All about whole lot

Saturday Post: Globalization Comes To A Screeching Halt . . .

Silicon Valley Watcher--reporting on the business and culture of disruption

- 5 hours and 11 minutes ago

DK Matai, chairman of the ATCA Open has written a terrific essay about how global shipping has come to a halt because of the lack of letters of credit.

Just five months ago it cost about $234,000 to rent a 170,000 tonne Capesize bulk carrier. That priced has collapsed 98 per cent to less than $5,000!

That means that globalization has come to a screeching halt. Read more:

The Global Shipping Halt: Is The Great Unwind Disrupting The Freight Market?

By DK Matai

Freight shipping prices for transporting dry raw materials have collapsed in November 2008. The Great Unwind is like a Tsunami that is engulfing and halting the shipping world at an accelerating rate. The Baltic Dry Index sounds like a weather report, but what it really does is track the price of shipping bulk cargo -- such as coal, iron ore, cotton and grain. Recently, the Baltic Dry Index has fallen through the floor. It has slumped by nearly 95% over the past five months. In real dollar terms, at the peak of the market in June, a 170,000-tonne Capesize bulk carrier cost USD 233,988 to rent. Recently, it was available for USD 4,793 - that is a crash of 98% and is below the cost of paying for crew, insurance, maintenance and lubricants. Why?

1. Of the USD 13.6 trillion of goods and materials traded worldwide per annum, 90% rely on letters of credit or related forms of financing and guarantees such as trade credit insurance. International shipping works on "letters of credit." These financial guarantees are issued to buyers of bulk cargo by their banks. This system has greased the wheels of global trade for the last 400 years by transferring payments internationally from buyer to seller once shipments have been delivered. With the collapse of the credit market - and banks now sitting on their hands, refusing to lend - the fast-moving wheels of global shipping have come close to halt.

2. There is a collapsing demand for credit driven expensive product purchases like cars and as a consequence, the transport of associated raw materials and sub-assemblies. Auto sales are falling in double digit percentages across most of the G7, ie, the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Canada. The pace of car sales growth is slowing down across most of the remaining G20 nations as well, including China and India.

This is a massive disruption in the freight market with asymmetric consequences for world trade, which poses systemic risk for many nation states. Liquidity has to return because if there is insufficient money to provide standard finance, world trade is being sharply cut back and economic growth is not only stalling but likely to implode. If cargo trade stops, a whole lot of supply chain disruptions start. For example, if the iron ore does not go to the refinery, there is no plate steel. If the plate steel does not get shipped, there is nothing to fabricate into components. If there are no components, there is nothing to assemble in the factory. If the factory closes the assembly line, there are no finished goods. If there are no finished goods, there is nothing to restock the shelves of the shops. If there is nothing in the shops, the consumers cannot buy. If the consumers cannot buy, there can be no sales!

On a more sobering note, if bulk shippers cannot buy cargoes, then a lot of US and world grain could end up rotting in warehouses while big portions of the world go hungry. For example, the Saudis are the biggest importers of food in the Middle East. They probably have the money to pay cash for their food shipments and may not therefore need letters of credit. But for the approximately 2.7 billion people in the world who spend 80% of their income on food, a disruption in the global shipping trade could mean the difference between quiet poverty and going hungry day-in, day-out. That will not last for long before there is social disorder on a massive scale.

The Baltic Exchange based in London is the world's leading maritime marketplace. Their dry index, a measure of shipping costs across different ship sizes, hit a record high of 11,793 points in May but has since fallen by 93% to 815 points last week. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said that the financial crisis had begun to affect international trade, noting sharp falls to key shipping indices. Much lower shipping costs mean national markets are more contestable by foreigners, which should limit the ability of domestic firms to raise prices and therefore this should reduce the possibility of inflation. We can safely conclude that the majority of The Great Unwind's forces moving through the markets now seem to be deflationary, and not inflationary.

