This is great stuff, and reminds me of some of the high points of the early days of Open Mic Night at UMM. I love how she uses the looping electronics in a way that comes across as very organic and acoustic.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

Thus I was pretty seriously distressed when the home button quit responding yesterday. It had been acting a little touchy for a while, but I could always get it to respond if I was persistent. Yesterday, however, it just went dead. Kaput. The end. This is the kind of thing you don’t repair, and I wasn’t super keen on spending a few hundred to replace it, especially since everything worked fine except that one crucial little button.

A little searching turned up this forum thread, which boils down to two recommendations:

• Blow compressed air into the connector slot at the bottom
• Put a drop of contact cleaner, nail polish remover, or other water-free solvent on the button, and then work the button to try to get the solvent to wick around to the where the contacts are

Both of these are based on the assumption that the problem is some dirt or or gunk that’s collected under the button and is interfering with the contacts. Since my iPod lives pretty much permanently in my jeans pocket (along with pens, keys, lint, and various other experiments in the spontaneous generation of life), that assumption seemed pretty reasonable.

Some of the people that tried the solvent approach got too much in there, and it seeped along the screen, giving them an undesired aquarium effect. Consequently, I tried the compressed air first, since that seemed least likely lead to some unfortunate side-effect. Sadly, it also didn’t lead to the desired effect either. Consequently I moved on to nail polish. I put a drop on the button, and then clicked and wiggled that little button to try to work the liquid around. And after maybe thirty seconds of fiddling … voila! It started working!

It’s now been most of an hour, and the fix seems solid. I’ve had it propped up with the button end down, so if there’s any liquid still in there it’s headed away from the screen and the bulk of the electronics, and by now I would assume that most of the liquid has evaporated anyway.

I’d think twice about trying this at home, especially if you have a working piece of electronics. Mine was completely unusable without the button, so I was willing to take the risk, but I can imagine a lot of ways in which this might not go well, so tread gently into these swamps.

For me, though, it’s all happy, happy, happy :-)

As computation becomes smaller and cheaper and more powerful, the big question remains “What are we going to do with all that?”. Cell phones and iPhones are one answer to that question, but in some sense a boring one because they’re mostly just littler laptops. Siftables, on the other hand, are representative of some of the genuinely new possibilities that these technologies enable, and are therefore much, much cooler :-).

To be honest, it’s not the best talk in the world, and probably not as compelling demo of the possibilities as one might hope for. That said, I can definitely see these being a blast, especially as people come up with cool new ways to use them.

Also, many apologies for the silence here. I’ve been much more active on Twitter than here; things have been super busy, and the 140 character world of Twitter has been much more amenable to my life and schedule than thoughtful blogging here. Lame, perhaps, but the truth nonetheless. Figuring out the balance is going to be a challenge, but that’s not today’s activity.

As folks collapse on the sofa, full of roast beast and replete with the goodies of the season, it’s worth thinking a bit about recycling as much as we can of the waste this whole business generates. If you were lucky enough to score some electronic goodies (cell phones, iPods, etc., etc.) that will orphan some of your old gear, you might consider giving or selling those bits on. We sold a bunch of gear on eBay before we came to the UK, and donated a great 19″ CRT monitor that no one bid on to the local school system. Services like FreeCycle make it a lot easier to find happy homes for things you no longer want but which could still be useful to others.

Barring selling or donation, definitely explore recycling them instead of just pitching them in the trash. Cast off electronic represent the fastest growing component of the municipal waste stream, and the problem’s just gonna get larger. Cell phones don’t biodegrade or compost well, and there are now something like 1 billion cell phones on the planet, which makes for a pretty hefty garbage truck.

Looking for some tips on how to gracefully move some old electronics on to their next life? There’s lots of info on-line, including this nice piece from The Daily Green.

Thanks to Alexandre Van de Sande for the cool photo.