Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘broken’

Sturdy little bastards!

For a marketing experiment we needed some broken products at work. So we peeled apart an LCD in a macbook to make it appear broken. We destroyed software on a harddisk. And a few other things. We also tried to break the digitizer of an iPhone. And we succeeded eventually…

Since a broken digitizer (the glass front and touch screen) of iPhones is the most popular repair here we decided we needed a broken iPhone. We had some old devices lying around and thought to simply smash the screen in and be done with it. As the most likely cause for it to break was to simply throw it to the ground we tried that. It didn’t really work. We then tried hitting it to the narrow end of a steel pole. All we accomplished was a small budge and a scratch.

A colleague then thought to use a alarm hammer, used to break car windows with minimum force. Basically what this thing does is shoot out a steel pin shattering any glass it touches. Not so for the iPhone. It didn’t even get scratched. When we tried it on the steel pole a big budge was there. So the hammer indeed worked. Just not for the iPhone.

We ended up using a wrench. Simply beating on it would destroy the iPhone too much we thought so we took it apart by removing the actual phone and LCD. So we would just break the glass.

And break it did:

And we used this tool:

It took some effort but the digitizer was thoroughly broken. Too much really. Since the touchscreen stopped working also. Which is part of the glass. But for our experiment we needed it to work. We destroyed 2 digitizers with the wrench and they both broke too much.
Finally we just took a used digitizer and smashed it’s edge to the table’s edge… The table is damaged now, but so is the digitizer. A neat little crack. Just enough to justify the need to repair it.

I wonder how all those people break their phones. Since, if they’re to be believed they dropped from a table or from their pockets… We dropped a fully assembled iPhone from 2 meters high and it didn’t even scratch!

Is it fixed now? Dammit!

Today, our modem signal again crapped it’s pants.
And i’ve had enough, so i went down there to replace the modem and some cables.

Turns out the spare modem i “borrowed” from our previous ISP doesn’t work with this one. It gets the signal and stuff right but doesn’t actually connect. I bet they locked the Mac address or something. Anyway, without a spoofing option to try that out i moved back to the original modem.

Next i swapped out all cabling. Some were a bit knackered, not sure how that happened. And the Ethernet cable promptly was stuck in it’s port. I had to pull hard to get it loose and in that process break the ethernet port on the router. Luckily no contacts were shorted just the locking clip broke off. So i can just use another port on the modem/router, it’s not mine so no need to replace it.

Let’s see how this works, all coax cabling is now replaced, new ethernet from the modem to the Airport… The modem shows a better signal/noise ratio. But i’m not sure if that was the problem. We’ll see.

iPad vs. iPod Touch

The iPad is a lie! It’s not a tablet pc. And especially not the tablet pc everyone wants. It’s more like they designed a new iPod touch and forgot to shrink it to a handheld format.

Note that the iPad is a better device specs-wise, but that’s what you would expect in a new iPod Touch.

The lack of multitasking and the “feature” of iPhone OS makes it a bit of a useless thing. Nice for in and around the house. But imagine you sitting in a bus or train with it. Playing some game or whatever. Try it… Take a paper and fold it to a A4 sized slab and see how it not fits with your environment because it’s too big.

The lack of a real OS makes it an iPod. Simple as that. If it has OS X and a desktop it would be a real computer that could replace something. Now it’s just something that adds to what you already have. But at the same time you just know it’s a bit useless because it lacks the software you need.

No iBooks outside the US? What the hell! Is this gonna be like the video store Apple is so happy about but never leaves the States? Damn Apple! Fix that stuff or do not present it as if it’s the greatest thing ever. If i, we in Europe, cannot use it. It’s as good as useless.

The, for me, actual dealbreaker; No multitasking. How can you even try to justify that. A device that you claim will compete with Netbooks but cannot open multiple apps at the same time. Insane! It’s not even a standalone computer. Yeah, it syncs with iTunes. Like your iPhone and iPod.

No file access, if only… only, they had given us a browsable home folder. You know. A place to store and access files outside the app you run at that moment. It is so very simple and obvious. This folder should be shared by default via Wifi and have the subfolders like your mac has. Images, Videos, Music, Documents. Etc. But no. iPhone OS cannot do that. You have to open the Images app to see your images. And you have to open Pages to see your documents. But only the ones Apple supports.

It’s failboat! A big huge failboat!

However, most of it is fixable with software i’m sure. And i hope Apple will, because i want an iPad. Just not this one! For now my iPhone can do more and is more useful.

SVN where art thou!

SVN, why do people bother. It’s too fragile, too crappy and it’s slow too. Did i say fragile yet?
Half of the time when i release an update to a plugin or try to commit some changes to my own SVN server i have to spend like 30 minutes fixing shit that shouldn’t break!

Where the idea is that you save your file, press commit and type your small comment on what you did to those files. I often am bashing commands in terminal to fix SVN before it even acknowledges the server and can find the path. But only after i fix the local repository which has been corrupted for unknown reasons. Then i ’simply’ have to add the files again occasionally loosing my new version which leaves me with an older version and i have to redo the update i made.

SVN is failboat! Drown in poo you hideous incarnation of blah! GRRR!

Media Center Mac Mini – Software Fail!?

With the addition of the Mac Mini Server i bought earlier this week i now have a spare Mac Mini to toy around with.

A 1.5Ghz Core Solo with 2GB Ram.
Given that my Lacie portable broke just before christmas. Or rather, the controller board of Lacie broke (Like so many other Lacie drives) i did some swapping around with disks here and there and suddenly had a 250GB 7200RPM disk spare.
Earlier today i built that thing in into the Mac Mini. But damn was that fucker noisy! I quickly removed it and after some more swapping of disks it now has a 120GB disk at 5400RPM. Which is dead silent. Yay! Originally there was a 60GB disk in there.

Anyway, i wanted to try out the media center idea i’ve been having for weeks now. So i installed Snow Leopard on that machine, installed Plex and got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of poorly designed settings. After toying with that for a few hours i didn’t even get to play movies properly. The DTS Sound was broken (which is a bug in Plex for the last 6 or so versions) and embedded subtitles do not work. 2 very much required features. That and the total lack of user-friendliness made me decide to look for something else.

Boxee seems very nice, and it is. Apart from its lack of home screen customization, broken DTS downmixing , missing embedded subtitles and poor streaming capabilities i liked the interface a lot! However, since i don’t want to synchronize the mac with my server but just want boxee to look in my movies folder and stream them on demand. It kinda failed. Mounting shares is easy enough, which strangely goes via SMB and not AFP. But then accessing it in a decent matter is a whole different adventure. Every time i would have to go back to the home screen which has the latest online stuff from other users. Something i want to turn off since i’m not at all interested in it. And then find the share under ‘local’. Which lists a ton of other folders and paths you cannot remove. But are not at all familiar too. Another way is to use the browse feature which kinda lets you wander the harddisk and attached devices (including network disks) but that’s confusing too. So if your data is not local, it’s difficult to find. Add broken DTS downmixing and no support for embedded subtitles and you pretty much have a failed software package.

Another thing that didn’t work out well, despite several sites reviewing the Mini saying it was “totally doable”, is that HD content, say anything 1080i and similar, will not always play smoothly. 720p no problems there, streaming it over a 11g Wifi connection. But 1080i often went with a stutter. I’m not sure if it’s because of the wifi, or because of the CPU. But when i copied a file over it wasn’t much better. Just less frequent. So i guess the CPU is on the edge of being capable playing a 1080i movie that is h.264 encoded with AC3 5.1 sound.