The ravaged worldwide demand for cargo ships is due to the chronic global financial crisis affecting credit availability, an unprecedented synchronised economic downturn across most of the major national economies in the world caused by massive demand destruction, and the resultant collapse in commodity prices. At the same time, container rates in the Asia-Europe routes have plummeted by around 75% this year and a price war between companies seems to be driving rates lower and lower, destroying the profitability of container shipping and placing huge stresses on companies struggling to meet their commitments. A significant component of the dramatic decline in shipping indices has been due to the difficulty in arranging trade finance during the credit crunch. Demand has been slashed because the global credit squeeze has made it very difficult for buyers to attract funding. At the same time, perceived counter-party risk in the physical markets has slowed trading to a trickle, exacerbating the freight slide. Many big players involved in the shipping of dry commodities and goods cargo are unwilling to trade with some parties fearful of their financial footing. There are big chains of owners of the chartered ships in the supply chain, so if someone goes bankrupt half way through the chain, it has a knock-on domino effect for everybody else. Another problem is that there are quite a significant number of players walking away from cargoes at present. So anyone who has taken cargoes to hedge the vessels they have chartered is now finding themselves with the ship without the cargo to carry.

ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steelmaker, on November 5th said its global output will decline by more than 30 percent. Cia Vale do Rio Doce, the world's biggest iron-ore producer, said last month that it will cut production.The fall in demand for many raw materials, which began at the beginning of June, first squeezed the profit margins of producers since they faced fixed high raw material costs and falling prices for their finished products. This was followed shortly by a squeeze of freight costs as they tried to pass the pressure from the profit margins to the freight market. One could be forgiven for not noticing what the world has experienced in recent years by way of an unprecedented growth in shipping and shipbuilding, fuelled by cheap imports from Asia and the seemingly unstoppable rise of economies such as China and India with their insatiable demand for raw materials. For some time charter rates went through the roof and reached a zenith in May/June this year and demand for new ships out-stripped supply. A different picture is now emerging. Companies are starting to struggle with too many ships chasing ever decreasing rates.

This slump not only means a fall in revenues but also less revenues to service debts. In turn, the current 'credit crunch' means extreme difficulties for struggling shipping companies seeking to raise capital. UNCTAD revealed in its annual maritime transport review that the world's merchant fleet had expanded to a record 1.12 billion deadweight tons, with the order book for new vessels reaching a peak of 10,053 ships in 2008. However, from mid-2008, companies were cancelling new ships on order, even when they were losing their 10% deposit in tens of millions of dollars. Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL), Japan's largest bulk shipping company is said to be considering laying-up and even scrapping vessels as revenues collapse. MOL may mothball some of its largest vessels. The company is considering scrapping seven of its Capesize dry bulk ships from its fleet of a 100 vessels. This suggests that MOL may be getting ready for a protracted down turn lasting several years. Reports are already filtering through of companies seeking sheltered waters to lay up their giant vessels to weather the financial storm. Just as in the days following the oil crisis in 1973, we could see the same happening with the great lumbering bulkers and container vessels, which now seem less and less attractive as they ply the waters with their great bellies less than full. In the space of less than half a year we have seen the shipping world ride the crest of a massive globalisation expansionary wave and then plunge into a financial storm that could sweep most vessels off our oceans, and with them, companies who cannot weather the crisis caused by The Great Unwind.

We welcome your thoughts, observations and views. To reflect further on this, please respond within Facebook's ATCA Open discussion board.

Best wishes

DK Matai

Chairman, ATCA Open

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This Week's Top Downloads [Download Roundup]

