Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Monday, December 15, 2003
00:32 - The very definition of "kludge"	(top)
One of the geegaws I can now enjoy, now that my iPod is one of the newer generation with the remote contacts and dock connector, is the iTrip by Griffin. It's an FM transmitter that attaches to the top of the iPod and lets you play your music through your car stereo, which though subject to static interference is a much more elegant (and legal) way to listen in the car than using headphones. However, the iTrip's design is very simple and self-contained, totally lacking in native controls. Most FM transmitters that I've seen for CD players and the like consist of little dongles with backlit displays of their own, which you can use along with a scroll-wheel or buttons to select the transmission frequency. As you drive around, you can jump to another frequency if a station heaves into sight transmitting on your frequency. But the iTrip doesn't have that. It's just a little white cylinder that plugs into the iPod. So how do you control what frequency you transmit on? Here's how: The iTrip installation CD comes with 103 little 5-second MP3 files, which it installs into iTunes and thence onto the iPod. Each MP3 file is actually a series of carefully timed beeps at a certain frequency, which when picked up by the iTrip tell it to synchronize to that frequency. You play the MP3 of the frequency you want, the iTrip's LED flashes to confirm, and thenceforward it transmits on that frequency. This just makes me quake in my seat, with how much of a kludge it is. I mean it in its purest sense: not a bubble-gum-and-baling-wire Band-Aid solution, not an inadequate or temporary fix; rather, it's a solution that utilizes the extant technology to its fullest capacity and in ways never really intended by design, thereby accomplishing its goal in a surprisingly elegant manner. This is the kind of thing that makes engineers wince at first, then cringe-- and then gape and blink and grin ear-to-ear. Wow! You actually got away with that! says the geek examining the device for the first time. It's a hack; it's not the slickest thing in the world. But it works, and it means the iTrip can blend in seamlessly with the iPod's minimalist design, with no visible controls or redundant displays or even software feedback into the iPod itself. It operates within the confines of the iPod's technology, and uses it in a creative new way that makes me laugh one of those laughs of joy over the magic of tech. This stuff is so much fun.