In reply to Matthew Carlson.

I’ll have to try the thwacking trick on the iPod pictured at the top of this. We get exactly that clicking sound, and have presumed the iPod dead. We’re probably not going to replace it, but it would be nice if we could make it work again without spending a ton.

I definitely agree that the internet access makes my iPod Touch a lot more useful than the Palm Pilots were. I think it’s more than that, though, and the interface and increased flexibility has a lot of value as well.

Many thanks to all those who pointed out the mistake – yes, I definitely meant “nail polish remover“. I seriously doubt that putting a drop of nail polish on the home button would do anything but Evil and Bad.

Great news, Nic. Glad to hear you got it working. That story reminds me of when my MP3 player stopped working. Turning it on would produce a faint clicking sound, presumably from the hard drive inside. After 30 seconds, the player would give up and display an error message. Posts on several forums suggested giving the player a good whack, because the problem is often caused by the hard drive’s head getting jammed (causing the clicking). So, as in your case, having an otherwise useless piece of hardware, I decided to give it a shot. Hitting it the first time produced no result, and the second harder slap sent it flying out of my hand. But it did the trick! Player still works to this day. I don’t travel with it much; it hangs out in my cubicle. But it does get plenty of use week in and week out. Pretty good for an 8-year-old refirbished MP3 player (Creative Zen Xtra). It’s starting to look a little long in the tooth, though. I was tempted by the cheap 30GB Zunes on black Friday.

A thought on the iPod vs Palm. I too had a Palm when I was at Morris. I found it useful to track things I needed to do and places I needed to be. Now that I have a job with a cubicle, between the desktop at home, desktop at work, and a netbook, it’s just as effective to track those sorts of items online. I’m guessing that internet connectivity on the device is the killer feature that the Palms were lacking. It is striking how similar the iTouch/iPhone are to Palm pilots.

Cool tip.

One thing: In the body of the blog post (in the bulleted section and in the paragraph that starts “Some of the people..”) you say nail polish instead of nail polish remover.

While I think most people wouldn’t be foolish enough to put nail polish on their home button, someone might. Especially if they are scanning the article quickly.

Cheers!

In your Tweet, you said “nail polish remover”; here you say “nail polish”. I surely hope it’s the remover!

Finger nail polish or polish remover?