Lifehacker

- 9 hours and 10 minutes ago

pullia href="http://lifehacker.com/5088042/streamdesk-brings-web-streams-to-the-desktop"StreamDesk Brings Web Streams to the Desktop/a (Windows and Mac)br /em"StreamDesk brings a hand-picked selection of live video streams from sites like Ustream.tv, Justin.tv and Stickam directly to your desktop."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5090567/dariks-boot-and-nuke-is-the-nuclear-option-of-secure-data-shredding"Darik's Boot and Nuke is the Nuclear Option of Secure Data Shredding/a (All platforms)br /em"If you're donating or otherwise handing off your hard drive, however, it's a serious tool for erasing data so it's really, really hard to ever find again."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5090915/extray-puts-itunes-album-art-on-your-desktop"ExTray Puts iTunes Album Art on Your Desktop/a (Windows)br /em"exTray is a free system tray utility that monitors your iTunes playback and displays album art and other track information on your desktop."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5093039/ultimate-windows-tweaker-is-like-tweak-ui-for-vista"Ultimate Windows Tweaker is Like Tweak UI for Vista/a (Windows Vista)br /em"Ultimate Windows Tweaker makes no bones about its source of inspirationâ€”the uber-specific, XP-customizing Microsoft tool TweakUIâ€”and does pretty well by it."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5094700/snaptell-explorer-instantly-looks-up-any-product-via-photograph"SnapTell Explorer Instantly Looks Up Any Product via Photograph/a (iPhone 2.0)br /em"Similar to a bar code scanner (except you photograph the item cover, not its bar code), SnapTell automatically looks up your item and gives you links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Wikipedia, and straight-up search engines so you can compare prices and find out more about it."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5094422/free-version-of-touchtype-email-app-now-available"Free Version of TouchType Email App Now Available/a (iPhone 2.0)br /em"TouchType offers landscape view (and wider keyboard) for composing email on your iPhone or touch, and even better, can save and load reusable text snippets to reduce your typing and make sending repetitive emails a matter of a whole lot fewer taps."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5093697/merge-mp3-combines-audio-files-in-drag+and+drop-interface"Merge MP3 Combines Audio Files in Drag-and-Drop Interface/a (Windows)br /em"If you are looking for ways to merge a bunch of MP3 files into one larger file, and don't like the command line solution I wrote about earlier this week, try Merge MP3."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5095548/q+dir-explores-files-with-multiple-panes-and-custom-views"Q-Dir Explores Files with Multiple Panes and Custom Views/a (Windows)br /em"Free file browser Q-Dir makes for a good USB drive app or installed replacement for Windows Explorer for those who do a serious amount of file swapping, or just like to be able to keep multiple folder views open at once."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5095241/plex-7-adds-itunes-and-iphoto-support-and-more"Plex 7 Adds iTunes and iPhoto Support and More/a (Mac OS X)br /em"The latest version of the free Plex Media Center for Mac now includes iTunes and iPhoto support, iTunes visualizations, TV theme music, and the ability to play songs you've purchased from the iTunes Store."/em/lilia href="http://lifehacker.com/5095994/mmm-free-declutters-busy-context-menus"Mmm Free Declutters Busy Context Menus/a (Windows XP)br /em"Free utility Mmm offers an easy interface for hiding and organizing right-click context menu itemsâ€”into a "Rarely used" subfolder, for example."/em/li/ul/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=1d859b9fbfba62f34789cda82a70ac15p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=1d859b9fbfba62f34789cda82a70ac15p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=1d859b9fbfba62f34789cda82a70ac15" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=QLf0vDPl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=AlBufPvW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=zFJyFlOL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=zFJyFlOL" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=6kQoPt3V"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=6kQoPt3V" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/LzCD30pOo4I" height="1" width="1"/

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Slap Shot 3 The Junior League DVDRip XViD-iFN

NXE creating HDMI headaches for UK Xbox 360 owners?

