Category Archives: Electronics

Apple TV

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My husband recently got me Apple TV for “my” Birthday. It’s kind of like when Homer Simpson gave Marge a bowling ball… with the name “Homer” on it.
Well, it turns out I am actually using it and enjoying it more than I thought.
The first day we had Apple TV, I noticed my Itunes was playing music on my IMac that happens to be in the same room as the Apple TV. I thought maybe my husband turned it on, so I turned it off, because he is watching TV. I leave the room and return…ITunes is on again!! I look over at the hubby, he is way too comfy on the couch watching TV to have quick turned it on. (But he is Ninja like sometimes, so it is possible.) Just as I ask him “Did you turn on my ITunes?” he switches the show he is watching on AppleTV and my computer switched songs on ITunes. Eureka, the Apple TV remote controls the IMac computer, too.
We mainly use it to get NetFlix movies and shows. It is nice to catch up on the HBO and Showtime shows that I usually have to rent and watch the whole disc set in one night so I don’t have to pay for 2 nights.
We have noticed on some shows (especially Better Off Ted) that the streaming will stop or the sound cuts out. I think this is a NetFlix thing. But this problem is easily remedied by rewinding a little and starting from there. It sure beats renting a disc that stops just at the most suspenseful part of the movie and when you remove the disc, you find a huge scratch, which no amount of cleaning can fix. Then you have to wait until the next day to re-rent the same movie to find out “who-done-it”.
Here is a picture to show how small the Apple TV is.

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Latest iPhone Software Update

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I just had to grab this image. The iPhone software update 3.1.2 says it resolves the intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart. Gee I have had the iPhone since the fall of 2007 and this has always been an issue. Support would say just restart the iPhone. Well I hope it works with this fix.

iPhone update October 2009

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Amazon has a New 3G Electronic Book Reader

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Amazon has the Kindle 2 now. You can now download books at 3G speeds and holds 1500 books. It looks cool, though I think it is missing one cool thing email… Maybe it is counter intuitive to have the book reader have email but what make the iPod Touch cool is that you can listen to music blah blah blah… But more importantly you can get your email and web for far cheaper than actually owning an iPhone. Maybe email will come with Kindle 3, but then I will be wishing for instant messaging. Never satisfied. Never.

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Not Looking Forward to the Switch to Digital

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Well if this is what having digital is like I am not impressed. Just this channel (ABC) goes out from time to time while the other channels from our cable provider are fine. If ABC is not a bunch of dropped pixels, it is out of sync with audio, reminiscent of those old dubbed asian martial arts films. It is funny to watch, but it is not what we payed for when we signed up for digital TV.

switch to digital

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iPhone 3G Fixed, Zoo was Fun, Beef Good

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Well we did a road trip to Indianapolis, Indiana to the Apple store. We had been to an Apple store in Madison WI to look at cases for our iPhones, but we did not expect the line and the interrogation we got before we could even go into the store. All went well though once we got to see a “Genius” he just asked the basics, looked me up in their data base, walked into the back room and returned with a replacement iPhone. The Genius did not talk much to me, I figured well he is a genius and must have psychic powers or something or he is just plane tired of dealing with us iPhone folk, because darn close to everyone in view at the Genius Counter line had an iPhone with “issues” in hand.

Anyway, the phone is fixed, and I just had to drive back two hours to sync the phone to my laptop to get it to work again. I kinda wish the support guys had given me a heads up about that, then I would have brought my MacBook Pro with me. Anyway, the Apple Store was packed and crowded and noisy, but right next door was a real live Pottery Barn.

Heaven.

They make everything look so perfect in the Pottery Barn, way better than in their catalog;  you just want to buy everything just the way it is and set it up the same way at home. My wife bought a bag of sea shells and I bought a wall shelf wide enough to hold my Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station with Gigabit Ethernet and Western Digital 500GB My Book Essential Drive in our seller stairwell.

The Indianapolis Zoo was a blast too. O liked the dolphins and the train and the giraffe and of coarse, the gift shop.

On the way back we stopped at the Beef House and had us some beef and rolls. We love the Beef House; it is one the best steak joints we have ever been to. We call it the Disney of Beef; train loads of cattle go in one door, and bus loads of people go in the other (Not really). You can even park an RV and go in for diner. Exit 4 on I-74 in Indiana. Yum. Yum.

