I foolishly didn't bring the firewire adapter with me that allows me to connect the BIG firewire (6 pin?) to the LITTLE firewire (4 pin?) on my laptop.  Since I'd bought a bunch of CDs in London, I decided at Heathrow that I wanted to transfer them to my iPod.  Heathrow supports many stores but no Apple store I could find.  It does =, however, have a Dixons which is a local electronics store.

My first thought was to buy the necessary connector.  YOu can never have enough foo to bar connectors right?  While Dixons in Terminal 4 offers a variety of cables and connectors but not the one I was after.  However, due to the popularity of the iPod they did have a lot of iPod accessories including an iPod sync and charge cable.  Unfortunately the cable was marked for "click wheel, 20Gb/40Gb and mini only".  Now I stopped and thought to myself "Has the iPod dock connector changed going from 3G to 4G and why 20Gb/40Gb when iPods are 30Gb/60Gb by default these days.  To me it looked like a case of 3rd party peripheral providers struggling to keep up with an ever changing/expanding range of products so I bought it anyway.

Now the cable works but it has a couple of flaws :

  1. It doesn't charge ... I guess that isn't supported on 3G iPods and maybe why it was marked as it was
  2. Syncing with USB 2.0 drains the battery in about 550 songs