30,000 jobs at risk as Woolworths teeters on the brink

Guardian Unlimited

- 1 days and 10 hours ago

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/72887?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+30%2C000+jobs+at+risk+as+Woolworths+teeters+on+the+brinkch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Woolworths+%28Business%29%2CRetail+industry+%28Business%29%2CBusiness%2CRedundancy%2CPolitics%2CUK+newsc5=Personal+Finance%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Marketsc6=Julia+Finchc7=2008_11_22c8=1122275c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Woolworthsc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FWoolworths" width="1" height="1" //divpMore than 30,000 retail jobs were at risk last night as Woolworths fought to avoid collapse and the fashion discount chain MK One crashed into administration for the second time in a year./ppWoolworths' future was hanging in the balance after its bankers objected to a management rescue plan to sell the loss-making 800-store chain to Hilco, which specialises in restructuring distressed companies./ppThe 99-year old retailer, which is a mainstay of town and city centres across the country, is now in last-ditch talks with its lenders in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy. But a source close to the negotiations said the talks had reached "an impasse" and "are not looking good"./ppSome 25,000 staff work in Woolworths stores and another 5,000 for two other businesses in the Woolworths group: EUK and 2entertain. The group also has 10,000 pensioners and pension fund members./ppEUK distributes DVDs, CDs and books to major supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons and if the distributor is forced into administration alongside the Woolworths stores it could threaten the supermarkets' supplies in the vital Christmas shopping weeks./pp2entertain is a joint venture with the BBC which produces and distributes BBC programmes on DVD and has had big successes with shows such as Little Britain and Top Gear./ppMK One, which operates 125 stores aimed at young women and teenagers, has 1,400 staff jobs at risk./ppThe latest potential job losses come amid vast cutbacks in the retail industry, which is slashing staff costs by reducing workers' hours. Argos, for instance, has cut workers' hours by 20%. The specialist magazine Retail Week yesterday reported that across the high street such cutbacks now equal 100,000 full time jobs vanishing in the last year. The retail sector employs 10% of the UK workforce./ppThe stock market fell sharply again yesterday as investors worried about the effects of a recession on the corporate sector. Leading UK shares suffered their third worst week on record with the FTSE 100 slipping to 3,780, its lowest level since April 2003./ppWoolworths has been battered by other retailers for years, but in recent weeks it has also been squeezed by the economic downturn and the impact of credit insurers - who protect suppliers from non-payment of invoices in the event of a retailer going bust - withdrawing cover to Woolworths' suppliers. That has left the chain having to pay suppliers on delivery - or have empty shelves./ppWoolworths bosses have tried to sell the chain for a year in order to protect the other two businesses, but without success. A possible offer from Iceland supermarket boss Malcolm Walker in the summer fell apart when Baugur, the Icelandic investor backing his approach, ran into its own, credit crunch-related, problems./ppEarlier this week Woolworths confirmed it might sell the stores, which are all leasehold, to Hilco. The US-owned group would have also taken on pound;265m of Woolworths' pound;380m of debts. Woolworths wanted the other pound;115m of debt to be transferred to EUK and 2entertain, which last year made profits of more than pound;40m before interest and tax./ppIn normal banking circumstances, such an arrangement would be commonplace, but a source familiar with the situation said: "The banks just won't let it happen. They seem to want to put the whole lot into administration to get all their money back immediately. The banks have the whip hand here."/ppWoolworths has a range of lenders, and many have been hit hard by the credit crunch. Its lead lenders are GMAC, of the US which is applying to the American bank bail-out fund for support, and Burdale, part of the deeply troubled Bank of Ireland, which yesterday said it had received a takeover approach./ppWoolworths' other lenders include Barclays, which is raising pound;7bn from Middle East investors, the American bank Wachovia, which has just been taken over, and GE, which has had two profits warnings this year./ppA spokesman for Burdale, one of the lead lenders, refused to comment on the discussions with Woolworths./ppThe crisis at Woolworths and MK One will increase fears that other ailing retail chains could collapse in the coming weeks. Casualties - and a fresh round of job losses - had been expected in the new year, when the Christmas winners and losers emerge. But lenders and suppliers had been thought unlikely to force stores into bankruptcy in the run-up to Christmas, when they should be raking in cash. Woolworths, for instance, normally makes 90% of its profits in the six weeks before Christmas. However, in the first six months of this year it crashed pound;100m in the red./ppWoolworths shares closed last night at just 1.43p, down 32%, valuing the entire business at just pound;25m - equal to about three days' sales./ph2strongJob cuts this week/strong/h2pstrongMonday/strongbr /Citigroup, London strong2,400/strongbr /Avis, Hayes, Middlesex strong100/strongbr /Hoover, Merthyr Tydfil strong337/strong/ppstrongTuesday/strongbr /Wolseley, nationwide strong2,000 /strongbr /National Express, East Anglia strong200/strongbr /PSL Energy Services, Aberdeen strong50/strong/ppstrongWednesday/strongbr /SIG, nationwide strong900/strongbr /Fidelity International, London strong300/strongbr /Deutsche Bank, London strong450/strong/ppstrongThursday/strongbr /Rolls-Royce, Derby strong140/strongbr /AstraZeneca, Macclesfield strong250/strongbr /BAE Systems, nationwide strong200/strongbr /Daily Mail and General Trust strong400/strongbr /Tughans, Northern Ireland strong20/strong/ppTotal strong7,747/strong/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/woolworths"Woolworths/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/retail"Retail industry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/redundancy"Redundancy/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Businesscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660246112201400459684"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Businesscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660246112201400459684" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

