Oldshovel

Oldshovel is a YouTube channel where the guy restores old mountain bikes from the 1990s mostly. It hits a nice combination of basic mechanics, nostalgia and just cool shit, and it’s part of the inspiration for my GT. The channel must do okay, because it’s got pretty good production values, a workshop full of Park Tool tools ($$$) and some pretty nice bikes, albeit older.

The guy likes to say (and I may be paraphrasing slightly) look for opportunity to give old things new life and it’s a nice contrast to the throw away everything, designed-to-break nature of most things we buy.

But sometimes, it’s just not worth it.


Dankpods is another YouTube channel with a similar-but-different philosophy, but the niche is iPods. Yes, iPods. Dankpods is keen on resurrecting old iPods, with flash mods etc. I had (and liked a lot) several different models of iPods over the years, so this was right up my alley.

I didn’t want to resurrect my old gen 4, because I had a gen 2 mini that my wife owned that was almost new. Dankpods likes these a lot, because they are ‘ridiculously over-engineered’ (in his words), easy to modify, and take CF cards in place of the original mechanical hard drive. Beauty.

So what happened when I tried it? Well, we can install up to a 256Gb memory card (up from 4Gb originally), but how much does a 256Gb CF card cost? You can still buy CF cards even though they have been superseded by SD and micro SD. So, how much?

Just under $300. Erm, no thanks. Option B is a CF to SD adapter from iFlash: quite reasonably priced for a custom thing at $18 but add $10 shipping and it’s basically $30. Then you need the SD card; I went 128Gb and paid about $20. So I’m out $50 by this point.

Next, a battery. You don’t want to open the thing up and replace the storage but keep the 15 year old original battery, right? Luckily replacements are not too expensive ($10-$15) and available on eBay etc. So I get one of those and wait weeks for it to be delivered. So I’m out say $65, and I’ve been waiting weeks.

Unfortunately, they don’t fit properly. The packaging inside an iPod is tight, and the aftermarket shit tier replacement batteries out of China are just fractionally bigger than the long since forgotten originals from Apple. There is a small daughter board above the battery which connects to the headphone jack, and the oversized replacement batteries push on that. Yes you can shave off the heat shrink, squash the terminals down and replace the insulation, but it’s still not enough. Yes you can cram the thing in there but it’s not right and every time you pick it up you know it’s not right.

Apparently you can get better replacements in the USA. They don’t ship to Australia. Apparently some of the replacements are better size-wise, but it’s a crap shoot. How many do you want to buy before you find one that’s been made closer to the original? Yuck.

And the final insult; they don’t even hold a charge very well.

So I’ve spent $65 to get a kinda half-arsed thing, sucked in by nostalgia. Well, more fool me, I fell for the meme. Sometimes, the past should stay put; it’s just not worth it.