My iPod let its magic smoke out over the weekend. my Mac's Disk Utility reported broken B Trees. First aid couldn't fix it, and the disk couldn't be partitioned either - it just sat there for hours trying to build a partition table.

Sad, but perhaps unsurprising. It has spent the last eighteen months pretty mush constantly in the pocket of the must clumsy, drunken man in South London. That's got to be hard on a hard disk.

Two days without sounds on the road proved that my teenage music addiction had come back with a vengance, so I went and blew the remains off my bonus on a shiny new 60GB iPod Video.

What's bad? All the accessories that I'd accumulated - cases, mains charger and a remote - are useless. I'll have to start again from scratch. :-(

What's indifferent? The 'Video' bit. I've ripped a couple of DVDs, just for the hell of it, but I really can't see myself watching anything much on it - especially given the way watching video burns through the battery.

Errr, well, rocket boom perhaps. ;-)

What's good? Everything else. It's lovely. The screen is beautiful, and I love being able to see the covers of my CDs as I'm listening to. The new iPod seems louder than my last one, which suits me fine. I can fit all my music on it. And as usual, it's the little touches that Apple get right. The icon on my desktop even knows which colour iPod I bought! Class.