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For the uninitiated, the iPod is a popular mp3 player that saw it's peak from 2001 to 2007. Even though theyre long dead, theyre still kickass little devices that are genuinely useful in the modern day, especially for students. Since my school is pretty strict on phones, you usually get in trouble for trying to listen to music on them. Enter the iPod. Not a phone, plus every teacher at my school is like "omg I had one of those in high school thats so cool can I touch the wheel" whenever they see it. The iPod truly is a great loophole for a noise sensitive dude that just wants to listen to some tunes while he studies.

HOWEVER, remember how I said the iPod's reign kind of fell off in 2007? Yeah, most of them are pretty dead unless you know how to fix them. Fortunately for me, I am a total loser who enjoys cracking open tech to fix it no matter how obsolete it is. So.... this blog is that story! :)

So, junior year, I was on my schools Academic Decathlon team. And my school's pride and joy is that team, so you bet they were working us to the bone. One of the first things that was established was "no phones while you're studying." But lowkey, music is my lifeblood. It helps me tune out any outside distractions so that I can focus better. I would constantly get distracted and it just kinda generally sucked balls to not listen to music. So I talked to my coach about bringing in an mp3 player. She said "yeah sure."

Flash forward a few days, and I'm using my "mp3 player," a repurposed android phone from 2011. And I, being the clumsy buffoon I am, knock it off the desk face down on the floor.

SHIT.

If you know anything about LCD screens, you know that they have a tendency to bleed out and die when they get damaged. And, if you know anything about android phones, you will know that theres a lot of different ones. No way in hell I was gonna find a replacement LCD for this obscure piece of tech from 2011. So, I had to find another mp3 player so i could get my NANORAY fix.(Go stream TILT btw, great album.)

After some research, I came to the conclusion that the iPod was the solution to my woes. It was top of its class when mp3 players were still relevant, and maintains that title to this day, since mp3 players aren't really a thing anymore. Looking more into the different kinds of iPods, I figured my best bet for repair would be the 5.5th generation classic. I'd say that I came to that conclusion myself, but if I'm being real, I chose it because reddit said it was the best option. To be fair though, they were right. Cracking it open was really easy, since the shell was plastic, and it had a fully colored LCD screen (and this time, replacement parts were actually availiable, which was really helpful for that time I dropped my iPod!)

After begging on my hands and knees for my dad to get me a dead iPod and parts on eBay, he obliged and placed a bid for it. Yippie! I was waiting by the door like a puppy looking forwards to his owner coming home from work for my packages to arrive. Finally, they showed up! I cracked open the iPod and got to work.

the official neilstech guide to fixing your iPod

Step 1: Open it. Should be easy enough. You got this girlypop.

Step 2: Take out the battery and hard drive. These are usually what wrong with it. In my case, replacing these did the trick! Be careful with the batttery though! After years of not being used, batterys have a tendency to puff and become miniature bombs.

Step 3: Put the new hard drive or flash storage device into the socket. In my case, I was using an iFlash solo with a 128gb sd card in it. MAKE SURE THE SD CARD IS PUSHED IN ALL THE WAY.

Step 4: Put the battery in. If you did everything right, the screen will light up with a little error message saying "Hey man, this hard drive isnt formatted right. Plug me into a computer so I can see what's up."

Step 5: Plug it into a computer to see whats up. Make sure you have iTunes. The app will recognize the iPod and restore the OS so that you can actually, yknow, use it. If restoration fails, redo steps 3 and 4 and inspect every little thing to make sure it's put in properly.

Step 6: Now that you've made sure everything works, you can close up the iPod!

Step 7: Bask in your success. Put music on the thing. It's an mp3 player after all.

If you know anything about me, you know that I'm a real gamer. I play the most intense, hardcore, extreme games, like the graphically intensive Atari Pong, and very extremely violent games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But my favourite game is Minecraft. Minecraft is a game best played with friends, something not really supported by the game unless youre all on the same LAN connection. What's the solution? Making a server of course!

When it comes to servers, the easist option is to just find some free hosting service online and use that. But I've found that these are pretty laggy, and having something that needs to be turned off and on whenever people want to use it seems like it defeats the purpose of having a server to begin with. Now, what's the solution to this connundrrum? Find a computer to sacrifice to make into a server that's permanently running!