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.

I have been using Time Machine to backup my user folder on my laptop for the last 6 months or so. Time Machine runs hourly and backs up my laptop to a network server (similar to Time Capsule). All has been running well…or so I thought!

Turns out that my Desktop Folder had some funky permissions on it and Time Machine was not able to read from that folder…hence it did not backup that folder. There was no error provided in my menu bar nor in the Time Machine system preference. Perhaps there is some error log in the console somewhere that shows the issue, but nothing to tell the user who thinks everything is just fine. Of course until you want something from that folder and it is not backed-up!

I fixed the issue by fixing the file permissions on the Desktop folder. But my faith in Time Machine is gone. Just be aware. Maybe someone from Apple will read this.

Rogue Amoeba software released a new version of their Airfoil software recently. The software allows you to stream any sound from a computer (Mac or Windows) to another Mac or Windows machine (or even linux!) that has speakers connected to it. This was very useful for many things….no need to buy Airport Express’s for every pair of speakers in your house…if they had a computer hooked up, you are good to go.

And you could stream any audio…not just what was coming out of iTunes. For example, you could stream an audio source that iTunes could not play like some windows music streams, content playing in youtube flash players, DVD soundtracks and similar. Have an internet radio station that does not play through iTunes…bingo.

I never bought the software, though, because it had one limit. You could not stream sound TO an airport express with airtunes. Since I already had a couple of these, I wanted that capability. Well, today it can do that too! (oh, and it can also stream to an AppleTV which essentially has airtunes built in)

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
$25

One more thing… Looks like you will be able to stream to an iPod Touch or iPhone later as well as they are working on some software to allow you to do that. I imagine you could hook your iPhone up to a pair of speakers and use it as a remote speaker. Not sure how useful that it or not. I doubt they coul allow you to stream it to your device as you travel around town as they would have to have a way to find your device on the wide area network. But maybe? Not sure how you would control the streaming source back at your house, but who knows what the good folks at Rogue Amoeba have up their sleeves.

Personally, I would love to be able to stream music that is stored at my house (in my iTunes collection) TO my iPhone and be able to control it from my iPhone. Then I would care a lot less about how much memory my iPhone has on it and less about syncing music to it….I could just stream music. Maybe that is battery intensive, but it would be cool.

Before I bought my first digital camera around 2003, I had a Nikon FE2 and a bunch of prime lenses. I bought the camera with a 50mm lens from Service Photo in Baltimore, used, for about $500 in 1988. I used the camera for 15 years mostly shooting black and white negative film and then slides.

I have a lot of B/W prints from my darkroom. But the slide collection was always hard to view. The projector, screen and inability to simply pull out an image and show someone were always a drag. For years I have been looking for a way to scan the slides cheaply, but the cost to scan 4,500 slides is not even close to approachable. I did not need the highest quality…just something fairly good…good enough for the web. If I really wanted to make a print/enlargement, I always had the original slide and could pay for a drum scan if I wanted.

The idea of putting the slides into a Kodak projector and somehow taking pictures of them with a digital camera was always a thought I had. I even briefly tried to make it work, but quickly ran into a number of issues which stumped me. The slide projector bulb was WAY to bright. Focus was an issue. And even getting decent color balance and contrast was problematic.

Luckily, my father (and mother) have a huge slide collection. My dad was also interested in the same thing – digitizing the slides. He did most of the work but I helped supply equipment, software and some know how on things.

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How you ask?

Answer: Get rid of your cable TV.

But how will you survive without TV and Movies?

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I started using Skype last year because I found it very convenient for technical support and other 1-800 type calls where you might be on hold for a long time. Skype also was nice as on a Mac Laptop it performs VERY well as a full duplex speakerphone without any additional things to buy/plugin. This allows me to do stuff while I talk to a tech support person.

Anyway, I quickly realized that it would be great to be able to call any number. So I subscribed to SKYPE OUT and found it was great and I used it more and more.

But the only issue I found was that sometimes when I called someone using SKYPE they would not answer. Why? Because the called id would come across as “not available” or some weird number like (123) 456-7890.

Today I had a similar experience and decided to look into it. I found that you can assign a caller ID to your SKYPE out calls by typing in the number you would like to use (like your cell phone #) and then confirming you own that number via an SMS confirmation code process.

I just did it and the process worked perfectly. They said my caller id would be activated within 24 hours and they would send me a confirmation when it was complete. Nice!

Don’t know about the rest of you, but my blog seemed to load very slowly of late. I tried a bunch of things but could not figure it out and started to suspect my hosting company (1and1.com). Being Christmas Eve and all, I decided today would be a good time to find out.