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NXE creating HDMI headaches for UK Xbox 360 owners?

Engadget

- 1 days and 11 hours ago

div align="center"a href="http://www.avforums.com/forums/xbox-360/867084-nxe-installed-now-no-sound.html"img hspace="4" border="1" vspace="4" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadgethd.com/media/2008/11/avatar-quiet.jpg" //abr //div The a href="http://www.engadget.com/tag/nxe"path to Netflix-enhanced glory/a hasn't been entirely trouble free for everyone, this time it's posters on AVForum noticing a distinct lack of audio on Xbox 360s connected to their HDTV by HDMI. So far suggested solutions for the afflicted include plugging in the hard drive while the system is on, or waiting several minutes before switching the monitor to HDMI, and repeating them every time the system is started. It's not the first time we've heard of a href="http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/07/03/30-failure-rate-for-bskyb-set-top-hdtv-boxes/"UK-centric HDMI weirdness/a, any of you hearing a whole lot of nothing while gaming (that's not attributable to hard drive installs)?br /br /[Via a href="http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2008/11/21/nxe-reportedly-causes-sound-issues-for-hdmi-users/"Xbox 360 Fanboy/a]pFiled under: a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/gaming/" rel="tag"Gaming/a, a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/hdtv/" rel="tag"HDTV/a, a href="http://www.engadget.com/category/homeentertainment/" rel="tag"Home Entertainment/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/nxe-creating-hdmi-headaches-for-uk-xbox-360-owners/"NXE creating HDMI headaches for UK Xbox 360 owners?/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.engadget.com"Engadget/a on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:33:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.avforums.com/forums/xbox-360/867084-nxe-installed-now-no-sound.htmlRead/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/nxe-creating-hdmi-headaches-for-uk-xbox-360-owners/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/forward/1379892/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/21/nxe-creating-hdmi-headaches-for-uk-xbox-360-owners/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/mnGHMY6UnBciL8kA4fLRpRWmk0c/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/mnGHMY6UnBciL8kA4fLRpRWmk0c/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=69pziPQ7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=69pziPQ7" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?a=BtYUFU9V"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/engadget?i=BtYUFU9V" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~4/ZRBtb65a2WU" height="1" width="1"/

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Olga Kurylenko Does More Maxim

Anthonys busted ipod

MAKE Magazine: Music

- 2 days and 1 hours ago

After school today, Matt and Anthony came in with Anthony's busted Ipod Video. They asked me how good I was at fixing iPods. Never having been inside an iPod before, I replied, "well let's see what you've got." It appears that the back came off the ipod, and now it was bricked. Anthony was pretty upset, wondering if all his songs would be missing, and what he would do without his beloved tunebox. It would not power up at all. He showed how it could be opened by grabbing at it with his nails and separating the back. so much for specialized antimar tools.

We did a few searches on replacing ipod batteries. One page that looked promising turned out to be about the wrong generation. Not knowing which model it was, we looked up the various models to get the generation right. His turned out to be a 5th gen iPod.

Next we needed to know what to expect inside. I could see a couple of ribbon cables that appeared to have just pulled out of their fittings. If they could be placed properly back into their slots, that would be fine. They needed to go back into place in such a way that the back could actually be reattached.

Inside, there was a bunch of cool stuff. The 80gig hard drive was incredibly small. I couldn't believe how much capacity could be stuffed into such a small package. The screen was neat too. Real thin, backlight coming from the top. There was some foam and spacers in there to keep things from flopping around. Everything was held together with ribbon cables.

