leyton.org

Or “An Ampersand a day keeps the workouts at bay”.

I’ve been a happy owner of an iPod Nano for a few weeks now, and have particularly enjoyed the charting facilities provided by my Nike+ kit that I’ve ‘bodged’ onto my running shoes.

Whilst I’ve revelled in the comparative information it makes available, I discovered last week that I’d lost a couple of workouts. At least, they weren’t going up to nikeplus.com. I was getting the frustrating error message “Your workout data could not be sent to nikeplus.com because the data could not be accepted by the server”.

Now there exist various guides to how to ‘hack’ the iPod Nano to resend the data (in a nutshell, enable disk use, navigate to the data directory, which will be something like:

/Volumes/Your iPod Nano/iPod_Control/Device/Trainer/Workouts/Empeds/SOMENUMERIC/

and move the files in the ’synced’ directory, to the ‘latest’ directory, and resync your iPod. It should push the data up. So that’s fine if it’s just a glitch, but my error was happening all of the time. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the data being accepted. Indeed, I was just starting to think about hacking the contents of the files in some way thinking it might be that ‘old’ data couldn’t be inserted, when I finally got the idea of searching the Apple discussion forums, which don’t seem to feature (prominently) in my friend Google’s index.

The post from leo_santos earlier this month hit the nail on the head. The two problematic runs were conducted with a playlist that seems to be too long, or contain invalid characters (the ampersand), for Nikeplus.com to accept. My playlist was “The Levellers - Truth & Lies” (a great album by the way), and that just seems to be problematic. So I edited it down to “The Levellers” directly in the file (back up first kiddies!), and voila! I’m resynced, and have my lost 10 miles back.

It’s a pain of an issue that really shouldn’t cause such horrible errors, so I really do hope that Apple/Nike fix the limitation somewhere along the line, because I suspect it’s annoying a lot of people who feel they’ve lost out unfairly. Especially if you’re in a challenge with somebody

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 11:25 am and is filed under Apple, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.