I found a Force Restart sequence online that I didn't know about: quickly press VolumeUP, then VolumeDOWN, then press and hold SIDE button. That did nothing.

But ... now the phone responded to the 2-button press that is supposed to bring up the scary Power Off and Emergency SOS screen. I was intending to power it down and then back up, since Apple doesn't provide a "hard reboot" command.  But instead of the Power Off screen, it flashed the Apple logo briefly and then quickly brought up my lock screen and everything was hunky-dory. I had to login with my password and re-login to Apple ID, but other than that it was all normal.

Not only that, it was more than half charged, probably because I had left it plugged in to a charging cable while I ate breakfast. There is something intermittently wrong with the mag charger on this phone, but the lightning cable always works. So I guess it was actually charging while it was comatose. All I needed was that Force Restart sequence and some persistence. 

I think what happened was that the mag charger drained the battery instead of charging it. I've had that happen before, but never to the point where the phone was unresponsive. Power cycling it has fixed the problem in the past, but this time the phone was so hung that I couldn't even power cycle it. 

 
 

Thanks so much to quility and Terry (not on DW/LJ?) for their help with my degenerating phone charging cases. Terry kindly brought along an impressive box of soldering equipment to last Friday's game party and swapped the new battery from the defective case into the old case with the dead or dying battery. When I slipped my phone into the rehabilitated case the phone took a charge. Yay!  That's the first step.

The next question - would the case recharge when plugged into a USB cable? Early attempts were not successful - the light on the charging button just kept blinking red for hours. Having nothing else to lose, I got aggressive -- grinding my finger down on the charging button, bending the case in various ways. My hope was that I was somehow improving the connection between internal components.

Unlikely as it may seem, this seemed to work. After a brief interval of steady red light, the LED went back to blinking red. But the next morning it was green! Unexpectedly, the poor old case had started charging again. Still remains to be seen if it will take a charge a second time, but right now it is charging up my phone. Thanks, Terry!

Even without the rest of the features, it really is a hell of a watch. It works fine right out of the box, but it is definitely worth taking the time to customize the available watch faces. Besides the time, widgets include date, calendar, moon phase, sunrise/sunset, weather, fitness summary, alarm, timer, stopwatch, battery life, world clock and stocks. You can also customize colors and in some cases the graphics. So I managed to spend at least 3 hours yesterday customizing the 10 watch faces currently available (you can switch between them fairly easily).

MOST USEFUL:  Modular, Simple, Utility.  With these 3 I have every "complexity" (a technical watch term) I am likely to want.


CUTEST. That has to be one of the animated faces. Mickey is not only cute, but usable. The Motion faces are visually impressive, giving you a choice of wobbling jellyfish, blooming flowers, or flapping butterflies, but thoroughly impractical. Not only are there no extra widgets available here, too many of the animations are basically white, making it hard to read the time (which often overlaps the animations). Mickey is pretty cool, though. In lieu of a second hand, he taps his foot once per second.
 

MOST PERPLEXING. The Astronomy face is lovely, and you can play with it. But I'm not sure what the point of it is. The lower left corner shows an animation of the moon changing phases. It does not, however, show you what the current phase is. If you click on the icon in the lower right corner you get a top down view of current planetary positions in the solar system. This might be useful to some people, but not to very many. Oh, I see. Once you select the moon or planet view you can turn the watch stem to see the phases change or the planets move, with a popup telling you how many days you have progressed. Okay, that's pretty cool. But not something I'll need very often. The second face below is called "Solar" and is even weirder. It shows the sun's current position in the sky. Turning the stem moves the sun backwards towards dawn or forwards towards sunset, with a popup telling you how many hours you have moved. Oooookay. The 3rd one, "Chronograph" is so impossibly complex that I have yet to figure out what all the little dials are for. It kind of makes my head hurt just to look at it. I may just delete that one from the progression.
 

Somehow this took all day, but on the plus side, patches of office and attic are cleaner than they were before. I've actually had that sound system for 4 years, so it's a little hazy what I was using before it.  I hauled an old Sanyo stereo set out of the attic, since it had speaker connectors that matched the 2 unused speakers that were still hanging on the office wall (suggesting that I have used this setup before, eh?).  It took me a while to find a cable that could be used to connect my relatively new computer to the old Red/White CD ports on the back of the stereo, but I finally did.  The correct cable seems to be a Y-splitter with one of those long gold plugs on the computer end splitting out to 2 R/W cables.  I was a little surprised to discover that the single cable somehow manages to carry both stereo channels.  It sounds surprisingly good. 

