Category: General

iPhone resurrection

On Saturday, I attended a housewarming party at a friends. He’s got a great house in Lake Washington and his party coincided with the Blue Angels air show. During the afternoon, a few of us helped him take a dip in the lake. The humor would not have been lost so suddenly if he hadn’t come up minus his iPhone, which went into the lake with him.

Between the cadre of tech geeks present, we had spare iPhones but this wretched soul had not synced his iPhone since January. I dove in and concluded that the bottom was about 20 feet deep and my lungs are only conditioned to free dives of 15 feet. So we formulated a plan. Jen and I drove home and fetched our SCUBA gear. Nelson fetched his tanks and BCD. We found a couple bricks to use as weights and went in. Nelson took a turn diving and then I did. After 10 minutes of swimming around face down and fins up, I found the phone.

There was much rejoicing but after 3 hours underwater, there was little hope of the phone working again. To prevent any further water damage I disassembled the iPhone and removed the battery. What surprised me was that I could find no evidence of the magic smoke having leaked out. That meant that either a component I couldn’t see had fried, Apple had some type of circuitry to prevent shorts, or we were just plain lucky.

Having the battery removed, the phone could now be safely “washed.” As we may remember from high school chemistry, pure water does not conduct electricity. It is the impurities in the water that allow water to conduct and wreak havoc on electronics. To stand any chance of recovery, the dirty water must be removed. Better still if I can also get as much of the lake sediment removed as well. Instead of distilled water, I prepared a bath of isopropyl alcohol and immersed the iPhone for a couple hours.

Why alcohol? Because even if I placed the phone in a ziplock full or rice, or my warming oven, it would take 3-6 days for the phone to completely dehydrate. Alcohol evaporates much, much faster. Isopropyl alcohol also acts as a water scavenger which further expedited the drying process. Finally, it is a mild solvent, which will help clean up any sediment that found its way in into the phone.

After a 2 hour bath in alcohol I removed the iPhone and set it out to dry. Exactly two days later I plugged it into my USB charging cable. The Apple logo came up but it failed to boot all the way. Suspecting that it couldn’t draw enough power via the 5v USB adapter, I plugged it into my iPod FireWire charging cable and it booted right up. Voila!  A working iPhone. 

The grand finale was soldering the battery contacts back onto the phone. After doing so, the battery still had plenty of charge left and the phone booted up off the battery. Our victim was able to sync his iPhone with his computer. Everything on the iPhone works (touch screen, applications, wifi, etc) except the phone radio. I dropped the SIM from my iPhone into it but got only a generic “call failed” error.

Interesting things learned: The iPhone has an immersion sensor at the bottom of the headphone plug. White is good, pink means it has been immersed. A USB cable does not supply sufficient current to power the iPhone when it doesn’t have a battery. A FireWire cable does. WiFi will not work on an iPhone without the battery. Alcohol worked well as a cleaner, solvent, and drier.

avoid GoDaddy

I have long disliked GoDaddy because using their web site to purchase a domain name is an atrocious experience. It makes me feel dirty and used, like GoDaddy cares more about my credit card info than me. Years ago, I transferred all the domains I manage to eNom and I’ve been quite pleased. My distaste for GoDaddy has been personal until today. It was recently discovered that GoDaddy allows employees to compete with their clients in domain name auctions. Rather than detail the problems with GoDaddy as a registrar, allow me to refer you to NoDaddy.

Shapely lies

As part of my “get into a shape” project, I rode my Schwinn World Avenue One to work today. I spent a fair bit of time route planning and drove numerous routes with the Jetta during the last month. I found several good choices, all about the same distance, 10 miles. This morning I hopped on my bike and rode off into the 47° drizzling grey morning. I arrived at work in almost exactly the time I expected, 40 minutes. I based my math on an average speed of 15mph and was quite pleased at realizing my goal.

