An iPod Gizmo Worth Having

I've tried a couple of those iPod-to-FM Radio transmitter things for my car. They both were made by Belkin, but you shouldn't necessarily take my comments as an attack on Belkin; the fact that they didn't work very well probably owes at least as much to the specifics of my car as to the devices themselves. Whatever the reason, they suffered from really bad signal-to-noise ratios, and for some reason stepping on the brake made them even noisier (I speculate that my brake and tail lights are multiplexed and somehow all the electrical activity is making the EMI situation in my car worse than it usually is).

I stopped using them because they were just more trouble than they were worth. Rotate the thing twenty degrees and suddenly noisy music becomes just noise...

But I found one for the house that's powered off the iPod's internal battery and not off the cigarette lighter in the car (remember when they were called "cigarette lighters" and not "auxiliary power outlets"?). It's actually Jean's, she got it for her birthday, but she hadn't even gotten it out of the package, and today I decided to experiment with it. Soon I was a third of the way through a box of Mike's Hard Lemonade and listening to my iPod and carrying on a spastic, convulsive twitching that only barely qualified as dancing, but was dancing nevertheless. The bookshelf stereo isn't the most impressive piece of sound equipment the world's ever seen, but for whatever reason, the little FM transmitter gets the signal to the tuner in the bookshelf stereo with no noise at all. It works really quite well - it's the "iTrip by Griffin" and I think it's worth it.

I let my iPod shuffle out a bunch of songs until I finally succumbed to a long day and four Hard Lemonades and felt that it was time for a nap.