There’s been a host of technical hurdles overcome, but I’m now back to being a fully-engaged podcast listener. With the old Inspiron 1150 laptop back in operation, I was able to install the Juice podcatcher application and go back and pick up the back broadcasts of many RSS feeds that the jPodder application on my tablet never was able to parse.
I know that makes no sense, but basically it means that after a lot more trouble than it should have been, I now have about 8GB of material to listen through, all the Drabblecast and Decoder Ring Theater and Pseudopod that my life has been missing all this time.
Which brings me to the issue of the 8GB media player that wasn’t.
So when the first super-cheap media player broke down, I immediately ordered a new one off ebay, and I was shocked to discover that I could get four times the memory for about the same price. I was really quite pleased at my cleverness for finding such a good deal.
Then it arrived and it didn’t work. If I filled it up with data, the flash memory would start copying to nothing, creating ghost directories and chopped sound files.
I figured this was just what happens if you buy super-cheap Chinese products over ebay, sometimes they don’t work. So I contacted the seller, who was very polite about it, and arranged to return it to Guangzhou, China, then waited for it to come back.
After a month and a half I checked the ebay listing again to find that the seller had been removed from ebay. So I tried it again, and again I got a 8GB media player that would copy ghost files after a quarter of the way through, destroying a large number of the podcast episodes that I foolishly copied over without backing up.
This time, instead of talking to the seller, I googled the issue. Because if it happened to me twice, then it must have happened to thousands of people already.
Lo and behold, it’s quite the thing. For years now, China has been selling media players to the rest of the world with a hack in the flash memory that makes it look like you have a much larger player than you actually have. Two times in a row I was sold an MP3 player that only had flash chips a quarter of the size that’s advertised.
I suppose I should be happy that they didn’t put melamine in the player, but seriously, China should change its national motto to "caveat emptor." How do you say that in Mandarin?
But here’s the clincher, after removing the hack by destroying the partition and reformatting, it’s actually a nice little player.
It uses all the standard firmware (which I’ve complained about in the past), and all the other functions work just fine (although the minesweeper game still doesn’t have all the buttons needed).
So why go to the extra trouble to create a memory hack just to screw me over by 6GB? Perhaps it’s just part of the Ferengi ethics which is the emerging PRC capitalism. I mean why deal with the paper-tiger of Western Imperialism (which is a real paper-tiger remember) if you’re going to be totally trustworthy?
But I think the answer is in the ebay feedback system. The ebay sellers who sold me the hacked systems are expecting that people will put in their positive feedback before filling up their players with greater than 2GB of data. And if they do, then there’s going to be a month or more of wheedling and finagling before a negative feedback will be registered. And you only have two months to put in a negative review.
That’s why both rip-off sellers had 98% positive reviews and over a thousand feedbacks. Which is impressive until you consider that their feedback is similar to the guy who’s selling the secret to invisibility for $50.
Considering that rip-off seller #2 has sent me word-for-word identical email responses to rip-off seller #1, I don’t feel bad about tarnishing the seller’s reputation.
