maybe my gadgets are cursed

For those of you who've read this blog for a long time know that at one point I bought an iAudio X5 and at another point a GP2X. Well, that was during the boom year, last year. Now that I'm in the recessed year, this year, where I'm back to being a broke student, I seem to have even more tales of somewhat sordid misfortune, gadget related or otherwise, than usual to put here on this blog. This post is no different.

Well, what happened?

I lost my iAudio in Six Flags in New Jersey.

And in typical ironic fashion, like the rest of my life, it wasn't during the roller coaster ride that it fell out of my pocket but right after I got off and was rushing to get back to the car because it was 10:00pm and Six Flags was closing.

I really liked that device. It would've made the 3 year mark in my possession. Now I'll never know how long it lasted. I'm worried more about my personal information than anything else though. I used to use the portable apps a lot when I had to use other people's computers in situations like in school labs and such. I don't really have to use them much but they were still on it. Of course I immediately started changing passwords on every website of mine. I had a master password in Firefox, but I still don't feel safe about it.

I did get a replacement device after awhile of doing without, but of course it had to be dirt cheap because I'm not a fancy salaried man anymore, so I got this 2gb Centon Movox. Whose Centon? *shrugs* I don't know, all I know is I wanted something that I could get ogg support for and a voice recorder to record lectures(like I ever listen back to them). I get that and an FM Tuner for $30 ?! I suppose that's what you get when you deal with a cheap chinese manufacturer.The only things that seem to come close is stuff from Sansa, but it's nothing that cheap.

I get what I pay for of course, the interface is awful. Fast forwarding also takes forever. The voice recorder records to wav, and I still haven't figured out how to export it to ogg yet. I get an error about unrecognized format in Audacity, even though it plays just fine in VLC. It also didn't come with a manual. For the longest while I didn't know that it had a tree-based folder view and thought just had to scroll from song to song. I only stumbled onto the feature later on. I had to download the manual from the site myself.

Now the GP2X, i haven't lost, but the joystick knob for it is another story. I'm standing on the train and I'm facing the door. I decide to pull out the GP2X from my pocket just as the door is closing in. As I pull it out the knob pops off of the little metal stick and goes flying out the door onto the platform, on the little strip with the little yellow bumps at the edge of the platform.Now I would've lept out of the train and gotten my knob back except I was already late for class and had to rush just to get to the train that I was on. The knob was already giving trouble and had been slipping off before. I guess it won't be doing that anymore.

My only point of contention was why was the knob slipping off in the first place? I have to admit that the GP2X hasn't aged very well at all. I knew going in that it would be inferior to the PSP but running hacks on the PSP would have been a much better value going forward that this device has been. My one gripe that I noticed was that it was missing wifi. After I bought it it worked well at playing videos, but the music player has some flaws, the main one being that fast forwarding takes much too long and sound quality is not that good. Also, a lot of the applications that people put out on it are not that good. A lot of the things that aren't emulators don't do what they were promised to do. Things like the PDF Reader for example. It is fun trying to get these things to work though and when Samurai Shodown worked that was epic.

The biggest problem has been that the stock kernel that has shipped out of the box doesn't have support for SDHC cards, so you could only put cards as big as 2GB in it. I did find a modified kernel that was supposed to have SDHC support, but it never worked for me. It had very alpha level card support. That has been the most major problem. I don't want to walk around with a bag of 2GB cards. Well I have a little collection of them now as a result and I'm going to sort through the applications to see which ones work and which ROMs for the emulators work and only walk around with those. In the meantime it's still a good video player and I still use it to watch podcasts regularly. The main impetus for getting this though was because it supported XviD and the PSP does that now, and the PSP also supports the ipod mpeg4 m4v files. *sigh* I look fuh dat, i suppose.