10.21.07
Tagged as Apple, iPhone, Tech
As most of you know, I’m the proud owner of an iPhone. What many of you don’t know, however, is that I’m currently on my third iPhone. I bought the first one the day they were released—June 29, 2007—but after two or three weeks the rubber seal around the screen started to peel away when I was cleaning it with the included microsuede cloth. I took it to the Arden Fair Apple Store here in Sacramento, and was given a replacement in the store—no shipping back for repair, no loaner/rental unit. The replacement, however, exhibited the negative black issue that affected a certain batch of new iPod Touch and refurb iPhone screens. Today I took that one back to the Apple Store and, after a warning that this one might not look any better, was given yet another iPhone. Again, no charge and no waiting. It looks great—blacks are deep and crisp, and it’s noticeably brighter than the first replacement, too.
Despite the inconvenience of taking my phone in for replacement twice within four months of the day I bought it, I’m happy with the way my problems have been handled. Also, both replacements were fully charged when I received them, so I was able to place and receive calls right away, and upon getting home I just plugged them into my computer and was given the option of restoring from backup, which included all my settings (except passwords).
Oh yeah—we got Faith an iPhone, too.
Another adventure: I bought a region-free DVD player. Sort of. That is, I bought a DVD player, and then I made it region-free.
Specifically, I went to Wal-Mart and found the cheapest in-house brand DVD player they had—a Durabrand DVD-1002 for less than $30. The nice thing about cheap DVD players is that it’s not cost-effective to make multiple versions of them for different markets, so the manufacturers tend to make make the region codes software-configurable. Using my iPhone, I did a little online research while standing next to the store display, and after confirming that this model could be unlocked, I bought one.
The exact code for the DVD-1002 depends on the firmware version on your particular unit; this one worked on mine (purchased October 20, 2007):
- Turn the unit on.
- Open the lid.
- Press STOP on the remote.
- Enter 9753 on the remote. A setup screen will appear.
- Select the desired region using the arrow buttons on the remote. Region 0 means region-free.
- Press OK on the remote.
- Close the lid.
If you have a DVD-1002 and this code doesn’t work, search online a bit—there are at least two other codes floating around that are supposed to work with older firmware versions.
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06.29.07
Tagged as Apple, Gadgets, iPhone
... and I’m typing this entry on it right now. More tomorrow.
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10.21.06
Tagged as Apple, Education, My Life
Woke up around five this morning. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Everything in my life is changing right now; my mind is racing and I’m full of nervous energy. But it’s good.
Thursday was my first day at Apple as an IS&T Helpline Analyst. Mostly I just shadowed a couple other techs all day, listening in on their calls and taking notes on the resources they used to solve problems. The calls were generally pretty simple: VPN issues, expired or forgotten passwords, slow network connections, requests for equipment and services, etc. There were a couple of Excel problems and a few oddities here and there (like a MacBook that for some reason always boots in verbose mode), but nothing too scary. Overall, I feel very much in my element.
On Friday I was given the entire morning to set up my workspace. I have two computers, an eMac and a PowerMac, which I was allowed to format and reinstall as I saw fit. I control both systems from a single keyboard and mouse using Teleport, and I also installed Quicksilver and Typeit4me to help me out. It’s all pretty darn slick. Friday afternoon was more shadow time. This Monday I’ll learn how to create accounts and change information in one of the employee databases, which is pretty much all I’ll do until Wednesday, when another temp starts and the two of us enter training on Espresso, the trouble ticket software we’ll use every day at Apple.
Another thing happened last Thursday: I got my acceptance letter from the University of London External Programme. I’m heading out to the Post Office in a few minutes to mail in my registration fee.
Everything just fell into place all at once, and it feels kind of eerie. Not that I can relax just yet; my job at Apple isn’t guaranteed past the end of the year, so I have to work hard to impress my supervisors in the hope of landing one of the limited positions they’ll have available, and I’m starting at UoL later than I’d intended, so I have to study pretty hard for the next few months to prepare for the four exams I plan to sit in May. If you don’t hear much from me in the near future, or if it takes longer than usual to get a response from me by phone or email, that’ll be why. But it feels like October 19, 2006 was the first day of the rest of my life, and I’m pretty happy about the way things look from here.
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10.17.06
Tagged as Apple, My Life
I got the call today—everything is clear, and I start Thursday.
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10.16.06
Tagged as Apple, My Life
As most of you know by now, I recently landed a temp job (with the possibility of going long-term) at Apple. I saw the job listing Monday of last week, interviewed Thursday, got an offer a couple hours later, and went to the employment agency Friday to fill out paperwork for the background check and take a drug test. Now I’m waiting, and I can’t stand it.
I keep telling myself I have nothing to worry about. I don’t take drugs, I’ve never been arrested, and I have no reason to believe my references will say anything but good things about me. But I hate it when the matter is out of my hands and all that’s left for me to do is wait for a response. At the interview I felt confident and comfortable—and with reason. I knew my résumé was good, I knew I was capable of doing the work, and I felt in control of the situation. Now all I can think of is everything I ever did wrong at all my past jobs.
Tomorrow we’re having a pot luck lunch at my current job. To tell the truth, if I’d heard back from Apple today I’d have started tomorrow just to skip the pot luck. I didn’t feel like making anything that would need to be heated on-site, and I especially didn’t feel like bringing anything that might turn into a hassle at the security checkpoint tomorrow morning, so I bought a cheesecake at Safeway. I know at least half the office is bringing dessert, but none of the salads in the deli section looked good.
When I grow up, I wanna be Bill Murray.