The ribbon cables would be fine as long as they did not get torn. I found the fitting for one of them on the side, and saw that there was a flip latch to hold it together. After securing that one, the next was the one at the bottom. We got it to go into the slot, clicked the case together and hit the power button. About this time, Anthony got about his 50th text message of our short session. The Ipod would not fire up. Anthony was upset. Then his father called. He explained that he was in the middle of fixing his iPod. There was some discussion of Best Buy and their warrantee policy. I was pretty sure that there was no chance of this relic being still covered.

While they were talking, I cracked the thing open again and took a look at the second fitting, down near the charger port. It was stiffer, with reinforcement of a piece of white plastic. I figured that it had to be that the fitting was not all the way in. I used my Warrantee Voider to get the ribbon into the fitting all the way. Once I got it running, I showed it to him, and he reported happily to Dear Old Dad that all was well.

On looking at the catches on the case, we could see that one of them was more worn than the rest. I figured that it would be good for a while, but it would eventually pull apart, so I suggested that we make a skin for his newly functioning Ipod. He said he had nothing planned, but I could tell that now that his iPod was running, his daily routine was about to resume. We didn't have a whole lot of time.

First we looked up the dimensions for the 5th generation iPod. The thing I was looking for was a good, full dimension drawing that I could use to make the image for the skin. I wanted to make it so that the sticker on the front would reach over to the back and hold the two together. The image and dimensions did not jump out of the browser at me, so we grabbed a ruler and went over to the computer to design up a skin.

We used CutStudio, which comes bundled with the Roland CAMM1. I don't like the software much, but it ports right to the cutter. Once you have the thing designed, you can only cut it, I have not been able to find a way to export it for editing in a more powerful program like Gimp or Inkscape.

Rather than having him do the design work, I chose to do it myself. His texts and calls were coming with increasing frequency, and I knew word had gotten out that he no longer had an excuse to be absent from his pressing duties. We had to work fast. A couple of quick measurements, some alignment of shapes, and the overall design was done. To add tabs to the sides so they would reach over the back, I had to trace over the outline and duplicate most of the shape. Anthony was impressed that it was possible to design something that was so close to the outline of his beloved.

When I sent the file to the cutter, it was done in a few seconds. He couldn't believe it when I showed it to him. Then we weeded it and put it on transfer tape. It took a few tries to get it onto the iPod squarely, but eventually it went on fine. In looking at it, I told him that it wasn't such a great fit, and looked kind of unprofessional, but would keep the back from falling off. I invited him to come back on Monday to make a better looking skin, maybe with a picture that he made on it as well.

He cruised out the door about 45 minutes after coming into my room for the first time ever, happy as can be with his resurrected iPod in one hand and buzzing phone in the other. Problem solved.

Do you have tales of repairs and making things right? How about advice on how to get the right patterns for skins to fit various models of phones or audio players? Would you like to make new skins for your laptop, digicam or even dashboard? Share your ideas in the comments or add pictures and video to the Make Flickr pool.

a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/anthonys_busted_ipod.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/anthonys_busted_ipod.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" / Permalink/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/anthonys_busted_ipod.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890#comments" /Comments/a | a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/diy_projects/?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890" /Read more articles in DIY Projects/a | a href="http://digg.com/submit?url=blog.makezine.com%2Farchive%2F2008%2F11%2Fanthonys_busted_ipod.htmltitle=Anthony%26apos%3Bs%20busted%20ipodbodytext=%20After%20school%20today%2C%20Matt%20and%20Anthony%20came%20in%20with%20Anthony%26apos%3Bs%20busted%20Ipod%20Video.%20They%20asked%20me%20how%20good%20I%20was%20at%20fixing%20iPods.%20Never%20having%20been%20inside%20an%20iPod%20before%2C%20I%20replied%2C%20%26quot%3Bwell%20let%26apos%3Bs%20see%20what%20you%26apos%3Bve%20got.%26quot%3B%20It...topic=tech_news" /Digg this!/a

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