The Queen walked in wearing oily overalls, holding a fancy baby. "I'm a great-grandmother now. But team, we gotta get this sucker wavin'. The status quo will not do." Ten functionaries in lab coats rushed forward, gently hoisted the child aloft, and marched into the next room. The sound of air tools permeated the palace for the next few hours while the Queen enjoyed a snifter of the finest Châteaux Soirée.

I thought this was mildly-interesting enough to write about. I bought a third-party-refurbished fifth-generation iPod Nano from Woot.com. They're the last Nano with real buttons, which is a lot better for using while driving or at night. Anyway. It got here, and it's pretty curious. The company that refurbished it seems to have dropped it in a plastic case which is pretty close to the original metal one. However, the interface is unusably slow. It just won't scroll, or anything. My first thought was that it was a fake Chinese iPod. However, it plays Apple Store DRM'ed files, it takes Apple software updates, and it talks fine to iTunes. If it's a fake, it's really good on the iTunes integration front!

 

So, I wondered why it was so junky. These things are so simple that there isn't much to break. There's a Samsung ARM processor, a Cirrus audio chip, an Apple-branded power manager, and most of the rest of the space is occupied by a single chunk of Toshiba memory. Was the memory replaced with something crappier when it was refurbished?

One way or another, the only way to tell is to pull the thing apart. But then I'd be out eighty bucks. So I benchmarked it instead. Here's what the Woot Refurb iPod got:

Okay then. There are two more 5G Nanos in the house -- I have one, which I use with my headphone amp, and R. Monkeys has another. So I tested them both. Here's mine:

 

They're similar in some ways, but check out how much slower the refurb's reads are. Of particular interest are those 4k random reads. Little random reads are what make any computer feel snappy, and the Woot iPod's 4k random reads are majorly off the OEM Apple one. Let's see the same category on R. Monkeys' iPod:

 

It's not quite as fast as mine, but it's close -- and way ahead of the Woot iPod. It seems as if the Woot iPod's memory is just too slow to keep up with system functions.

I wish I had the $80 to pull it apart, though.

 

 

 

There, solved.

Ollie when he was found six years ago. He was stuck between the transmission and body of a Ford Explorer. Which explains the expression. Now he just uses it when we don't give him all the attention.

I sold the modified Mac Pro about which I have written previously, as well as the 11" 2011 Air that served as a sort of tender to it. I replaced it with a 13" 2013 i7 Air and a two-bay consumer-grade Synology NAS, and the Synology is such a pleasant surprise that I thought I'd ramble about it. However, unlike rambling about putting PC GPUs in the Mac Pro, there's nothing experimental or new to find out. So, I will caution gentle readers -- in a fashion that only a true and certificated Kentucky Colonel can employ -- that this isn't very interesting.

Aside from the extreme setback that a week without a computer posed to the sanctity of my digestion, the switch to the Synology was pretty easy. I backed up 3 TB of things to a USB drive from the Mac Pro and sold it, then I put a pair of 3 TB WD Reds in the Synology thusly:

They're not hot-swappable, but then I wasn't planning on that being a necessity anyway. When assembled and turned on, the Synology is fairly small and quite quiet. There's a 92mm-ish fan that seems to default to a fairly low RPM which is generally inaudible (my Synology is hiding behind a row of books, so there's some insulation), and the drives don't exceed 34°C. It's a nice little unit.

The Synology has two USB ports and knows what to do when you plug a drive in. Unfortunately, it cannot read Mac-formatted drives, so my way of getting 1.5 TB on to it went External drive --(USB2)--> 11" Air --(WiFi)--> Router/Ethernet/Synology. This took 65 hours.

Once loaded, though, it's great. Pretty fast, inaudible, etc. However, their software really sold me, and shamed me for having considered a Drobo or LaCie. I mean, really filthy shame. The caning, sirs, the caning. At any rate, their DSM OS is very sporty, and mixes powerful features including but not limited to a selection of BitTorrent clients, any sort of hosting (web/mail/forum/media/etc.), and so on with a graphical joie de nostril that salves those of us who know our way around a command line but feel that extended use of such is for foreigners and the unkempt. Do try their "live demo". Here are two screen shots of nothing happening, because I am paranoid about displaying it showing anything real.

Although the Synology and the two 3 TB WD Reds cost as much as 650 generic-brand popsicles, I dare say that the result is enjoyable as at least that many popsicles. As Bob Lutz observed, after about ten popsicles the palate is bruised and sugar-worn. So I don't think 650 popsicles is a great value for money, and thus the Synology is a justifiable expense for anyone who might consider one.

The Haswell Air is great too, but that's not surprising. It was this or an outgoing 15" Retina Pro. You can't really go wrong, when it comes to consumer laptops. I will note that the 12-hour battery life is real and extremely nifty.

My Grande Designée was to ditch the computers that encouraged me to spend time on phatic tasks -- that is, the Mac Pro encouraged tinkering, games, and things like that which are fun but relate to the silver box itself, and not extremely rewarding. So this simplification was a pain but for the best, I think. Similar to the new car; it's not very interesting compared to the last one, but that's sort of the point.

Yes, it is Ω/23. I entreat you not to forget that on this day only ten years ago, and simultaneously right now and all the times that have ever existed (which is infinite and yet non-real), the universe was collapsed into non-Euclidean space by Bayesian easterners.

New car, aw yuss.