40. Know your digital camera and your MP3 player inside out

We'll start with the MPs player only today. Don't want to pull a muscle on day 1 of The Challenge...

And let's get something straight - I'm not much of a techno-whiz. Both my camera and MP3 player are not the newest. Every time I buy a new needle for the player I think to myself, 'I need an upgrade...' Just kidding. The needle hardly ever needs replacing.

But in truth, I got my player in the days when programmes were on tv and memory was something my grandparents were losing. But it's a great MP3 player - my sister- and brother-in-law in Boston (the US one, not the UK one) bought it for me and I wouldn't swap it for the world. It's not the one pictured on the left by the way. The one pictured on the left is the beauty I am going to buy when I lose (as, inevitably, I will) the one I've got. Whether it matches the one I've got remains to be seen. I'm hopeful.

The weird thing is my wife and daughter have these new-fangled iPods and they don't do half of what my trusty iRiver does. Mine's a multi-codec player,supports multiple languages, plays FM radio stations (and will store radio stations), has strange teenager-friendly EQ settings (nope, not a clue), has a GUI menu (but idiot-simple navigation), allows you to create playlists and folders, will record external sounds, voice or radio and has alarms, timers and a tea-making facility. (Last one there might not be true).

My player is so good you can't even buy it now (it's an iRiver iFP-895). You can buy a cover for it but you can't buy the unit. 'Obsolete' is a harsh word which is why I prefer 'collector's item'.

Anyways. Today I started to learn how to use that long list of goodies and, I must say, I love it. I've loaded songs onto the thing before obviously and I listen to the radio but I tried the voice-recording today and it is crystal clear. Which is useful: one of my Life List tasks is to use self-hypnosis and, having done some reading on that I find I will need to record a relaxation script - which I will do on my iRiver.

There's a difference between 'Menu' and 'Function', I find. A function is a thing you do - play music, listen to the radio etc. Whereas the menu gives you lots of settings to fiddle about with that will, amongst other things, alter your experience of those functions. The key to mastering this player is two-fold:

1. Pick a couple of the most useful functions plus a couple of the most relevant menu settings for each function and resolve to learn those.
2. Keep on practising changing the settings for the functions until it starts to become second-nature. So today I am going to record four good radio programmes using the timer facility and I'll also make use of the random play and shuffle features.

Tomorrow I will repeat with different functions or settings. Boy, do I know how to live. I reckon I can say I've mastered it when I can use easily any of the functions or settings necessary to allow me to utilise the player in any of the scenarios I am likely to want to.

PS Our American cousins can see the above-pictured player here iRiver H320 20GB Digital Music Player with Color Display

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