The Weakling Gazette

A few weeks ago I found my old iPod Mini from back in the day. My uncle used to sell electronics at a swap meet and agreed to give me one upfront as long as I worked for my other uncle selling power tools at the same swap meet so I could pay 100 dollars for it (I only ended up paying him maybe 50 bucks sorry tio).

I was able to get it to turn on after a bit but as soon as it was unplugged from the charger it would die. That got me wondering how hard it would be to replace the battery, and from what I had read it was surprisingly easy. Then a second questions popped into my head; Can I upgrade the amount of storage in this thing? Again, the answer was yes and pretty easily.

So I ordered the replacement parts and gave it a shot. I was able to install the new parts, and and proceeded to fuck up the motherboard so bad that I needed to order a replacement. I was still able to put my music on it though so I excitedly added over 5000 songs to it and the Rockbox custom firmware to get it looking and sounding better than new. The second motherboard came in, and then I broke that one even worse. So I ordered a third one… which showed up broken. I almost gave up but then I found a listing on ebay for a working one for 40 bucks so I said alright last chance. It came in and I was able to install my new drive with all of my songs on it and finally it to work.

Now I just had to hope all of that effort was worth it. It was.

I forgot just how fuckin fun these things are. Like I was excited to have it working again but these things just feel so good to use, the games on it are pretty damn good, and the nostalgia of using this thing that completely changed how we listened to music is unreal. There’s something almost surreal too about listening to songs that came out literally 20+ years after this thing did too.

So first things first. Listening to music on this thing just rules. The audio quality is better than almost anything you’ll get through streaming, you don’t have to worry about your songs being delisted, and the click wheel is super intuitive. Scrolling through your library of music is just so satisfying.
It might just be me but having such a stripped down, streamlined interface just makes picking what you want to listen to feel way less claustrophobic than it is on an app. Can’t decide what you want to listen to? There’s a “shuffle songs” option on the main menu that will shuffle every track you’ve got on the device. No ads, no monthly subscription, just straight up freedom.

I also didn’t realize how much I missed the games on this thing. I’m basically an old man so I love playing solitaire. Brick was probably the game I played the most back in the day. It’s pretty much just a simplified version of Arkanoid if you ever played that. Still feels just as good as it did when it came out.

The game I didn’t even remember being on here despite having put hours and hours into it was Parachute. Parachute is a game where you’re a stationary ain’t aircraft gun and you shoot helicopters and parachuting dudes out of the sky. I don’t know how I ever forgot this game it’s so damn fun. For my money though, there’s one uundisputed king of iPod games. Music Quiz.

Music Quiz is a simple mutiple choice quiz that takes all of the music on your iPod and plays a clip of one of them, while giving you 4 options for the track title that you only have a limited time to guess correctly. I enjoyed this when my iPod was only able to hold like 500 songs but now that it’s got a 256gb SD card in it and can probably hold somewhere around 30,000 (I’ve only got a little under 6,000 right now though) it’s even more fun.

I’m having such a good time with this thing and have been telling my son all about how much I love this thing and what a revelation it was for music back in the day despite that fact that he’s only 4 and doesn’t give half of a shit about that. Old tech is great. It definitely makes me miss when you paid for something once and that meant that you owned it and some corporate jerk off couldn’t take it back to save himself a few bucks a year.