During my visit to Wales at Christmas, my brother and I spent a morning at one of those outlet centre places. While my brother got a good deal on a coat, my shopping was restricted to a visit to Whittard. Theirs wasn’t really an “outlet” shop, as it had much the same stuff as in their normal stores, though it was bigger than most. I totally failed to resist getting some chocolate covered coffee beans, which are quite lethally addictive. But I also got something else. Something so dangerous that I’m sure that there should be a law against it.

I got a bar of Lindt Excellence dark chocolate with chilli. Chilli and chocolate is a very old combination – the Aztecs (or some such people in that general vicinity) used to drink chocolate with added chilli, and those lovely Hotel Chocolat people do some nice truffles with a bit of chilli, so I knew I had to try this. And I’ve just got round to sampling it.

And you know, it’s pretty damn good. OK, it’s a bit light on cocoa – only 49%, which I’d describe as very low for dark chocolate, but it’s very smooth and moderately creamy. And the chilli is just strong enough to be interesting without overwhelming the chocolate. Really good stuff.

Lindt don’t list this on their website, and I haven’t seen it in a lot of places, but if you like chocolate and you like chilli, you need to try this. Watch out for it!

I vaguely hinted about these in my iPod piece, so I thought I might as well get on with writing about them. I’ve always tended to upgrade the headphones when I buy a new music player, as the supplied ones tend to range from “not all that good” through “poor” to “unspeakably vile”. For a few years, I’ve had a pretty good pair of Sony in-ear ones. They do a pretty good job, but I wondered if I could do better. So I did the usual googling and reading. For a while, I was looking at some nice Sure phones, and at a few others. But a few more reviews and articles led me towards these. Ultimate Ears make actual, proper in-ear monitors. If you’ve ever noticed bands playing with ear plugs in, there’s a good chance that those plugs will have been made by Ultimate Ears – they do a custom manufacturing service which involves the customer getting moulds made of their ears, which are used to make perfectly fitting sound isolating earphones. Cool. But they also make things at the slightly less exotic end of the market, like these.

The phones come with a variety of different sizes of tips, and it’s important to pick the right ones for your ears. There are also foam ends which will adjust to your ears, but those are only intended for a small number of uses before being replaced. Ultimate Ears do sell replacements, but as they’re in the US, that could be a bit awkward. I believe there are people in the UK who can supply bits if you need them, but as I don’t right now, I haven’t researched that. One cool thing about these is that you can replace the cable if it gets damaged, or if you need a different length – again, you’d have to check for a supplier outside the US.

Once you’ve picked your tips, it’s time to fit them. This involves a bit of wiggling, and can take a bit of getting used to, but it is worth it. If they’re not in right, the sound will suffer, and they’re less likely to stay put when you’re moving around. Ultimate Ears helpfully provide videos on their website demonstrating the technique, which is pretty cool. OK, now you’ve got them in, connect them to your chosen sound source. Make sure the volume is set low before you start playing. No, really. I found that with the iPod, music that sounded OK with the voulume set near to maximum with Apple’s earbuds sounded several million times better with these with the volume set to half way. Yeah. Partly it’s the sound isolation[1], but it’s also the fact that these little beasts have much more powerful and better quality drivers than you’ll get in budget headphones.

And yes, the sound is really rather good. Very clear, with plenty of bass, and more detail than seems reasonable from compressed digital files playing on a tiny player while walking around. I’ve been using them for about a week, and I’m quite impressed – they’re a definite improvement on the Sony set (which cost nearly £30 when I got them some years ago) and a dramatic improvement on any headphones that might have been supplied with your portable music player.

In addition to the black ones I have, other colours are available, including white for iPod fans who would feel strange with any other colour.

[1] Not sound cancellation, which needs a power supply and fancy electronics. These just fit into your ear in such a way that most surrounding sound is eliminated. I find that when I’m walking, I can hear traffic, but not much else. Caution is advised, etc. Not recommended for cyclists who’d like to survive their journeys.

