ORN: 6 miles in something like 1:10:00. That's slow, but I did it. I ran five continuous miles in the late night 85° heat before taking my first walk break.
At around the 5 mile mark, I tried to press my iPod's center button to get Nike+ to play my Power Song, "I Got It Made" by The Skatenigs. Instead of getting a body-boosting jolt of industrial-punk, I got silence. Somehow, I had managed to reboot my nano. Not only did I not get my jam on, I lost my whole workout. Running the whole time, in the dark no less, I futzed with the temperamental little gizmo until I reluctantly accepted the sad fact that I lost data on my first glorious long run in a long time.
But all was not lost. Google was my friend and I found a way to manually hack the run back onto my nano, and therefore, back onto Nike+. This information was gleaned from several sources.
The bad news is that Nike+ stores its data in tricky little XML files. The good news is that it stores its data in XML files, plain text, that can be hacked. The first important thing to do is to set the iPod to disc mode in the preferences. This makes the iPod appear to be just another storage device in Windows, and therefore, you can navigate to it and play with the files. The default path is [driveletter]:\iPod_Control\Device\Trainer\Workouts\Empeds\[device ID]. The drive letter is whatever drive letter Windows assigns to your iPod. The device ID is a string of gibberish that identifies your sensor. This is an important string, and I will refer to it later.
Be sure your iPod is "disconnected" from iTunes. Don't pull the plug. Just "eject" it so that it is still visible to Windows, just not to iTunes.
The first thing I did was go to a website that generates a very generic workout file in the Nike+'s XML format. The instructions there are very thorough, and by following them carefully, I soon had a file to begin to work with. Next, I had to open up that file and make a few changes. Look first for the <empedID> tag. Cut and paste your device ID between this tag and its closing tag. That associates the record with your sensor, and without it, you won't get a successful sync. Change the values in the <weight> tag if you want. Copy the values from another XML file in the synched folder if you want to paste in something for the <calibration> tag. I'm not sure whether it's necessary. Move the file into the "latest" subdirectory in the path I mentioned before. That is it. Re-plug your iPod into the computer, and it should recognize the new file, process it, and put it into the synched folder. If not, move the file back into the latest folder and try again.
Data! You are mine once again!
The downside is that you don't have your pacing data, but I imagine if you spent a week trying to figure everything out, you could manage to recreate it manually. I didn't feel like it, so I contented myself to get back the mileage data.
Technorati Tags: running, nikeplus, geek, XML, hack
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