ipod

My geek cred has arisen substantially. Or to say the least, my geek cred has potential for heroistic levels, if only the newly installed battery in my wife’s iPod will work as advertised. But after our digibox (set top box, receiver, recorder thingy) lost its operative edge which i haven’t yet been able to restore, i do need an addition of karma.

It was no more than a week or two ago when my dear wife lamented the fact that her iPod battery had really run out of magic. She could charge it all night but it wouldn’t play for the bus ride to work. She even contacted a Mac retailer and could n0t believe it when she heard that buying a new iPod would probably be cheaper than having it fixed at their establishment.

Cue geek husband.

A quick browse on eBay led me to HKinventory. One iPod battery cost me less than a fiver. Shipping included. And a mere week later, the battery was neatly delivered in a padded envelope.

It was a bit unnerving popping open the hermetically sealed designer thing (i was about to say cracking open but that never happened… fortunately), but finding familiar looking components inside replaced the mystery with a more familiar feeling. Changing the battery took me maybe fifteen minutes and i even got the whole thing rebuilt without any extra bits left when the casing was closed. Nice.

The most unnerving bit was actually plugging the thing into the charger to see if the thing still works, and the most satisfying bit was seeing that it did charge.

But that wasn’t the strangest bit.

Because with the battery came a small bag of colourful … pripples.

Just add water

I don’t have the bag left, but the instructions said i should submerge these into 4 dl of water (a cup an’ a half, if any reader from the stateside should see this) and wait four hours. It didn’t really say why, but hinted something along the lines of eternal happiness and a good life.

The pripples started to grow (yeesa) and take a fuzzy shape. Within an hour, my container had a myriad of floating colourful blobs of colour within. It was truly weird.

Which is nothing to say compared to what we had after the promised four hours of growing. This:

Four hours later

I don’t know if they’re poisonous or just weird. But i did find a small flyer with the baglet claiming that i could use this “crystal mud” to put plants into, or to drop some essential oil on it to make my home or office nice and fragrant. If those were the words.

But at a fundamental level, i’m still stunned.