Adventures on the Journey
iPhone 3G white 16GB
iPhone 3G black 16GB
iPhone 4GB
iPod 40GB white
AT&T Tilt 8925
Palm Treo 755P
Palm Treo 700P
Samsung A900
Nokia 1100b
My policy of getting rid of old electronic goodies before buying more has been laxly enforced. It’s time for another round of Craigslist/eBay postings. All but the iPhones will soon be sold. Jay Simon, does that answer any of your questions about how we like the iPhone?
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.
I’m standing in line with 200 others to get my new iPhone 3G. My plan for just waltzing in and buying one a week after release with no wait was optimistic. I estimate that this store had 200 phones in stock today. I have been regularly checking inventory since the release and I know they have sold out of inventory every single day since release.
I have SSH access to many hundreds of servers and am regularly needing to log into new systems. My SSH key is available via ssh-agent thanks to the ssh-agent script I wrote. To make good use of ssh-agent, my SSH public key needs to be installed on the remote servers. I have had to do this often so today I polished up a shell script that automates the installation of your ssh key on remote servers. It is now fit for mass consumption.
I’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.
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”
Dear Steve Jobs,
I am certain you have seen the YouTube videos and countless photos of children and toddlers demonstrating the ingenious simplicity of your iPhone. My two year old daughter loves getting a hold of my iPhone. She unlocks it, launches the Photo app, clicks and few times, and proudly shows us her favorite picture, “Big Daddy!”
My 1 year old isn’t quite so proficient, but also enjoys the iPhone in his own way. It turns out the iPhone is a fantastic toy for entertaining young children. I’m not normally interested in paying hundreds of dollars for a child toy but I have an idea that would certainly increase the sale of iPhones and the iPod Touch: toy mode.
Yes, that’s right. I’m asking for a way to turn my $400 phone into a child toy. The gist of ‘toy mode’ is to allow either of my babies to push buttons, navigate around, see my photos, read my email, and otherwise play. The catch is that in toy mode, they can’t change anything. No deleting Daddy’s email. No changing the minimum font size. No placing phone calls to my colleagues.
Imagine of how many iPhones you will sell when babies are teething on them and toddlers are dropping ’em in toilets because parents feel ‘safe’ letting them play with it unsupervised. The prospects of, or horror, actually having to use our old Palm or Windows Mobile phones will spur us back to the Apple Store.
You asked when to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5. For many of you, I advised waiting. The wait is over. Go forth, upgrade to 10.5, and then download the 10.5.2 update.
It’s spring cleaning time. I just posted my PowerBook G4 for sale on Craigslist. Update: it sold already.
I have a few more things I’ll be listing soon:
Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11 b/g) – $50
Griffin iTalk (iPod voice recorder) – $20
iPod Shuffle 1GB + spare battery – $40
iPod Nano 8GB Black – $100
iSight Video Camera (firewire) – $70
23″ HD Cinema Display (plastic bezel) – $450
The day I booted a FreeBSD system off Compact Flash I was hooked. CF is an extremely robust storage medium with no moving parts. CF cards have emerged completely intact from washing machines, clothes dryers, and impacts that would destroy any spinning disk. After setting up a system to boot from CF, I am confident that henceforth and forevermore, that system will have a functional boot disk.
I’ve stuck CF cards and USB thumb drives into servers in our data centers, our server room at the office, and my server closet. The practice has served me quite well but that is not to say that CF is perfect. Write speed is slow. There is a finite number of write cycles each block can endure. Some CF cards claim DMA support but don’t support it well enough to be useful. Some server boards do not include internal IDE or USB ports. But everywhere else, we use CF.
Because of CF write limits, I always mount the root partition read-only. Files on the / partition are not frequently altered so this rarely causes any inconvenience. We recently built a 6.7 terabyte storage array at work using a HP 320S chassis, a pile of disks, and ZFS. ZFS volumes aren’t bootable in FreeBSD but we had already installed a USB thumb drive as the boot partition.
After working with ZFS, I decided that gmirror was no longer sufficient for my personal file server. It needed ZFS, which meant upgrading to FreeBSD 7. This server has been running off a 256MB CF card for years. The CF card is so old it was actually made in the USA! While upgrading to 7.0 I ran into a snag, the FreeBSD kernel (and modules) now use over 100MB. That means 256MB is no longer enough space for the new kernel and the old one to both fit.