Owners of failing first generation iPod Shuffles will be pleased to learn that Apple has released a reset utility (for Mac and Windows), which completely wipes the flash storage and starts the iPod fresh. Normally, we think of an iPod “Restore” action having this effect, which is entirely true for hard drive based iPods. A hard drive based iPod can be restored after the drive has been completely overwritten with zero’s, so there’s no argument there. However, the iPod Shuffle must work differently, as they can get corrupted and become unusable. A corrupted iPod Shuffle just blinks orange and green lights, and refuses to appear on the desktop. Apple’s new updater communicates with the iPod USB controller chip — always available when plugged in, unless the problem is far more serious — and reloads the entire contents of flash, bringing your once-dead iPod back to life.

I think Apple must have used some utility like this in the past, at least internally, to reset returned iPod Shuffles. When mine failed a few months ago with the aforementioned problem, Apple was able to reload the contents and make it live once more, so I’m glad to see that this great tool is now available to the public. As this is one of the most common iPod Shuffle difficulties, the iPod shuffle Reset Utility should greatly decrease the number of necessary returns.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve worked on Duplicatr, my Flickr metadata mirroring project, so here’s an significant update for those that are making use of the code. This version adds a number of highly requested features:

• Mirroring of 500+ photos
• Fetching information about photos added since the last run
• Tag-based filtering
• Simplified installation and execution

Download
Duplicatr version 1.1 can be downloaded here, and a link to the most current version will always stay in the sidebar at left.

Installation
1. After downloading the package, unzip it using your preferred utility (I recommend The Unarchiver for Mac OS X, and 7-Zip for Windows — both are free) and save the files in a convenient directory in your web folder.

2. Open duplicatr_config.php with an available text editor and fill in the details for your MySQL database and credentials. Note that you must already have a database created, which can be done with any number of utilities or directly from the command line using the mysqladmin program that comes prepackaged with MySQL.

3. Also edit index.php and fill in your Flickr ID (or email address) and desired tags. Following the example in the code, you can add as many tags as you like. This may be useful if you intend to have only photos with a specific tag appear or be searchable on your site. If you don’t need this feature, they are commented out by default and won’t be used for filtering.

4. With the database ready and Duplicatr in an accessible place, visit www.your-domain.com/duplicatr/install.php, or whatever the path to install.php may end up being in your case. The install script will create the necessary tables and inform you of its results. Once completed, you can delete the install.php and go directly to index.php to kick off the duplicating!

Just recently, I received my iPod Breakout Card, and I finally finished assembling it tonight. By using a the same JAE manufactured connectors as the official iPod ones, each pin from the Dock connector can be individually run to a much larger pad, making it easy to interact with the iPod. I intend to install a row of pins on each side and allow the entire card to be snapped into a breadboard for easy prototyping.

While I’m not sure what kind of hack I’ll be using it for yet, I do intend to post some code written for the BASIC Stamp II, as I don’t yet have any PIC experience (I should write about the BlackBerry-like devices a buddy and I made years ago using a pair of BSII chips and wifi transceivers! A story for another day…)

You, too, can order and assembly your very own iPod breakout card from Ridax in Sweden. It took a few days for my parts to get to the U.S., but they arrived well packed and ready to be used. This should be the start of some more interesting iPod hacks!

While removing the few spam emails that Mail didn’t catch this evening, I had the idea of combining the Akismet comment spam filter API with Mail (or any email client, for that matter). Akismet does such a great job of catching comment spam, I thought that using a continually updated database of email spam could perhaps do the same for my inbox.

However, this idea is not without email privacy concerns. Every email would have to be sent to the Akismet servers, where they are checked and flagged as “spam” or “not spam,” much like the current blog plugins work. While I don’t believe the Akismet spam database is able to be publicly browsed, the text of every email received would have to be sent to and scanned by a third party system, and I’m sure some will object to this (heck, some people don’t even like the idea of Google’s bots placing targeted ads in Gmail).

I’m sure plugins for Mail and Thunderbird could be created in short order, but I’m not positive that their spam database would be accurate until a bunch of people started using it and flagging spam emails. As Mail’s spam filtering abilities only seem to increase with each release of Mac OS X, I think it’s about time to take matters into our own distributed hands.