My iPod died and broke my detox
In my last post on this blog (wow, it's been a month and a half. sorry.), I wrote about how I was repairing and upgrading an old 5th gen iPod I bought second hand. That thing kept me happy for a while and I was enjoying it a lot.Eventually, I wanted to try out Rockbox, because everyone I know who has an iPod or a supported music player sings its praises. I never really tried it properly, until about... 2.5 weeks ago. I installed it, resynced my entire library, and installed an iPod 1st gen theme, since I like the UI on those but the hardware design is just... atrocious. Sorry. Limitations of the period I suppose.
I used it for a few days, and I enjoyed it. The lack of animations compared to iPodOS (or OSOS, if you wanna be accurate) did make it feel less "polished" but I can't blame the developers on that. They make up for it in features and ease of library syncing.
One thing I disliked was that Rockbox seemed to just turn the iPod off instead of putting it in the sleep mode I was used to with the original firmware. I like being able to just hit the clickwheel and wake the device up. Barely any waiting. Unfortunately, it seemed like this option wasn't there on Rockbox, so I had to make do, and disabled the automatic power-off function entirely. It led to some battery drain, but it was honestly better than the original sleep function. I just had to charge it regularly.
This is where the story takes a turn for the worse and admittedly it makes me realize I am genuinely stupid.
After disabling automatic power-off, I left the house, did some stuff, got home and put the iPod on my table. And I forgot to plug it in. For an entire night. And an entire sleep cycle. Which equals to around... 22 hours of not charging an iPod that was actively running.
When I woke up, I saw the "Very Low Battery. Please Wait." screen with the dead battery icon and spinner. I thought "oh yeah, I forgot to charge it" and plugged it in for a few hours. When I returned, it still had not charged. At all.
After a few days of trouble shooting, I realized that i had just... killed it. The battery was completely drained and wouldn't hold a charge. My only options were supposedly FireWire or just getting a new battery. And since music is such a big part of my day to day life, I decided that I would just... go back to using Deezer on my "old" phone that I put in a lockbox in hopes of never picking it back up.
I guess you can assume how that went, considering the post title. I was back to the Instagram and Bluesky doom-scrolling rabbithole, and reliant on my phone for constant dopamine rushes again. I felt like shit.
Today, while in the big city, I was in a music store, and I saw an iPod on the table of the guy who runs the store. I asked him if it was for sale, since there's a lot of old tech there. He said no, but told me there was a place that sold parts nearby. I went there, and it was honestly amazing. There were old Nintendo consoles, PSPs, iPods, rotary phones, and more old stuff I can't think of right now. I think there was even a Commodore.
He sold me a battery for a relatively decent price, I hung around the city for the rest of the day, took photos, and went back to my town. At around 10pm (for context, it is currently 10.31pm) I got to the house. I found my iPod, pulled the screen cover off, unplugged the old battery and plugged the new one in.
I was immediately greeted by what I can only assume is a shattered LCD screen. And the back cover didn't close, so I think the battery is too thick for the case. I now have to wait about... 4 days for the holidays to be over, so I can go back and ask him if he has any other batteries (which he might) and if he can sell me an LCD for a decent price as well. So far, this iPod has cost me around... 180 euros. I bought the iPod for 110, so you can guess how annoying it is to constantly need parts for it.
Anyway, that's about it. Thank you for reading. I'll see you later.
- Asya, 23/5/26