Personal

Replacing the glass/screen on an iPhone 4

My wifes iPhone 4 dropped getting out of the car about a year ago and the screen broke. At the time, it was 150 bucks for a glass screen/display. You can't just do the glass like an iPhone 3G. So, I figured it was cheaper to wait and buy a phone when she can upgrade.

However, I saw at the office that you can now get the glass/screen for 35 bucks delivered on Amazon. So, I bought that. It came today and I sat down to do the job. I've done about 3 iPhone 3s before so I have a little experience. But, the iPhone 4 basically requires taking the phone apart. You have to remove the insides of it to remove the front screen assembly. Most of the screws are different sizes so you need to take a lot more care when disassembling if you want to put it back together.

The biggest problems I had were:

1. Screw sizes being different and I didn't take enough care remember which ones were which.
2. There are small fingers on the speaker assembly for EMI and 2 of the 4 broke off just by touching them. They are very fragile.
3. The coaxial connection for the antenna is very tricky to reattach. There are two tiny clips on it that need to be lined up. You don't just push it on, you need to align it and then it clips on. I had no 3G signal when I reassembled the first time so until I got the antenna back on my phone wasn't a phone.

It's back together now. I have 4 screws left on the desk that are not in the phone. Everything seems to work though, the phone makes calls/receives them, sound works, screen works, all looks good except for the screws left over and the 2 metal fingers that broke off.

The rear glass is literally a 5 minute job. Very easy, the front glass is about an hour easy. The good news is that unlike the iPhone 3G, you don't need a heat gun and all the messing about with adhesive to move components from the old glass to the new one. But, there seems a lot more disassembly and more care needs to be taken. It's probably easier than a 3G but you need to remember which screws go where and be very careful with the antenna and metal clips around it.

 

Ordered an iPhone 4S today

Well,

My daughter trying to text me while I was driving to pick her up was basically the trigger to upgrade. I couldn't respond to her texts while I was driving. A bluetooth headset doesn't work with texts, something kids (who don't drive) clearly haven't figured out yet (CALL ME!).

Anyways, I didn't get an iPad 2 because I didn't see the value. Faster processor and graphics didn't sell me. My original iPad is fast enough. Now, the iPad 3 with a rumored retina display would push me to buy. The iPhone 4S would have met the same response except for the SIRI feature which is what pushed me to buy.

I don't see where the next big innovation is going to be in the phone space. The screen is already as hi-res as anyone needs. Faster CPU/graphics will enable more software features and it's here where the innovation will come, not on the hardware side I think. I'm hoping I'll get two gens out of the 4S. You figure the iPhone 5 will still be using a dual-core chip and probably the same GPU. The screen may be a little larger but I don't need a larger phone thank you.

So, I bought an iPhone 4S for the software and hoping that with the new CPU/GPU, it'll run iOS 6 decently. Something that is worrying me is linking the software to the hardware. SIRI looks to only run on the 4S. Will future revisions require a 5? I'm hoping a lot of the SIRI is running on Apples cloud and hopefully, this will take the pressure off requiring faster and faster phones to run it.

As for the case staying the same, HURRAY! I already have an external case, and so on. A new case would just force more spending and waste throwing away the old cases.

I'm hoping the phone will soon just become a dumb terminal with voice preprocessing/screen and connectivity and most of the 'firmware' will be running on the cloud where it belongs...

Nook 2nd edition doesn't support WEP on Snow Leopard

I bought my daughter a Nook today to read on. I bought a Nook over a kindle because the book selection is better on Nook. I paid 140 for one at Staples.

I tried to set it up in my hotel room using my macbook as a wifi router for the wired internet in the room. My macbook running Snow Leopard only supports WEP encryption when used to share the internet like this.

The nook saw the macbook and noticed it was WEP, let me type in the password but would not connect using it at all. When I turned off WEP (no security), it connected and completed registration, downloaded her existing books (she was using an iPod Touch to read before, hard on eyes) and all was good.

It won't be a problem in the house where everything is WPA/WPA2 anyway so it's not really a problem but I see enough posts on the web that wifi doesn't work on the nook to make posting this account worthwhile.

I contacted BN about this using their chat support and the gentleman basically confirmed that WEP isn't supported and that you need to use WPA/WPA2 if you want security.

UPDATE:

I just upgraded my MacBook to Lion and WEP now works so it looks like a bug on the MacOS side in their internet sharing thats been fixed in Lion. So, it looks like WEP does work on a Nook despite their tech supports claims otherwise, it was a Snow Leopard bug.