I went with Dreamhost and signed up for their yearly plan ($10 a month…same as 1and1 business hosting). I heard they were a good provider and I was hoping that the speed issue was indeed 1and1.com and not my blog set-up itself.

My blog was hosted as a directory off of my main site (carlhutzler.com/blog). I wanted to be able to move the main site (my photo business) and the blog as close to seemlessly as possible. I was a little nervous as I had not moved a Wordpress blog before. My website was simple…just a bunch of html files, but the blog had a MySQL database with all kinds of data in it along with my configuration settings and even a little .htaccess rewrite rules for the pretty URL stuff.

I read up a little on the subject and decided to go with the steps after the break… Read more

I set-up Time Machine successfully to backup to a network attach storage device (ReadyNAS 1100) twice now and have had great reliability. But for some reason, I have been trying to do it a third time at a client site and it will not work. I have been getting errors like:

Backup failed with error: 19
Network mountpoint not owned by backupd… remounting

I looked all over the ReadyNas.com site and followed their instructions perfectly. And I searched all over the blogs and other folks are having the same issue. Some think it is permission problems and I have no doubt some people have a lack of write access to their network share. But this was not the case for me.

What I found worked was after choosing the Time Machine volume in Time Machine preferences, you have to EJECT the time machine afp share (and sparse disk image if you had it mounted) BEFORE time machine will be happy and start backing up. I think it is because initially you had the share mounted as “you”, a normal user. And when time machine runs it wants to mount the share AS THE OWNER (backupd) in some way. If the share is already mounted as “you the user”, time machine can’t mount it as itself.

So when you choose the time machine volume for backups and the time machine preference says “backup starting in 120 seconds…119 seconds…118 seconds”, just eject the time machine AFP share and it just might work for you.

I am doing more backups for clients these days. One issue I ran into was that the ReadyNAS’s web user interface does not provide many options for how an rsync job runs. For example, while you can control whether or not files are deleted on the remote machine, you can not control most other standard options. I needed to specify two options:

1) I needed rsync to run on an alternate port so that I could map that port to the right backup readynas machine at my home office (I have more than one now). Without the ability to specify ports I had no way to target the correct readynas machine behind my office firewall. Well, there are ways, but VPN and SSH solutions were not exactly what I wanted. I just wanted to specify –port=XXXX

2) I needed to constrict how much bandwidth the rsync backups could use. This was mostly because my clients have slower internet connections than I do and if I let rsync just run, it would eat up all the upload bandwidth at my client’s location (if the job ran late). While there are some controls for this in the QOS settings in the router at my client’s location (running DD-WRT), I thought the rsync option would work just fine. I just needed to be able to specify –bwlimit=50

I looked around a lot for a solution but could not find one. I even called Netgear and their support team did a great job understanding the issue and thinking about solutions with me. But in the end they admited they had no Web UI solution and that getting access to the unix shell and setting up a job in CRON was the only solution. So I set up a job in CRON and it has been running for several weeks without issue. Basically it is just a small shell script with a bunch of rsync jobs that run daily.

But my shell script was just adequate. I am not a unix programmer so some of the more complex things I wanted from my backup job were not in my dinky script. I did have it email me when it was complete, but I never new if it completed properly unless I manually looked at the logs each day (which I didn’t). And I had nothing in my script to prevent another backup from starting even if the previous day’s backup was still running…a real possibility. From looking at the backup jobs built into the readynas, I could see how they provided these and other options, but I did not fully understand how to add them to my script so I didn’t.

Then today I happened to stumble upon Ian Macdonald’s post about how he added a little PERL code to the ReadyNAS’s backup script generator (it generates the shell script that actually performs the backup). This addition let’s you use the ReadyNAS web UI to create jobs as you normally would. But when the jobs are executed, his perl script additions do a lookup in an external file to see what options to apply! Bingo!!

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=19857&p=118320&hilit=readynasexclude+rsync#p118320

His code was fairly simple. It looked for a config file called /frontview/conf/rsync.conf. In that file his perl code would look for a matching source or destination for the job in question and apply options. Simple enough. The only downside (minor) is that the TEST CONNECTION button in the web UI does not use these options. So for me, connecting on a different port, I could not use the test button. No biggee….this is just a small inconvenience.

Now I can create jobs in the web UI and be assured that jobs will only run one at a time and also provide emails with the logs when they complete. And I have full control over what rsync options I want the jobs to run with. Cool!