up this 1Gb iPod Nano up for under a hundred quid. We’ve had a few of these things in + out at school as prizes and awards for kids, but the black version is so much sexier! I’ve already had one cheeky get who shall remain nameless betting I’ll have a scratch on it by Monday morning…

Getting it working has been a doddle under Ubuntu, with gtkpod handling everything straight out of the bat. Very impressed, though would like a way to have my podcasts downloaded through iPodder automatically sync’ed across to the iPod. Will see what I script up