A Sense of Doubt blog post #4086 - Walkmans and Chinese Technology

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4086 - Walkmans and Chinese Technology

I fell behind on my blog but not a record number of days behind. It's Tuesday the 28th as I type this. I had a rough week of homework heavy burdens last week. I decided to not do ANY homework yesterday  (4/27) and today (4/28), which is in the future from when this post is published.

Discussing digital music on phones and other devices with a friend, and so I went hunting for these two posts by Warren Ellis, which I share here.

I still have two old iPods, which I use when I want more control than streaming, easier to find stuff, or am cut off from signal.

Thanks for tuning in.

THE WORLD SERVICE

MY WRONGS

an excellent short film by Chris Morris starring Paddy Considine

Among the many things wrong with me is that sometimes I think too much about Karl Lagerfeld’s collection of iPods. He treated iPods like cassette tapes and had three hundred of them.

I have ONE mp3 player, a Sony NWZF805B F Series 16GB player that I bought in 2012 for £200. It still works, believe it or not. Had to replace the proprietary cable twice using eBay. I could, and do, load up the phone with music, but we all know iPhone audio isn’t all that. Fine for podcasts. Not so much for real music.

And then sometimes I think, what if I had a rack of mp3 players curated for different moods and spaces? With wired earbuds. Non-networked, no wifi. Is that mad? Maybe. But is it wrong?

Well, probably. But still.

Look at this lunacy. It’s a £50 lossless mp3 player called the Snowsky Echo Mini, styled to look like an old Walkman tape player. It even has an extra port for in-ear monitors.

I was on a flight once in a seat opposite Fred Armisen, who was staring intently into a a laptop screen reviewing footage while wearing the weirdest earbuds I’d ever seen. People were bothering him constantly for selfies and the like while he was trying to work, and he was very nice and gracious to everyone. I waited until he finished work and closed his laptop before I leaned over, asked his forgiveness - you could see him bracing for another selfie or weird question — and then asked him what the hell he was wearing in his ears. His face lit up and he then explained to me what in-ear monitors are, and I’ve wanted to try a pair ever since.

Mid-range mp3 players seem a lot cheaper than they used to be. The high-end, is, however, now insanely priced.

Phones are convenient, yes. But if you want to listen to music properly while on the move, you need something else. Maybe it’s time to reject convenience, go for quality and style and wrong. Look at this. This is, by any measure, wrong.

Fendi made him an iPod case

Except there is a degree of fuckit that says, if I’m going to curate a collection of music players, then is a designer case for them really a step too far? Listen, my kid’s (just about) a millennial and she doesn’t even want phone and email any more. (Her partner jokes that she’s reading to *go full bog-hag” and it’s not even really a joke.) In a world where we might retreat from everything being networked, and where we might want to pay real musicians real money for music we can really own, maybe this isn’t quite as crazy at it looks.

Louis Vuitton made him an iPod trunk

Vuitton famously put an entire fold-out office into a travel trunk for Leopold Stokowski, so an custom iPod trunk wasn’t a stretch.

If you think I’ve gotten old enough to turn tech-conservative, ask yourself if you really want ads streamed to your fridge door or clock, and remind yourself that when you outsource your doorbell and your bed to tech companies, Amazon Web Services might go down and kill your doorbell and brick your fucking bed, as happened last week. Draw a line somewhere.

2025: a server outage lobotomised your smart bed. That is the Science Fiction Condition, and not the happy one.

(I wrote a whole lecture about this in 2015 that I should throw up here one day.)

And then I discovered, reader, that modern mp3 players take SD memory cards. And that Chinese companies make all kinds of cheap lossless mp3 players. So I don’t need a case of machines. All I need is a case of SD cards. So I have one of those players, three 128GB cards and a case, and a card device coming. I therefore descend into more disconnection.

And yet, somehow, more cables.

Bonus round: a whisky blender’s travelling trunks:

How about you and me start being mad, being wrong, and being happier?

Orbital Inoperations Orbital Operations for 2 November 2025 Warren Ellis November 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes OPERATIONS THE CHINESE WAY My secret shame is that I love weird cheap Chinese tech and always have. There was a time where I’d torrent episodes of DEADWOOD to watch on a little Chinese video player while travelling. It’s always a bit odd, a bit cranky, a bit loose in time - elements of past and future jostling together in an ill-fitting case. But. I wanted to try one of these mp3 players that are driven by SD cards - which meant I also needed SD cards, a card writer and a card case. All of which are sold for peanuts by various outlets. If I didn’t like them, I was only out a few quid. If I did, I could upgrade later. (note also some cheap gel pens I like and a pendant I spotted) I loaded Laura Cannell’s discography on to an SD card, stuck the card in the mp3 player, fiddled around with the player to get it to work (this stuff never works first time) and to get to grips with the user interface (some of you can remember WinAmp on Windows 3.1) and the weird earbuds (Chinese factories iterate on basic devices constantly and come up with hundreds of variations that seem to have been designed by a cheap AI, often ending up with the equivalent of a sweater with three sleeves). And holy crap I had forgotten just how plain and flat iPhone audio really is. Suddenly I have a portable soundstage again, with bass, warmth and detail. My old Sony mp3 player is lovely but only has 20 GB on board with no expansion. I have three 128 GB SD cards for less than a fiver each to plug into this new player. Now SD cards are too small to write on. So you never know that’s bloody on them! But I did buy a case to keep them in. Here’s my solution: I have a roll of stickers laying around. So I cut one up, (badly) drew some lines, and made a map for the case. I’ll fill out the boxes and know what’s on each card. This is now the equivalent of the iPod trunk. Happily disconnected, on the cheap, with small devices and space-saving objects.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2604.25 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3950 days ago & DAD = 604 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.