Perhaps the world has moved on to the new iPod Nano. Still, there's an entire legacy of iPod minis out there to deal with (heck, the mini gave the new-gen Nano its scratch-proof metal skin. How's that for legacy?).

So, aside from turning minis into flashlight stereos, aircraft black boxes - or, for some weird and psychotic reason, flushing them down the toilet, why not recycle them, and/or turn them into the subject of a mod experiment, as one from the Geek Technique blog has done?

Because the microdrive in a mini is a storage device with moving parts, sooner or later (likely later), that drive will run down and conk out. What this geek did was to swap the 4GB microdrive for a Compact Flash card. He used a 4GB card, but as he pointed out, maybe even bigger "since the CF-standard is able to support capacities up to 137 GB." Hmm... maybe Apple SHOULD go flash for the next generation of video iPods.

Full how-to of modding an iPod mini's memory in ways Steve Jobs hasn't thought of, until perhaps just recently, at the Read link below. And, once recycled and sporting a muy-streamlined flash card, please don't suddenly flush this into the toilet as well. The only iPod that could probably fit with zero damage to the pipes is the Shuffle, anyway. Maybe even survive, too.