Ooooooooooh, boy. Now here’s a review I never thought I’d write. I’ve had a number of different music players over the years, but I’d always shunned Apple’s offerings for a number of reasons. They tended to be expensive compared with those from other companies, no user-replaceable batteries (unless you’re a fan of microsurgery, which I’m not), proprietary connectors, and of course the “everybody else has them, I’d rather be different” factor. But the influence of using the Mac has been insidious. When I started copying CDs to the Mac, I accepted the iTunes default format (AAC, which creates .m4a files). Now these files do offer better quality for the size compared with the ubiquitous (if not indigenous) MP3 files that we all know and love, but they do have a slight problem: most portable music players don’t recognise them. They’ll all play those MP3 files, most will happily play the Windows WMA format (with or without DRM), but M4A is a bit of a poor relation.

So, I did a bit of looking, and found a nifty Creative Zen beast that would play them. Nice thing, flash memory, big screen, easy controls, available in a range of capacities at moderately non-painful prices[1]. The more I looked, the better it got, until I noticed that it wasn’t supported on the Mac platform. Now it might well be possible to persuade it to play nicely, but I’m really not inclined to play with things that are not supported by the manufacturer, so I reluctantly crossed it off my list. I’ve had good experiences with Creative stuff in the past, and I’d have been happy to get another one, but never mind.

So, I wanted something that would talk to the Mac, play MP3 and M4A files, be nicely small, preferably with flash memory rather than a hard drive. Which led me to this little beast. It’s the latest in the “small but perfectly formed” range of iPods and is available in either 4GB or 8GB capacities. The larger size is available in a choice of colours for those who like to look at their devices rather than listen to them.

Apple are pretty good about packaging their fancy toys – the boxes tend to be just big enough to hold the device and its bits, with much less of the huge volumes of air many companies like to include. This comes in a really small plastic box which contains the Nano, a cable (USB to that proprietary dock cable), an adaptor for clipping the toy into a desktop docking stand, and a small quick start guide.

Opening the small box revealed the really small Nano. It looks pretty wide in pictures, to accommodate the widescreen format display. )Yes, you can watch videos on it if you like, but personally, I find looking at anything other than short clips quite uncomfortable at that size.) However, that’s just relative wideness. The actual size is on the teeny side of tiny, and it really is remarkably thin. The front is in brushed aluminium, which looks very nice. The back, in one of Apple’s curious design decisions, is in mirror finish metal, which looks great for the five seconds before it shows a fingerprint. It’s also quite scratchable, so some kind of case or skin is a good idea if you want to keep your toys looking good.

Transferring music was as simple as plugging it in. It mounted on Mac, then appeared in iTunes, where I was offered the chance to register it and to update its firmware to the latest version. You have a choice about how to synchronise – if you have more capacity than you have music, accept the easy choice of copying everything from computer to iPod. Then every time you connect it, it will automatically keep things updated. If you have more music than capacity, you can let iTunes select enough music to fill the iPod. I’m not sure how it makes that choice, and personally, I’m not sure I’d trust it that far, so I went for the other option, which depends on creating playlists in iTunes – I tend to do that with music players anyway, so it suited me. Then all I have to do is tick boxes to determine which playlists I want on the iPod.

At first, I wasn’t too impressed with the sound. It seemed very quiet, even with the volume turned up all the way. Then I found the not at all obvious settings for changing the maximum volume (this is intended for parents who want to stop their kids deafening themselves, apparently). That was quite a lot better. Then I changed from the Apple ear buds to my trusty in-ear Sony set. That was much better, and my music began to sound the way I’d hoped it would.

The next stage will require another review, which I’ll do soon.

I managed to get an Apple remote control at half price in John Lewis, and that means I can safely bury the iPod in a pocket and have the ability to turn it off and on, pause, play, go forward and back and adjust the volume. The remote also adds an FM radio to the iPod, but I wasn’t really interested in that, and I haven’t tested that feature. I did find that if the earphones were connected to the remote rather than to the iPod, there was more background hissssssss between tracks, which is worth bearing in mind.

I’ve had the iPod for a couple of weeks now, and it’s doing the job. Battery life so far seems to be very good – Apple quote around 24 hours for audio or 5 hours for video. I’m happy with the sound, and the click wheel thingy is nicely easy to use (certainly it requires less practice than the Zen Micro’s odd slider thing). Nice kit. And it’s pretty.

[1] Unless you want the 32GB version. That’s a wee bit expensive

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. Today’s weight is a quite unusual 1.8 pounds (0.8 kg) down on yesterday’s. Not only that, but it’s the lightest I’ve been so far this year. Interesting…