I needed another light in the Philips Hue system, and grabbed an Iris rather than another Bloom, mostly because I was curious about what the difference was. Essentially the Iris is a bigger and somewhat brighter version of the Bloom, with a more designey exterior. It reminds me of an Apple product from 15 years ago, which is a style I like very much. It has the same shortcoming as the Bloom -- it can do the full RGB spectrum, but it can't do the sort of "enhanced" second spectrum that the regular A19 Hue bulbs can. You can get very close indeed using the regular spectrum, though (and the corollary is that the Bloom and Iris can do a much better green than the regular Hue bulbs can). The color reproduction of the Hue and Iris is the exact same.

Otherwise, it's pretty much what I expected. It's all-plastic -- the Bloom incorporates a glass rim around the bowl's edge. Given that it's also bigger and less dense, I would say it feels a little cheaper, but it's not the sort of thing you pick up a lot, so that doesn't really matter. The Bloom's cable routing is also a little more thoughtful in that the cord is made to come out the front, under the bowl, and is easily hidden.

As mentioned above, the Iris is slightly brighter, but not drastically so. The difference is such that you only notice if you compare them directly.

The Bloom is probably better than the Iris for almost any use given the smaller size and nicer cable routing, but the Iris is kind of fun looking, so I'll keep it around.

YESSS ULTIMATE POWER

Brainings of T. Hiram "Crashed Unicycle" Goosebee, naval expert and reformed autogyro.

She shot him a penetrating glare.

"Ow," he said.

My usual setup for listening to music is an iPod connected through a line out dock cable to a Fiio headphone amplifier, which powers AKG Q701s. So there's certain limitations. Because LOD cables only work with the old 30-pin port, you have to use an older iPod; likewise, because I like to listen to music at night, in the dark, an older iPod is necessary to have physical buttons, so you don't have to look at a bright screen. So you get a choice between the iPod Classic, which has a noisy, slow hard drive, and an iPod Nano, which tops out at 16 GB. I've used the Nano for a long time.

But I have a lot more music than the Nano holds, which has gotten a little annoying. I was thinking about getting an iPod Classic, but didn't want a hard drive, or the really laggy interface the post-2007 iPods have used. Putting in a 1.8" SSD fixes the first problem, but leaves the second, and adds a lot of cost (since you're talking new iPod, then new SSD). And using an old used iPod (with the good B&W interface) is hard because they are universally beat to hell by now.

I remembered that, around the time I got my first DSLR, one of the cool things you could get was a Microdrive CompactFlash card, which held four gigs compared to 128 or 256 MB on a regular CF card. And because of Apple's bulk purchasing, the cheapest way to get the Microdrive was actually to buy an iPod Mini, then harvest the Microdrive from it and throw away the rest. Given that iPod Minis were more robust than the big iPods, and that I had a spare 64 GB UHS-1 Micro SD card that I bought to use with an Nvidia Shield and forgot about, I decided to do the opposite, and throw away the Microdrive in favor of the SD card. Then you get the best of everything -- fast OS, big solid-state storage, robust enclosure, 30-pin out with the good DSP, and a big click wheel.

There's several guides to putting a CF card in an iPod Mini, but I wasn't sure what would happen with this; the iPod uses CF cards natively, but I needed to go through a CF-to-SD adapter, then an SD-to-µSD adapter. So it's a little hacky.

The only thing to really watch out for is to make sure you get the second-generation Mini, because the first-generation can't play lossless audio.

That's how you open them -- spudge off the top and bottom covers, undo two screws and unplug the click wheel, then the rest just slides out. The last picture is the stock Microdrive and ancient battery in place.

...and there's the adapter-pile and new battery in place, with some half-hearted tape to make sure it doesn't jiggle inside. The new battery has 157% of the original's capacity; given that the original could run the iPod for 18 hours, and given that the Microdrive probably uses a lot more power than the Micro SD card, I think this thing should give pretty awesome battery life.

Plugged in for testing before reassembly.

Aw yuss. Works perfectly, holds all my music, sounds great with the Fiio. Total cost was $90 -- $65 for the Micro SD card (Sandisk Extreme Plus), $15 for the iPod, $10 for the new battery. All I want to do now is get a dark red gel filter and slip it between the screen and the screen-hole, to make the backlight nicer to use in the dark.

As a sidenote, me-of-ten-years-ago was really happy to peel a Microdrive apart. It is indeed a micro drive.

...a'right...

This was a fun little project. I've always wanted a nice wooden toolbox. More-so recently, because the plastic Craftsman one I got in 2006 has started offgassing a very distinct odor that's like a stoat drank a lot of sasparilla, peed, then died and began to rot. Unfortunately, nice wooden toolboxes are very expensive. Seems like it's new Gerstner, old Gerstner, fake Chinese Gerstner, and "other". So I went with "other", and found this Neslein one for a good price. Good quality -- box joints and all -- but it needed a little work. A few of the drawers needed a little glue at the back, and all the liners were pretty nasty. So I did some gluing, and some re-lining, and now it's pretty nice. I was gonna re-do the finish in a moisture-cure urethane, but after giving it a good clean I think I'm okay with how it looks. All I guess I'll do is fill those holes on the front, and clean up all the external metal bits. Worked out well -- good stuff for not too much money. Holds all ma' chisels. Here's a little gallery.