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05.10.06
Tagged as Apple, Software
I’d been having a problem with Safari lately: when loading certain pages—like parts of the WordPress management interface—I sometimes (but not always) got an error message about a “bad server response (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011).” Refreshing generally cleared it up, but sometimes I had to refresh two or three times before the page loaded. No useful details were included with the error, and Googling the message turned up nothing useful.
Today I learned, via this Ask Metafilter thread, that nightly builds of WebKit are available via OpenDarwin. I’ve had no errors so far since switching to the nightly build. Hooray for open source!
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02.16.06
Tagged as Apple, Gadgets, iPod
When I worked in tech support, we had a name for the phenomenon of problems that mysteriously resolve themselves as soon as a tech arrives to help: “Solved by Tech Proximity.” It happens a lot—either the problem was transitory to begin with, or the process of walking through the symptoms makes a user more careful and conscious of the correct procedure, so he doesn’t make whatever mistake he was making when the tech wasn’t there. But since I am the tech guy, it’s not supposed to happen to me.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
- I bought a car power adaptor for my aging, battery-challenged iPod. When plugged into this adaptor, my iPod emitted a hissing sound through the headphone cable that leads to my auxiliary input adaptor. I spotted what looked like a line-out jack on the power adaptor and tried plugging the auxiliary input cable into that. With a loud pop! the auxiliary input adaptor stopped working. Turns out that jack was intended to supply power to an FM transmitter.
- After a period of rest, the auxiliary input adaptor worked again, but poorly. The sound was tinny and I really had to crank the volume on the head unit to hear it, making switching between iPod and radio a pain. Also, the display on the head unit went blank when I switched to the iPod, and I couldn’t switch between the auxiliary input adaptor’s two input channels.
- Shortly after all this, my PowerBook’s internal hard drive stopped working—it wouldn’t even spin up. I had a recent backup on an external firewire drive, and my PowerBook automatically detected that and booted from it, but this made synchronizing my iPod difficult because the iPod doesn’t like FireWire daisy-chaining—it likes to be the only FireWire device present. But if I held it just right (for some reason it seemed to work better if the cable was perfectly straight—lack of cable shielding, maybe?) it worked—slowly.
- I figured I’d kill two birds with one iPod car charger. This particular model comes with a USB docking cable that plugs into the charger, so I figured not only could I power the iPod in the car, but when I got home I’d take the cable in and sync to iTunes with it. But it turns out my iPod is too old for this to work—it syncs via USB, but it won’t derive power from it.
- Not knowing this, I plugged the charger into my cigarette lighter, the cable into the charger, and the iPod into the cable. There was another pop!—and then unusually loud music. My adaptor was working normally again—it sounded great, the display on the head unit worked, and I could once again switch between inputs.
- When I got home I took the USB cable in, figuring that part of the plan was still worth a try. There was a message on my computer screen (which I’d left on all day, downloading via Bittorrent) saying the computer needed to be rebooted. When I did that, one of the partitions on the external drive failed to show up. This was annoying, but then I noticed that the computer had booted from its internal drive rather than the FireWire drive. SMART diagnostics found no problem with the internal drive, and the bad partition on the external drive had minor directory problems from which I didn’t even bother recovering the data, since I no longer needed it anyway.
Self-reparing electronics: really cool, or kinda creepy? I say cool.
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08.30.05
Tagged as Apple, Software
I’d been annoyed lately by slow performance in my web browser of choice, Safari. It still loaded quickly enough and all, but had developed the habit of freezing for a few seconds shortly after bringing up a page. See? Annoying.
The solution, as it turns out, was right in front of me—in the Safari menu. “Reset Safari…” clears the history, Google search history, cache, cookies, and form field entries all in one go. Doing this took about two minutes on my system (after two years of particularly heavy web browsing). Now I have to log back in to all my favorite online services, but the benefit is a much faster web browsing experience.
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06.30.05
Tagged as Apple, iPod, Podcasts, Software
Apple now has an Official FAQ on the podcast support in iTunes 4.9 with, among other things, a little bit of detail on the bookmark feature I mention in my AppleScript page. An interesting point is that the play count tracking works differently in the podcast library than it does in the regular music library: although the play count number isn’t incremented until you reach the end of a track, a podcast episode is no longer considered “unplayed” the moment you hit the play button. This is visually represented by the disappearance of the blue dot to the left of the episode title. What it means, though, is that if you use the built-in play count-based management (“Keep all unplayed episodes” in the settings panel), episodes you’ve started but not finished won’t be synced to a clickwheel-equipped iPod. Just one more reason to use my script instead.
Daring Fireball today features the best explanation I’ve ever read of the iPod’s commanding market share. I particularly like the bit about the font change—I personally am not a typography geek (though my limited desktop publishing experience has left me with a deep and burning hatred for Comic Sans and Matisse ITC and the people who use them), but I love reading analyses by people who really know and love this stuff.
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06.29.05
Tagged as Apple, iPod, Podcasts, Software
As I mentioned yesterday, the new version of iTunes with podcast support rendered the most popular post on this blog obsolete. Since iTunes has an option to automatically delete podcast episodes you’ve already listened to, the main reason for using the script is now built-in.
But not the only reason. There still isn’t a way to mark tracks for removal or retention while away from the computer, listening to tracks on an iPod. I’ve updated the script to work with iTunes 4.9’s built-in podcast support, and I’ve created a special page just for both versions of the script. Enjoy.
Also on that page is a little bit of technical information on some of the interesting features included in the new iTunes. Executive summary: Apple now has the premiere platform for listening to podcasts, at home and on the go. If you’re listening on anything else, you’re missing out.
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