So this will do for now. But if anybody has an old subwoofer with 5 speaker connections to get rid of, I might be interested.

After several months of waiting, we're finally up on the screaming fast fiber to the home USI service!  According to the Qwest online bandwidth meter, we've got 27MBPS download and an amazing 30.3MB upload. The PS3 that serves as the hub of our home entertainment system reports about 15MB/sec.  So there's a 50% drop in bandwidth in the wireless trip from my router to the attic. This is about what I saw with Qwest, so no surprise.  I quickly connected to Netflix and started up a show. It loaded like lightning and looked great. Better than before?  I really couldn't say.

Now I have to call Qwest and drop their service. I certainly hope I didn't sign some kind of contract when I negotiated my current ISP arrangement. 

In 2005, I was seduced back into the Apple world after a long hiatus when my employer, in an unexpected burst of generosity, gave everybody an iPod Shuffle. The first generation shuffle had a few issues, but I liked it well enough to keep buying new ones when the headphone jack wore out. Then came the Gen2 Shuffle, which is one of those rare product designs that is absolutely perfect. It's tiny enough to clip to your shirt lapel and completely indestructible. Like the original shuffle, the controls are elegantly minimalist: pause/play in the middle, volume up/down and forward/back around the circle rim. There's a toggle button that allows you to shift easily between shuffle and straight-ahead mode. Gen2 added the one necessary function that was missing from the original: a triple click that takes you to the beginning of your playlist.

People who started out with full-blown iPods are confused about how you use a device with no LCD screen. Well, I've tried iPods with screens, and I don't like them. I listen to my iPod while I'm walking, doing chores, biking, etc, and I don't WANT to have to look at it. With a Shuffle, you load on new playlists every couple of days, so you don't need help figuring out what you want to listen to. The trickiest thing for me was figuring out how to switch back and forth between podcasts and music playlists. The triple-click was all I needed to take care of that problem.

Every day or two I load about a dozen podcasts at the beginning of my playlist. Then I load an hour or two of music after the podcasts. When I want to listen to podcasts, I triple-click to get to the beginning and quickly skip ahead past the ones I've listened to. When I want to switch to music, I click the button into shuffle mode. For some reasons, podcasts are never selected in shuffle mode, so this quickly takes me to my music. When I want to go back to podcasts, I switch to straight-ahead mode and triple-click. Bingo, back at the podcast section. All these buttons are so easy to use that I can do them by touch while wearing my shuffle clipped into my Monster iFreeplay headset. It is wonderful. Or it was.

Sadly, the iFreePlay headsets are flimsy and wear out in 6-12 months, and they only work with the Gen 2. I had bought several sets, but was down to my last one. Then I lost the headset along with Little Blue, my last remaining shuffle. I decided to bite the bullet and buy the latest shuffle (now up to Gen4) and a different type of headset. My pretty pink shuffle arrived, and then I discovered that it had been effectively ruined for me by the latest "improvements." A completely unnecessary VoiceOver button has been added, that allows you to hear a computer-generated voice trying to pronounce the name of your song. If you hold it long enough, this bot-voice slowly lists all the songs on your playlist so you can choose one. Seemed unnecessary, but harmless. But then I discovered that the addition of this feature had DISABLED the skip-ahead button, at least for podcasts! They have also removed the triple-click to take you to the beginning of the playlist. So there is now no way to progress from podcast to podcast without using the inane and clumsy Voiceover function. Sometimes the podcast will move on to the next one if you suffer through the credits at the end, but once you have used the Voiceover function once, it won't even do that!!!

I think it is still possible to order Gen2 shuffles online. I'm going to buy a bunch of them before it's too late and send this piece of garbage back. Fooey on you, Apple. You created something absolutely perfect, and then you ruined it.

My iPhone arrived, despite the fact that it was being delivered by UPS. The truck came by in the afternoon when Richard was not only awake but in the house, and the delivery guy actually found his way to the doorbell. But in the time-honored fashion of UPS drivers everywhere, he punched the doorbell once and then scooted for his truck without bothering to wait for anybody to answer. But he was foiled - Richard was only two rooms away and managed to make it to the door before the driver escaped. 

Like all Apple devices, the iPhone is a brick until it is connected to iTunes and registered. In this case, it continued to be a brick until I got a SIM card into it. This was a little scary, since it involved several kinds of phone surgery. It was my intention to remove my AT&T GoPhone SIM from my old Razr, trim it to micro-SIM size with the special cutter I had purchased from Amazon, and insert it into the iPhone. It took a strong pair of thumbs (Richard's) but we got the SIM out of the Razr. The cutter worked pretty well, although the edges needed a little trimming with a utility knife.

