I bought my refurbished iPod in January 2007; it's still going strong five years later. Same for my refurbished Macbook, although it's only 3+ years old, I think.

My current one basically works, except the right click button just stopped working, and I can't imagine it's going to be worth fixing in any way, since it's probably 4 years old? But everything else about it works fine, so I'm not in that much of a rush, except that now I've started thinking about New! and Shiny!

New! and Shiny! are worse than the Sirens of Scilla. They lure technogeeks to their financial deaths with their haunting melodies of gigabytes, fast processors, and true HD screens. Instead of being tossed against the rocks to an untimely death, New! and Shiny! hurl dead touchscreen devices at unsuspecting wanderers.

Hee.

I try to remember when I am looking at the New! and Shiny! thing how I felt that way about the last New! and Shiny! thing I am now wanting to replace. And assess whether or not I got that kind of value out of it.

That would be pretty annoying. Sure, most computers have internet access most of the time, but people move their laptops, dammit.

Hmph. Exactly. And furthermore, it's a to-do list! I shouldn't have to have internet access to maintain a text file.

The thing that's stupid and annoying is that I was using the Cozi calendar (flylady) to-do list, which I liked fine and would keep, except that its Android widget wants too much landscape. Like, it would be the only thing on the page. Or at least, it wouldn't be possible to put both it and the calendar (from the same app!) on the same page. Which is dumb.

So I went back to Astrid, but I have nothing to sync it to. I might as well just stick with Evernote checkbox lists, even though that's not a todo app, and it doesn't have functionality like that. But it's a list. I make it, then I check stuff off it. C'mon, people!

Wow! Two years? I would be pissed.

One of my friends swears that every iPod she owns dies in 14 months, shortly after the warranty expires.

My iPods do get used everyday and put up with a fair amount of abuse.

Mine is 6 years old and counting. I use it everyday. Aside from some lost pixels on the screen (I don't use it for video), it's fine. I would feel too guilty if I had to replace it often.

I have nothing to sync it to

Lifehacker has a suggestion of todo.txt, which is supposed to be the simplest and most elegant to do solution ever, but man, it has some overhead. If you're going to make a text file alert me when a deadline is past, how can you not? Jeez.

I sync Astrid to an Astrid account. I did use to have it synced to my Google task list, but I have too many gmail accounts in use to make that particularly sensible.

I couldn't achieve what I'm doing with Evernote. It would require more activity on my part than I've proven able to maintain. Astrid works very well for me as it is. But, as noted, little PC/Mac usage.

I don't like the free Astrid widget much, because it's buggy on my Honeycomb install (just a display issue, not functionality), and it can't be resized in order to take advantage of all the room I have to give it. If you pay for the premium app, you get more widgetage, but I'm not convinced it's worth it.

Yeah, I was getting ready to pay for the premium app, which would let me have it fill the rest of the half screen that Cozi leaves, but I dunno.

I did have some technical problems with my registration, and their support people were very responsive and helpful. I'm tempted to pay for premium just to tip my hat to them being good at their job for a free application.

Hmm. Now that I look at it, Cozi doesn't actually have anything other than a web interface either. Haruph.

Okay. I think it's possible I'm spending too much time working out my todo list software and too little time making the todo list, let alone doing the items therein.

Ima just pay for the app and see how it goes. It really isn't that often that I'm offline; it's just the principle of the thing.