iPod nano not washing-machine compatible!

Last Christmas, Nick was the (very lucky) recipient of an iPod Nano. It was a shiny blue 4Gb and he really enjoyed loading it with music or one of my audiobooks.

Until a month or so ago, when he ran it through the washing machine. I hadn't really noticed he wasn't using it, but I mentioned something about it and he finally came clean and told me what had happened---but it was a week after the fact. It looked reasonably dried out, so I looked online for hints and tips on what to do next and it looked like charging it was a good idea. It powered to the blinking charging battery icon when plugged in, so I thought, "Good." We let it charge and came back to it.

Dead.

Since then, we've not been able to get anything out of it. So, I thought I'd disassemble it and see what might be wrong inside. I found a really nice disassembly walkthrough with excellent photos and got started. I had a size #0 Phillips and that was good for the first four screws, but the bit was too chunky to fit down inside for that fifth screw. So, I placed an order and waited (im)patiently for the parts to arrive. I didn't think I'd see them until at least Saturday, but the arrived in today's mail.

Yay!

Fifth screw out, bracket out, cable released, push. Er, push. Push! Damn. It's stuck. Forty-some odd minutes later, I've still made no progress---except to crack the liquid crystal display. *sigh* I was really looking forward to playing with the innards!

Summary: Don't test your iPod nano in the washing machine. If I could do this over (assuming a certain teenager came clean right away), I would set the iPod in a sunny window to dry. I'm afraid it may have not dried fast enough and some of the parts corroded or oozed and stuck (?).

In other iPod news.... my new alarm clock arrived today! Very cool. I'm a little disappointed in the amber-not-red digits. But what concerns me most is the bright blue light on the iPod tray which is lit up whenever an iPod is in the tray. Sure, if you dim the clock, the blue light goes off, but the last thing I want is to dim my clock at night! It's the whole reason I *don't* like blue clock LEDs----blue is too bright and un-readable and dim red without glasses can be as well. I'll soon see how amber does.

One feature of the clock I didn't know: it has a USB port on the top, so thumb drives can also be jacked in. The alarm can be bell, radio, iPod or USB. If it's set to iPod and the iPod isn't jacked in, the bell will go off instead. Pretty nifty.