Here's where the Apple hate started. The damn iPhone came with instructions that conveyed practically zero information in multiple languages. There were absolutely no instructions on how to remove the SIM card: we had to look it up online. It's a user-serviceable part, so there is no excuse for this, IMHO. Anyway, once we located the itsy-bitsy little hole in the side and inserted the teeny-weeny little wire tool that was hidden in the iPhone packaging, the SIM tray popped right out. We popped in the cut-down SIM and I tried again to sync with iTunes. This time it worked. 

I then followed the welcome wizard, updated my firmware to 4.3.3, and told it to "restore" my new iPhone from my stored iPod data. It churned away for a really long time, restoring all my apps. I used the newish App Manager screen in iTunes to rearrange the app screens, create sub-folders and delete the dopey game demos I didn't really want . It all looked great, and I was breathing a sigh of relief at how easy that was *Love Love*.  Until I tried to use one of the apps and discovered that NONE OF MY DATA WAS THERE!!  Even the built-in apps like Contacts, Notes and Calendar were completely empty! 

HATE HATE HATE.  I know that all that data is on my computer in a huge directory of cryptically named files - why can't I restore from it?  Did I miss some sync setting in iTunes?

I started looking around online and discovered that no, this is just the way Apple does things. WTF???  When I replaced an old Palm Pilot all I had to do was sync it with the Palm Desktop and all my data was there. Why on earth wouldn't Apple provide that same service?  Apparently I will have to restore the database for each application individually using a different technique for each one.  I was able to restore my Contacts by passing them through the Windows Address Book.  My favorite app, Daily Tracker, provides a way to backup and restore data through Google Docs. Same with Awesome Notes. HanDbase lets me email all my databases to myself and then fetch them back to the iPhone through the Apple email tool. I had to sign up on a proprietary website to sync the data in my diet logging program. I still don't know how to get my Notes files back (although I mostly use that app for quick notes that have little value over time). 

On the plus side - the phone is now working perfectly on my existing prepaid AT&T GoPhone account. I was not at all confident that this would work. 

Okay, I managed to get my old Palm Address Book into my iTouch and found a nice 3rd-party app for only $3.99 that lets me create groups. The app is named.... "Groups."  Not the most creative name I've ever seen, but to the point.

Here's the procedure I used, starting with iTunes on a Windows XP machine with no Outlook:
1) Open Palm Desktop and clean up your address book. In particular, make sure that every entry has a name. If possible the firstname/lastname combination should be unique. This step took was the longest part of the whole procedure for me.

2) Export address book to vCard format:  Select all entries, menu selection File->Export vCard.

3) Open Windows Address Book: never heard of it? Neither had I. It's in Programs->Accessories.  If there's anything in it, delete all entries. Import the vCard file created in previous step. You can do this from  the WAB menu or by simply drag-dropping the file onto the app. You then have to confirm every single entry, which is kind of a pain. Fortunately you can do this easily by simply holding down the Enter key. Unfortunately it doesn't like entries without names and will stop to query you for any entries with duplicate first/last names (thus, step 1).

4) Open iTunes with iTouch/iPhone connected. Select the device, go to Info tab, scroll down to section called something like "Sync contacts with..."
Select Windows Address Book from the dropdown menu. If there are already some entries in the iTouch contacts that you would like to get rid of, scroll down to the Advanced section and check the box next to Contacts. This will erase the current iTouch contacts list and replace it with the new one.

5) Hit the apply button (way at the bottom of the screen, on the right). This starts the sync.

My new phone is here! It's a Sony Ericsson W580i that sings, dances, takes pictures, plans your life, counts your steps and (I hope) also makes the occasional phone call. It's totally different from any other cell phone I have ever had (in other words, it's not a Motorola), so I'm finding it a pretty steep learning curve. I already like the interface better than the Motorola one, but I am still but a grasshopper.

For an expensive phone, the package is remarkably sparse. There's a charger and a very nice set of earbuds and that's about it. No case or belt holster, no lanyard, no plastic screen cover, and no memory stick. I didn't expect a BIG memory card, but I thought there'd be something in that slot. The Walkman music feature is pretty much unusable without a memory card. Does anybody have a suggestion of a good place to buy an M2 memory stick cheap? I want something I can pick up locally to get the thing working. I might order a larger card from the Internet later.

Oh, and my old phone that I lost? It was found almost immediately after I placed the order for the new one.

But that's okay. Now I have two.