Airport wifi speeds

I just upgraded my AirPort eXtreme base station to a 5th generation model. The old one was a 2nd generation. I'm using both now with the old one on the upper floor as an extender. It seems pretty seamless so far.

My iMac (7,1) gets a 130Mb/sec rating in the network utility and my MacBook gets a 300mbit/sec. I'm seeing this also in the transfer speeds. The iMac gets abut 1.5MB/sec maximum while I can get nearly 3MB/sec on the MacBook.

This is probably as good as I'll get on the iMac, I don't know of a way to upgrade the airport card on it to a better one. The new MacBooks can get 450Mbit/sec apparently so I'll see when I get one.

5th Generation Airport Extreme initial experience

I bought one of the new MD031 (A1408) model number airport extremes this morning. I have an original wireless N (A1143)  thats still got a single radio so the new one is about 3 models up from the one I had.

I unplugged the old one and plugged in the new one to start. It took a long time to get an IP address from my cable modem but eventually it did and it's solid since. I used the airport utility to find it and then the utility let me apply my old settings (base station name, passwords) to the new one so that was cool.

Everything in the house detects it now and is working with it. I'm seeing stronger signals everywhere. My macbook reports a 300mbit connection now instead of 130. My iMac isn't reporting a faster signal but thats probably because of antenna limitations in the iMac.

Upgraded my iMac 24" to 2TB disk

My 24" iMac had a 320GB drive and this had me using an external 1TB USB drive for my digital media. That was filling (900GB) and seemed to be starting to fail, no errors but lots of lot unexplained pauses were worrying me.

So, tonight, I bought a WD 2TB Green drive for 150 bucks and a torx screwdriver set. I used a garmin vacuum suction cup for removing the screen glass and then pulled off the LCD. The iMac already used a WD green drive so I liked that from a possible temperature issue with a new HD. I used the ifixit.com web site to help with disassembly. Total time taken was around 30 minutes.

Course, now, I'm waiting hours to move the files from the external drive to the internal one. I used superduper to copy the internal drive (the 320) to the new 2TB in a USB enclosure to prep it for install. The iMac just booted straight up with the cloned drive.

iBooks won't work. Failed to load book

I just bought my first book on iBook and for now, it sucks big time. The book won't open. iBook gives me a "Failed to load book because the requested resource is missing.". I can't see a way around this. Tried deleting it and redownloading but no joy. Lesson learned. Stick with Kindle. I only used iBook because I figured the book would look better in iBook than kindle but it looks like as well as costing twice as much as Kindle, I can't even read it now...

Time machine doesn't seem to deal well with backing up external drives

My home iMac has an external 1TB USB drive where I keep all my iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie stuff. I use timemachine to backup both my main HD and that drive to my Drobo. But, recently, it's going a little crazy. MY machine goes to sleep every night and wakes up every morning. Sometimes, the 1TB drive doesn't reappear on my desktop and I need to unplug/pluug it back in to get the drive to appear. This looks like a MacOs bug but what ever, this is what happens.

Lately, timemachine is making crazy sized backups. I just watched it do a 700GB one and as I type, it's doing another 900GB one. The only drive getting any traffic right now is the 1TB one so I'm assuming timemachine is doing a full backup of everything on that drive which is crazy as 99% of it hasn't changed since yesterday.

So, the question is, if a drive that is backed up by time machine isn't available when a backup is scheduled, does timemachine then think it's gone? And then later when you reattach, does time machine then decide to back the whole thing up again? For me, this is a rhetorical question as that seems to explain whats going on at least here. I'm on MacOs 10.6.4. Any one any ideas?

For now, I turned off the scheduled sleep/wakeup stuff thinking maybe thats when the 1TB drive gets 'lost'. But, thats tomorrow, today, it's backing up over 800GB as I watch it...

Unibody MacBook lid wont stay closed

My unibody MacBook screen won't stay closed. It looks like the magnets aren't strong enough so the smallest excuse is enough for the lid to pop up away from the magnets. It's just an annoyance so far but what I'm afraid of is the laptop turning on in my bag or something and then overheating.

Googling around the web shows others with similar problems but they all think it's the screen is twisted slightly but I can't see anything wrong with mine from that point of view.

I guess I'll drop in to an apple store next chance I get for an 'opinion'.

Bluetooth on MacBook and 10.6.3 not working FIX

I updated my Aluminium MacBook to 10.6.3 last night and bluetooth wasn't available on restarting. I fixed this by reseting the SMC on my MacBook. For me, shutdown, remove battery, hold down power button for 5 seconds, insert battery and power on and bluetooth is back.