Do-Not-Try-This-At-Home Department: How to disassemble your mini iPod

(Note: this section is only suitable for millionaires with a technical bent.) Are you sitting down? Right, we’ll begin:

“The plastic top and bottom plates are glued into place with a tacky adhesive that will soften considerably when heated so use the hair dryer on a low setting to heat up the top plate. Work the area until it’s very warm to the touch. Now turn the mini around so you’re looking at the Apple logo and squeeze the two rounded edges together at the top, causing the enclosure to bow a little bit in the middle. Insert the flat bladed screwdriver between the plastic and the metal (in line directly above the Apple logo) and gently pry the plate straight up. Work around the edges, leaving the area around the ‘Hold’ button till last. When you finally do get to the ‘Hold’ button area, pry carefully and pull the plate STRAIGHT up. Behind the ‘Hold’ button are two plastic standoffs (sort of like tabs) that extend down into the case and push the real switch on and off. If you pry the thing out at an angle, you will break one of these standoffs. That was mistake #1 for me. The actual ‘Hold’ switch soldiered onto the main board broke, so the ‘Hold’ switch no longer works….”

It gets worse. Read on…

“Turn the mini over, looking back into the top, you will see two tiny philips head screws on either side of another metal plate. Remove these with the #000 screwdriver carefully and put them in a safe place (don’t drop these on the floor, you will never see them again).

Now comes the fun part – gently push on the 30 pin connector at the bottom of the mini and all of the main components (on an assembly I call the component sled) will slide right out the top. It is a bit tight, but if you meet major resistance, back off and INSURE you have the ribbon cable disconnected. This is where I messed up and killed my iPod mini, I forgot to check and I pushed with all my might, ripping the ribbon cable off of the male connector. Oops.”

Oops indeed. And the cost of one of these little beauties? Why a mere $249.

Alternatively… you could just stand under a hair-dryer tearing up 20-dollar bills.

Terminus blues

On my way to a meeting in London I passed through King’s Cross station (which is where one of the Cambridge lines terminates). KX was always the poor relation of its grand baroque next-door neighbour — St Pancras station. And — as the picture illustrates — it’s become very tatty. Now, to make matters worse, its relative impoverishment is set to increase. As the Guardian reports: “From 2007, St Pancras station, expanded from eight to 13 platforms, will be the principal London terminus for Eurostar trains scything through the North Downs, under the Thames and by means of viaducts and tunnels to North Pole Junction, the Regent’s Canal and Barlow’s train shed. The platforms at St Pancras will be extended under what Lansley describes as a “lightweight and diaphanous” steel and glass roof. Eurostar trains will take centre stage, with Midland main line and suburban trains on either side. Barlow’s roof will be restored to its original condition, its great iron trusses painted sky blue as they would have been in the 1860s.”

And what is to happen to poor old King’s Cross? Why, it is to be ‘regenerated’.

Sunset strip

There was a wonderful sunset this evening. I stopped to photograph it on my way home, then wondered what a painter would make of it. So I photoshopped the image, with this result. It’s cheating, really, but for those of us with no artistic talent…

The EU-anti-trust decision looms

According to today’s New York Times, the European Commission has reached a conclusion about the Microsoft case. If the Times is to be believed, it’s fairly robust. Quote:

“The commission has drafted a preliminary ruling that finds Microsoft guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Windows operating system – a finding that is expected to be supported by the national regulators, the diplomat said.

A second meeting will be convened within a week to discuss corrective measures to impose on Microsoft. The second gathering of the so-called advisory committee will also discuss how much to fine the company.”

Hmmm… Not sure I believe this…

Easing the network pressure caused by P2P file-sharing

From an interesting Tech Review article: “As the music downloading frenzy continues unabated, Internet service providers (ISPs) are finding their infrastructure and business models imperiled.  The main threat comes from the popularity of peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa, which connect users without using a server. ‘Peer-to-peer activity corresponds to at least one fifth of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow relentlessly in the future’ says University of California, Riverside researcher Thomas Karagiannis,  who works with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis on measuring peer-to-peer traffic.”

The article also has a lovely, informative side-bar explaining the P2P protocol issue:

“One reason that peer-to-peer traffic is clogging the  Internet is that the protocols used are not designed to minimize the number of bytes. On the contrary, since sending data through the Net is essentially free, programmers optimize other parameters, such as speed.

Skype, Grokster, and Kazaa use a protocol called FastTrack. Other peer-to-peer systems, including BearShare, Morpheus, and LimeWire, use another one, called Gnutella. These protocols use different ways to send queries and retrieve information[~]and these differences have a distinct effect on how much traffic is needed to transmit a song or movie from one network user to another.

Per Brand, leader at the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Stockholm, says peer-to-peer file sharing traffic in Sweden can consume as much as 85 percent of a typical ISP’s capacity. Brand, who is involved with the largest European-based research effort on distributed storage, says that inadequate protocol design carries much of the blame. [base “]Gnutella is both brilliant and completely brain dead,[per thou] he says. Its peer-to-peer protocol is smart in the way information is spread out, but stupid in the way it uses up bandwidth with sending questions asking where the information is located.

Improved protocols would spread out both the information and the traffic so that the both the network and its computers are used more efficiently. The goal, in effect, is to design a system that has the best properties of peer-to-peer without its drawbacks. It is like combining Kazaa and Peercache in one. If the research succeeds, Joltid and its competitors will have one less product to sell.”