My headlights look much brighter now that I cleaned 'em with the brass cleaner, as described in my previous weblog entry.  This evening I was driving home from a local restaurant around 8:30PM, and noticed the difference.  They look about 30% brighter now.

The headlights on my 1999 Mitsubishi 3000GT have been turning foggy over time. It's the outer part of the plastic headlight covers where the problem is. I thought it was some weird coating, I tried scratching it off but it doesn't help; it's like the plastic itself is crystallizing or something. I've just been living with it for years now, with poor illumination on the road at night-time... until today.

I saw an article on digg about some guy who figured out how to remove scratches from the plastic cover on his Ipod, by polishing it with Brasso. Other people leaving comments below the article swore it worked.

My cell phone is 1.5 years old, and had lots of scratches, so I went to the grocery store to buy some of this stuff. The place I go to does not have Brasso, specifically, but they did have a generic looking brass polish, so I bought it. It took a lot of rubbing this smelly liquid on my cell phone screen with a cloth, but it made my cell phone screen look almost brand-new!

Then this weekend it occurred to me - why not try that stuff on my car lenses? They're clear plastic, just like the cell phone screen. So I tried it. And it WORKED. I rinsed off the goop after rubbing for about 10 minutes on each side of the car, then let it dry. Check out these pics.

Yes, I know my car needs a wash really badly. It rained the other day, just a little bit, which always deposits dirt like mad.

I think my headlights will work a lot better now. There's no reason to spend hundreds of dollars replacing the lenses (especially since I couldn't find any on the Internet for this car), when you can simply spend less than $7 on a bottle of this stuff, and about 20 minutes of work.

I can't wait to try driving with my lights on after the sun goes down.

technorati tags: 3000gt, headlights, foggy, cloudy, car, lenses, polish

My ipod wiped out every song I had from it's memory, and I think it's Itunes' fault. Luckily, Itunes keeps my "library" on hand (along with my favorite podcasts, audio books, etc.) so I was able to reconstruct what I had on my ipod... sort of.

The failure scenario went like this.

I needed to move 2 episodes of Firefly to my laptop from my main home computer, so I could watch them in another room last night, and my normal keychain memory stick was not big enough. I remembered you can use an ipod the same way, so I copied the files onto my 1GB Shuffle - and it turns out I barely had enough room. So after copying the files to the ipod for transport and yanking it from the computer, I plug it right in to my laptop (where I have never used it before). Itunes opens up (I had installed it but never used it), and says "this ipod is part of another server/fileset/something or other, are you sure you want to switch it to a different set and wipe out all your songs?" I don't remember the wording, but you get the idea. Naturally I clicked "no", and closed Itunes. Then I pulled the files off the ipod, and deleted them from the ipod itself; the transfer was now complete.

That was yesterday. Today I plugged my ipod into my main computer, as usual, just like I have done so many times before, and guess what it says to me: The same exact message! It thinks I had switched my ipod to the laptop computer, and now I'm trying to switch it back! The only 2 choices it gives me are "no" and "yes", so I click "no". And guess what - the ipod does NOT show up in Itunes when you do that! I tried it twice.

You have to click "yes", and wipe out all your files, to get it to show up in Itunes again - even though I never granted permission for it to do anything on the empty Itunes computer (my laptop).

This is an extremely severe bug, in my opinion. Apple should never have shipped Itunes with this, and a number of other, extremely irritating bugs that I deal with every week.

So I guess I won't be using my ipod as a memory device, ever again. That's really screwed up.

Itunes is extremely poor software. I'm a programmer and know what can be done, and Itunes is not up to my standard. It's just too bad it's the best thing out there, for what it does.

technorati tags: ipod, itunes, bug, flash