Music

Solid Gold Chartbusters

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I’m afraid I am about to post a music video which ranks as one of the most annoying songs of all time:

Once you have watched it, and presumably received relevant counselling, I’ll explain myself.

The song is called “I want a 1-2-1 with You”, unsurprisingly, by a band calling themselves the Solid Gold Chartbusters, but who are actually better known as The KLF. It wasn’t a very big hit, being released in the run-up to Christmas in 1999 along with other novelty songs.

But it’s notable for being one of the first songs to use a ringtone as part of the main melody, in this case the default tone used by Nokia phones. Of course, in 1999 we didn’t even have polyphonic ringtones, never mind MP3s, so it was a series of beeps. And the “1-2-1 with you” idea was almost certainly inspired by the UK mobile network One2One, originally part of Cable & Wireless and since bought out by Deutsche Telekom and re-branded T-Mobile.

Why am I mentioning this? In 2005, some marketer who probably deserves a rather painful death came up with the idea of combining the Crazy Frog ringtone with the song Axel F, in this instance covered by the Bass Bumpers. This song, rather unfortunately, went on to be UK number 1 and spawned a whole album of songs which were mercilessly destroyed by El Frog. At the time, it was claimed that this particular cover of Axel F was the first time that a ringtone had been made into a single, as opposed to the other way around which is what normally happens. While it was the first ringtone-based song ever to be number 1, it certainly wasn’t the first song to be released.

It also happened to one of those random songs that I vaguely remember seeing on MTV 10 years ago that for some reason surfaced in my mind, and so I decided to share it. You’re probably wishing I hadn’t, though.

Wikipedia names your band

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Via Waxy Links is a meme called Wikipedia Names Your Band. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Go to a random Wikipedia article – the name of the article becomes your band’s name.
  2. Go to Random Quotations – the last 4-5 words of the last quotation on the page are your the title of your first album.
  3. Go to Flickr’s “Explore the last 7 days” and choose the third picture – this will be your album cover.

Put them all together, and you get something like this:

The components for mine were:

There are many other covers on the Buzzfeed page, some of which are very good.

Fixing a broken iPod

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I was going to make one of two posts today:

  1. How I fixed my broken iPod
  2. What iPod to buy in place of my broken iPod

Thankfully, this post is the first one.

I have an iPod Mini, bought in August 2004, which has hit a spot of bother. Well, okay, I dropped it, and afterwards it kept crashing or giving me the dreaded ‘unhappy iPod’ screen (which is like the Blue Screen of Death for iPods) when playing music, especially when skipping tracks. So here’s how I fixed it:

  1. Because my iPod was formatted in Windows (a conscious choice, see rant below), I plugged it into Hari’s computer and ran ScanDisk, and opted to do a full surface scan to fix any bad sectors.
  2. Next, I opened iTunes on the Windows PC and did a restore on the iPod, wiping the existing firmware and files and replacing it with the most recent firmware.
  3. Then, I reloaded my music.

And now it works fine. Quite what went wrong originally, I am unsure. However, by running ScanDisk it may have marked any damaged parts of the disk as bad. If I had more money, I would have bought a copy of SpinRite which is apparently very good at getting hard disks back into working order (or at least letting you know that your disk is fubar‘d).

I may still consider buying a new iPod eventually but I’m torn between which model to buy, so that blog post may still come. At least now it’s not so much of a priority as my current iPod now seems to work fine.

And now for my rant about iPod formatting. If you format your iPod on Windows, it will be formatted with the FAT32 file system, readable by Windows and OS X (and pretty much every other modern operating system). Format it on OS X, however, and it’ll be formatted with the HFS+ file system which only OS X can read. Since Apple now ships Boot Camp with Macs and has been promoting the ability to run Windows if needed, why not let Mac users change the file system used when formatting? If needed it can be some option hidden away in an obscure corner of iTunes where your average Joe User who has no idea what FAT32 or HFS+ are can safely ignore it. But it would be nice to have the option, rather than having to use a Windows computer.

My iPod Mini arrived!

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A photo of a green iPod Mini being held

At long last, my iPod Mini arrived this morning. It’s now on charge, connected to the bundled transformer that is almost as big as the device itself. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do all that much with it until my laptop is repaired because neither my dad’s laptop or my parents’ PC have USB2 ports, although once I have iTunes installed and have the device fully-charged I’ll try anyway. Experience tells me that if you charge the device fully on first use you can greatly extend the battery life of a device so I’ll wait a few hours.

Still, I’m excited at the fact that I can call myself an ‘iPod owner’ 🙂 .