Some time back I mentioned that the battery life on the iPod had suddenly gone from the advertised 10 hours to less than 2 hours. A friend in the US, who's ex-something senior in Apple's kernel dev team, told me that this was likely to be due to a known (but not widely advertised) bug in the iPod power management, rather than a battery failure. There is a fix, but it involves dissasembling the iPod, and detaching the battery completely for some time to reset the power management system.

Luckily I seem, inadvertantly, to have found another fix. To wit, go on holiday with iPod, flatten battery on flight out, have such a good time for two weeks that you forget to even charge the iPod, and then finally partially charge it, flatten it again by looping Future Sound Of London tracks to relax on the plane home, and then fully charge. Then be surprised when it suddenly seems to be performing as it should again...

So now I am four albums into it, when last time I used it it would hardly play one. Go me, I say. Go me.