The sense of accomplishment was not to last. I had fallen prey to the greatest of cyclist delusions. When a cyclist happens to be catching a small but favorable wind, the typical response is something like, “wow, I’m feeling particularly vigorous today.” During all my exploratory drives in the Jetta and during the ride into downtown this morning, I had failed to notice the elevation changes. It turns out that riding into town is pretty much downhill the entire way. The ride home was painful. And slower. Much slower.

Psychiatry worth reading

 Man\'s Search for Meaning

Freud’s psychiatry has never held much appeal to me. When I read Freud, I labor my way through because I simply don’t see the world the way he does. I suspect that a substantial portion of mentally healthy humans feel similarly and look elsewhere for psychiatry that is insightful and meshes with their life experience.

Viktor Frankl is one such psychiatrist. I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning. Like the hundreds of other reviewers on Amazon and Audible.com, I enjoyed the book and his perspective. Viktor shares a tremendous amount of insight into humanity that would be difficult to come by without his incredibly vast amount of life experience. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the essence of humanity.

kill-a-watt

Kill-A-WattI’ve finally bought a Kill-A-Watt. Of course, I’ve been running around plugging stuff into it to see how much juice various items use.

  • 252 W: Halogen Lamp
  • 150 W: iMac 24″ under load
  •  95 W : iMac 24″ at idle
  •  80 W : Home build file server**
  •  50 W : 20″ Apple LCD display (2W sleep)
  •  48 W : 20″ Viewsonic LCD display (1W sleep)
  •  45 W : iMac 24″ at idle, display in “sleep” mode
  •  30 W : Two disk Firewire 800 enclosure
  •  25 W : Lamp with 25W Compact Florescent bulb
  •  24 W : MacBook Pro 15″
  •  05 W : Netgear GS108 8-port Gigabit Switch
** I’m very proud of how little power my file server consumes. I went out of my way to reduce power (and heat dissipation) everywhere I could. Housed in an Antec P180b case is a Core 2 Duo T5500 CPU, Corsair 85% efficient modular power supply, 4GB of RAM, Compact Flash boot disk, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of mirrored 500GB disks, and a 300GB disk. I clocked down the CPU, reduced fan speeds, run powerd to reduce the CPU speed even more, and used smartd to spin down disks that aren’t in use. 
And that halogen lamp?  It’s gone.

Lucas and the halibut

Until quite recently, Lucas has been a fairly conservative eater. His tastes are quite diverse but he has lacked the necessary teeth to masticate anything more substantial than noodles. He has recently gained a fully functioning set of grinders and with them, the desire to chew up just about everything. So, did he really like the fresh Halibut as much as we did?  Or was he just enjoying the mechanics of eating it?  Does it really matter?

It’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed fresh halibut. The darned fish was so fresh it flopped right into my shopping cart. I didn’t have the heart to toss it back. I recalled that even a day’s freshness is significant with halibut so I just had to cook it up tonight. I broiled it nearly nude, with only a few pats of butter and a light sprinkling of salt. The tender moist white flesh flakes apart after 10 minutes and it’s ready to eat. Hmm. Hmm.

a whale of a good time

Instead of more unpacking, Kayla suggested we go boating on Saturday. Grandpa Ricardo obliged and all of the Ruby children, Lucas and I tagged along. As we puttered out into the Sound, the topic of whales came up. Minutes later, I saw what could only be the exhaling of a whale. Nearby was a boat which had just motored nearby.

We continued watching for the whales next exhale. After spotting a second exhale, I calculated the trajectory of the whale, turned the boat into his path, and shut down the engines. A little while later, one, and then another whale surfaced 20 yards off the bow of our boat. The second was extremely cooperative and surfaced high and submerged showing us the classic whale tail view, much to everyone’s delight.

Taming my savage Savage

I grew up surrounded by a million acres of the Huron-Manistee National Forest. Every fall, thousands of hunters would come “up North” to hunt deer in the outdoor paradise that was my back yard. Hunting was a way of life in the world I knew. If opening day of rifle deer season fell on a weekday, schools cancelled classes and businesses closed their doors. At 12, us lads were eligible for Hunters Safety and were out hunting. Continue reading “Taming my savage Savage”