Category Archives: hardware

Rear Facing Camera not working on iPhone 5S?

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Having a problem with a rear facing camera on your iPhone?

Specifically an iPhone 5S?

Should you try and replace the rear camera module?

These were all questions I was googling/asking when my wife came to me with a black screen inside of the camera app. I followed some black magic on youtube about toggling low power mode and hard resetting with some success but it was not consistent. Finally I found an apple forum post from a guy who went through the whole process below in iFixit after buying a new camera module:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+5s+Rear+Facing+Camera+Replacement/20259

He got in to replace the camera just to find that the camera module cable had disconnected. After a shy grin his girlfriend admitted her phone had dropped about the time the camera stopped working.

After reading this a lightbulb went off. Knowing that the kids use my wife’s iPhone to play games and watch video I knew this had to be a similar issue. I took out my trusty iFixIt tool kit and got to work. Low and behold the rear facing camera cable was loose.

iphone_5s_rear_facing_camera_replacement_-_ifixit

I went through the iFixIt guide and then popped off the rear camera connection to make sure no lint or dirt was under the contacts and reconnected it. I put the phone back together and poof! The camera started working again like magic.

My wife was happy and so was I. Happy wife, happy life! 🙂

Repairing a TrueCrypt Volume and Unmountable Boot Volumes

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truecrypt-logo38pxThe dreaded Unmountable Boot Volume rears its ugly head from time to time. Microsoft says it’s either a bad cable or a corrupt filesystem. For me it has always been the later which I fix by putting the harddrive into another computer and running a chkdsk. Or windows sees it as corrupt and fixes it for me (ie Windows 7). But what if your drive has full disk encryption using Truecrypt? (Don’t know what TrueCrypt is? It is an encryption program that can encrypt full volumes or volumes you create. Awesome indeed)

TrueCrypt is not longer being supported and is now VeraCrypt https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/. The info here should be the same for 7.1a versions of TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt.

 

I have a MacBook Pro so I hooked up the drive using a USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Cable (which are very handy BTW) and mounted it in Parallels Desktop with Windows XP by selecting the USB ATA Bridge under the Devices->USB menu. I loaded up TrueCrypt in XP and mounted the drive. You have to make sure to mount the drive with “mount partition using system encryption without pre-boot authentication” selected under options. I forgot to do this and got frustrated, but after a quick google I figured that part out. Here is where that is:

truecrypt-mount-without-pre-authentication

Once the volume was mounted under windows TrueCrypt noticed the volume had not been unmounted correctly and asked me if I wanted to ChkDsk the drive. I said yes as this is exactly what I wanted to do! It found a couple problems and ChkDsk stopped. I then ran ChkDsk 2 more times till it ran with no errors.

I now have a bootable TrueCrypt system volume again and best of all my client will be happy she can get access to her files!

Wish I had an iPhone

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After looking over the unpacking of, the disassembly of, the workings of, the howto videos of and more I think I have finally gotten iPhone envy. But just like I waited for the Macbook Pro Core 2 models to come out I think I will wait for the iPhones w/ GPS, 3G, 16-30GB, and more. Good things come to those who wait (some would say good things come to those who get in line first). So have fun with your iPhones. I’ll just sit here wishing I had one and play with my Blackberry Pearl.

Free iPod Bummer

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Free iPod BummerWell I thought I was going to get a free ipod from ipods.freepay.com, but alas you cannot sign-up multiple users under the same address. Each account has to be from different addresses and have to sign up themselves 🙁 So I’m now back down to 2 referrals. I’m not sure if I will just quit or not. It makes me mad that FreePay (Gratis) is getting referral kickback money for the ones that they put on hold. I guess that is what I get for not reading “the fine print”. Maybe if I would get another referral in the next few weeks I would try again, but I signed up over 2 years ago so I think it might just be time to call it quits.


Phone + Toilet = Bad News

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Motorola RAZR v3Well if you haven’t heard already I tanked my old Nokia phone in the toilet last week. It didn’t rattle or roll or bounce. It tanked straight into the down spout. While the toilet was flushing no less. I thought it was a goner. Luckily it back-washed and I was able to retrieve it. No it didn’t work (only lit up the backlight) and yes I was able to retrieve the contacts (with my nokia serial data cable and gnokii). So I decided to get a decent phone this time around (with phone insurance just in case). I decided on the Motorola RAZR V3 after looking at all the other options Cingular had at the store and online. It’s a pretty sweet phone with alot of goodies: camera, mp3 ringtones, bluetooth, usb port, etc.

I’m also trying out a new wordpress plugin called wp-mms which will allow me to text message photos. I’ll be posting under the moblog category so you’ll see interesting pictures and the like popping up from time to time.


mtink: Status Monitor for EPSON inkjet printers

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mtinkI found a great little print monitor for linux called mtink. It works great for my Epson Stylus Photo 825 printer when hooked up via usb and I can reset, clean, and nozzle check the printer all from this little program. If using my particular printer you will need to select the Stylus Photo printer as the option because the 825 is not specifically handled, but most other models are.

Free iPod: Almost There!

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Free iPodSo I now have 4 referrals of the 5 total needed to get a free 30GB black video iPod. I am SOOOOOO close I can smell it. Most of the referrals I have gotten were ones that bought ink for around $30. I have gotten the free ink options a couple of times and it works great on my printers. Click on the image to see how close I am and then click on the link below to sign up to freeipods.com. Thanks!

Sign up to FreeiPods.com today!

My Next Laptop: IBM ThinkPad X41 Tablet

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I was looking over the KDE Look feed in akregator (a RSS feed tool in KDE) and opened up a splash screen that I thought looked good in Get Firefox!. I clicked on a google ad, to help support sites I like, and came upon a site called eLucis which sells linux distros on cd and dvd. I thought that site was decent so I then processed to click on another google ad that took me to the EmperorLinux, Inc. website where they are selling the IBM thinkpad X41 tablet. This laptop looks so sweeeeet! It could be used as a mobile digi-pad to work in gimp/photoshop as well as your normal tablet pc for writing notes etc. It’s thin enough that it is not a pain and EmperorLinux goes through all the pain of customizing the kernel so that all functions of the laptop work great when you get it, even the fingerprinting login system works! So with all that said. This is my next laptop. When my business starts making a little bit more in the next month or so I will be ordering this badboy. Check it out for yourself.