It's been about 14 years since I first heard Puressence's eponymous album. And Near Distance still gives me that tingling, hair on the back of my neck standing up, feeling.

A hauntingly beautiful song from a shocking underrated band. And possibly the best live act I've ever seen.

Last week I told caitlin I wasn't getting any scrobbles because I was mostly using android to listen to music at the moment. This week there's a new client for android that scrobbles.

She was obviously reading my mind or something! Psychic cat! (Mystic mog?)

So everything had arrived. Time to put it back together.

First up was to install the battery:
http://pancake.2280.net/ipod_photos/small_battery_installed.jpg

When OWC say the battery won't fit in a 20GB ipod they are serious. The battery was a pretty tight fit. It was quite tall too. It would be hard to fit everything in the slim case if it wasn't for the hard drive being replaced too.

Next up was to replace the hard drive. The converter from dealextreme had a couple of pins with a jumper on so that got bent out of the way and then it got plugged in.…

Since the 40GB ipod was a bit of a brick and didn't need the extra space inside the case I got a cheap 20GB ipod from ebay. £15 got a "faulty" ipod. The description said that the seller had replaced the battery and that it didn't work properly afterwards. Personally, I was only really after the back of the case, perhaps the front if it wasn't too scratched and with a view to resurrecting it if I could. Unfortunately it looked as though the seller had been a bit of a moron and hacked the case apart with a knife.…

When it came to replacing the hard drive the obvious choice was some sort of flash memory. Of course it needed to actually connect up to the hard drive connector. And so everyone's favourite Chinese tat merchant dealextreme came up with the goods. About $4 came up with a compact flash to 1.8" hard drive convertor.

The compact flash card with the best bang for the buck (or GB per £ if you want to be picky) seems to be 32GB at the moment. Amazon had a decent price for that. Not terribly cheap though - a 16GB one would…

Originally the 4G ipod came with a 630mAh battery. There's plenty of higher capacity batteries available. But the best at the moment is the 1350mAh battery available from Other World Computing. It should give an increase in battery capacity of about 110%. The original battery supposedly gives around 12 hours of battery life so this replacement should give a battery life over 24 hours.

And so $20 got me this:
http://pancake.2280.net/ipod_photos/small_cropped_battery.jpg
The battery came with a couple of tools to open an ipod without scratching the case and so I popped it open to have a look.

The best instructions…

Naturally apple don't sell six year old ipods. And so I turned to the source of all tat in the universe - ebay.

£20 got me a 40GB 4G ipod with a monochrome display. The only problem with it was the battery was very tired and wouldn't hold more than a few minute's charge. Not like it matters if you're going to change the battery though.

And so this arrived in the post:
http://pancake.2280.net/ipod_photos/small_cropped_pod.jpg
It's a bit scratched and scuffed, but works fine.

Next was to get a new battery.

So it turns out that hacking open a 6G ipod to replace the hard drive isn't likely (or at least not without destroying it). So how are you supposed to repair an ipod? Luckily even after all its falls mine's still working.

But what about when it does stop working? It would be nice to be able to fix it. It would be nicer to make it better. A bigger battery would be better. Or just a longer battery life.

All this got me hankering for an old ipod. A 3G would be nice for nostalgic reasons (my first ipod…

My ipod hard drive is making some "bad noises"(TM) and it's been crashing and rebooting itself recently.

Poor little pod. :(

Worse is that it's an ipod classic and from what I tell looking at ifixit there's not really much chance of being able to repair it.