Carl Hutzler's Blog

Apple is an awesome company, but they have really been f-ing the consumer when it comes to their ipod dock connector. They have been changing the way it works and disabling many accessories that consumers have bought over the years. And for the most part and from what I can tell, there are very few legitimate reasons Apple is doing this.

I won’t go into every example (different charging voltage, different docks for different ipods/iphones, encryption chip to view video, etc) but I will tell you that it pisses this guy off. I have “fixed” my accessories several times to make them work again. And it is a pain in the ass that I don’t wish to repeat. Why does Apple insist on f-ing everyone who bought a car adapter for their expensive factory radio? How about those speakers with docks (BOSE, etc) that don’t work anymore? Special headphone jacks (original iPhone)? Why does Apple insist on making a simple USB charger not work unless certain other pins are held at specific voltages? This was the reason I will never buy Motorola phones again (they will not charge via USB 5V to a computer without a driver installed for that phone!)

Apple claims to be a “Green company” but the amount of material going to landfills because Apple wants more money from their accessory “Made for Apple” program is down-right criminal. The AG for California should look into it :-)

OK, enough of the bitchin’. I feel better now.

So on to the latest chapter in the refuse to re-pay Apple for a cigarette lighter adapter saga…. A number of years ago I bought a Belkin Auto Adapter. The adapter was nice because it was a single connection to my ipod and it allowed for line out as well as charging.

I ran a standard 3.5mm headphone to the back of my stereo in my car and I had a nice system for listening to music. Even better was that the Belkin had a special feature that would pause the iPod when 12V was cut to the cigarette adapter (so when I got out of the car, the iPod paused). This was a great feature which saved the battery on the iPod (from just running down) and also allowed me to start listening to the song or book on tape, etc where I had left off.

Two months ago I bought an iPhone 3g. I already knew there might be an issue with charging the phone as I had heard that for some time now, Apple had stopped supporting Firewire syncing and more recently did away with the extra circuitry for charging off of 12VDC (firewire). I did not know 100% if the Belkin would have the issue, but once I plugged it in, I got the warning that “iPhone will not charge” from this accessory.

So I did a little research and found a few places that sold a converter that had a female dock connector on one side and male on the other. You plug it in and it takes the 12VDC and chops it down to 5VDC (along with the various resistors you need to get the damn iPhone 3G to charge). So I spent $20 or so on a Griffin converter thinggy. I wasn’t happy about it but I had already looked inside the Belkin CLA (Cig Lighter Adapter) and did not see a way to fit a DC to DC converter inside. For $20, it also came with a little dock like thing which I plan on using in the car. So, I was happy.

But when I got the Griffin thing and tried it, I got another warning. The dreaded “This accessory is not made to work with iPhone”. It was charging, so I knew the Griffin thing was working. But what was this other warning? The Belkin lineout was working just fine as well…but ever time I plugged in my iPhone I had to clear that damn warning. Everything worked but the software on the iPhone 3G would always pop this warning.

After a search of the Internet, I found out I was not alone in my frustration. But I had trouble finding a solution until I found this forum. It was all about the issue and many people wanting to use the LOD (Line Out) feature on their iphone 3g but seeing this error. A number of people were saying that instead of the 1M ohm that the Belkin used to tell the iPhone what type of adapter it is (with that special pause feature), the iPhone 3g wanted to see a 68K ohm resister. And while a lot of people claimed it worked, others claimed it did not work…or worked sometimes.

So I tried it and found that it worked on my test bench. I was happy. I put the cig lighter back together and tested it in the car. It did not work in the car! I could not understand. So I went back inside and it was working/failing intermittently now back on my test bench with my 15VDC power supply. I tried a bunch of experiments. Finally I just hooked up a potentiometer to the accessory pin on the dock and tried adjusting the resistance slowly around that magical 68K mark. I found that 68K seemed to barely work on my test bench. But when I was actually testing in the car (which has a slightly lower voltage – most cars are around 13.5 volts) that 68K was not enough to get the line out to work and avoid the warning message.

What I found was that something around 75-85K ohm seems to work and be reliable. I ended up using exactly 78K and so far it looks happy.

I will post this link to the forum and see if this write-up helps some folks.

When the new iPhone 3G devices were released last year, one of my clients gave me his old iPhone (he upgraded). I played with the device and loaded it up with games. It was basically an iPod Touch on steroids (camera, etc).

Anyway, my kids loved playing games on it so we always took it on long drives. This past week my son was using it and stuck it in his jacket pocket but forgot to zip it shut. Later when he took off his jacket, the iphone fell out onto the concrete parking lot. Ouch!

The glass had 2 small “divots” but it was not cracked. The divots were a result of the impact which also seemed to broke many sections of the LCD display. The display was not cracked, but as I would later understand, the liquid itself had been forced out of some of the areas and as such the display had a lot of lines through it. I was especially bummed as I was about to switch to ATT and buy an iPhone 3g and give the old iPhone to my wife. Whoops!

When we got back I did a little research on the web and some experimentation with Brasso, a dremel tool, steel wool and a few other things. What I found that worked was some very fine wet/dry sandpaper. Like 1200 or 2500 grit type stuff. I used a somewhat coarse version (1200 grit) with water to literally sand out the scratched areas…all but the biggest one which I was only comfortable sanding out part way. I had to use a reasonable amount of pressure in the sanding process. The divots in the iPhone screen got a lot less noticeable from the 1200 grit sand paper but in the end the glass surface had a very finely scratched finish left over from the sand paper.

Next I used a finer grit (2500 or so) to smooth out the area a bit more. This worked well and left the iphone with more or less a “matte” finish in the area where I was sanding – basically finer scratches. The scratches from sanding were gone and what was left was more or less a haze. Oh, and a nice side effect of the sanding process (pressure) was that some parts of the LCD screen got better. I had fewer bad sections/lines in the LCD screen. I think the pressure forced some of the liquid back into some parts of the screen. As you can see from the pictures, the LCD is still not perfect, but it is better than it was (trust me).

While the iPhone’s screen was very usable now, I wanted to get rid of the haze/matte look to the half of the screen where I had been sanding. So I ordered some Cerium Oxide and a large buffing/polishing wheel from Caswell Plating. The kit arrived in 3-4 days and I went to work.

I put the polishing/buffing attachment in my drill press and ratcheted the speed (RPMs) to the highest setting it would go. I mixed some of the cerium oxide powder with water to make a substance with the thickness of heavy cream. According to the directions, you want enough water in the solution so that the buffing does not heat up the glass too much. This is important as it is not only glass we are polishing, but an LCD display right underneath.

I applied the liquid cerium oxide mixture with my fingers directly to the iPhone screen and polished the screen for about 30-40 minutes total. The actual process was tedious…put solution on the screen, polish for 10 seconds, put on more solution, polish some more, repeat. Warning: you don’t want to put too much pressure on the buffing action as it will heat up the glass in one spot and might crack the glass or damage the LCD underneath. I would buff for a few seconds and feel the heat of the glass to see how I was doing.

Periodically I would wash the iphone with a wet rag to see my progress. This slowed me down, but being the first time I had done this, I wanted to make sure everything was going well.

In the end, I think you will agree that the screen is 1000% better than it was. I could likely go further and get it to be perfect, but that would take a lot of time and might risk damage to the screen. The only areas of the screen I found hard to polish was the area near the edge. I think the polishing wheel was not making full contact with the glass due to the small metal lip that runs around the edge of the iPhone. But it is pretty good.

After the polishing, I used a pin, a wet clothe and some canned air to get the polishing compound out of the small holes and gaps in the iphone case. Not sure if there is a better way or not, but this seemed to work just fine.

First things first!
This is a tutorial on how to rip DVDs you own and not how to steal movies!

That said, there is a legitimate need to be able to take DVDs you own and turn them into files that can be streamed/played, installed on your iPod or iPhone, or used with an AppleTV or other media device. This is a tutorial on how I do it for one of my clients along with a script I customized to make the whole process easy.

The set-up I have for one of my clients is a central Mac Mini server (headless – no keyboard/monitor/mouse) which we use for the iTunes server. It runs iTunes all the time and does not do much of anything else. We have a number of AppleTV’s on the network and each of them is paired with the iTunes library on the Mac Mini server. This set-up allows my client to play/stream any music or movies in the iTunes library on any AppleTV. This works well for their purposes.

The issue I needed to solve for my client was to make it easy to rip all of their media/content into iTunes. Automating the music ripping was easy as iTunes has built in preferences for automating the ripping of music. Just go to iTunes preferences and tell it to rip a music CD when one is inserted in the Mac Mini and when complete, eject it. Done.

But what about DVD movies? Read more