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The Eternal Silliness that is the Apple iPhone

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OK the iPhone 3G is cool, when it works. It does everything Apple, the very merry Apple way. Unfortunately, when it is broke, it is miserable in the most miserable Apple way. I recommend that you do not buy an Apple iPhone if there is no “Real” Apple store within 75miles of your main residence. When I called in to Apple support about my iPhone “No WiFi” error, I found out the hard way that even if the you are in the parking lot of the AT&T store and walk back in and say “my iPhone does not work”, all you will get is a blank stare and then a very rehearsed “you will have to call Apple we don’t support the iPhone warranty”.

So I call Apple and it is like talking to people from Leave it to Beaver meets George Orwell’s 1984… Sure they calmed me down, and made it feel OK that they just *&%(*# me over. You see even though the AT&T store I purchased my iPhone from is only two miles away, if I want the iPhone replaced right away, I have to make an appointment at a “black balloon” Apple store not a “blue balloon” store. You see on the Apple website when you go to find an Apple Store the blue balloons indicate an Apple “authorized dealer”, but the place lacks the Orwellites that only a true “black balloon” store has on staff to help you fix anything iPhone. Blue balloon would be “in town” or 40 minutes away for me, but instead I have to drive a 110miles to get to the closest “black balloon” one. Grr… The support guy says “Hey that is in Chicago, you are in Illinois, so that should do it for you”. Nice and close…

Like everyone in Illinois lives in Chicago. Well, ok, a large portion of the population does live in Chicago, but we don’t.

This call is taking place on Wednesday morning, and the guy thinks I can just take off and drive to Chi-town on a whim. I say “I can not make it until Saturday.” He says “no problem, we will just follow the prompts on the website together… Hmm… Looks like you can not make an appointment that far out. You will have to wait until Thursday. Or you can send us your iPhone.” Gee that is convenient, I just spent two weeks waiting for the phone and now a I have to wait a couple days for a package to be delivered to my house, which of course, will be diverted to Fedex or UPS or the post office for an extra day, because well… I work, and will not be home for the delivery. So maybe three days to get a box to send the phone, then they will send it back five days later which will be six or seven if a weekend gets in the way.

OK it is my fault, but I let the guy go, because I could not decide whether to drive 110miles or ship the phone out. This is one of those things I need to talk with the wife about, mainly because the last time I exchanged an Apple product without confirming with the Mrs. I walked away 500 bucks poorer. I hangup. The wife says mail the phone in… But I can not get past the darn Apple Support robot operator. “You can say what you need help with like, iTunes or iMovie; go ahead give it a try” I say “iphone” and then I am pretty sure the robot hung up on me. Five tries later and I am sure the damn robot has me on a list. I am sorry Steve said you can not have access.

I give up. It is late and it looks like we will make our very merry Apple way to Indianapolis on Saturday, and go to the Zoo after visiting Apple land.

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iPhone 3G Arrived Today -Broken

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My old iPhone died the week before the 3G came out so instead of dealing with repairing the old beat up iPhone, I bought the new iphone 3G thinking that it would at least work when it arrived. Well It works mostly… I was able to sync in all my contacts, email accounts and music, but when I went to add the iPhone to my access list for my house wireless network it said No WiFi am on hold going on 10minutes with apple support… grr… 15minutes to get a person Yeah!

Starting to miss my old clunking Samsung phone right now.

Apple support guy said to reset my iPhone, it will take about 30 minutes and it should work then. so I opened up iTunes plugged in my iPhone; after the phone showed I should click the Summary Tab and (oh here you need to make sure all the important stuff is backed up) select the Restore button and answer all the prompts to get a fresh factory iphone (225MB) software.

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iPhone 2.0 Yippee!

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Well my iPhone still does not work. It almost made it to a year. I can still plug it in and get calender reminders from my outlook calender, and today it even updated to iPhone 2.0. Oh Boy! Basically the phone is a $500 clock with calendar reminders, and also has a cool picture of my wife and son as the screen wall paper otherwise it is a brick. A brick Designed by Apple in California and Assembled in China, so I could drop it some soapy water just in time to pay $15 a month to get 3G service in an area that does not have it. Yeah!

I can still answer phone calls with the ear phone attached to my brick-phone, but I can not get to my voice mail, or contacts. I can’t make calls either. I can not use the cool map feature, or annoy my friends by quickly googling to find out what Clint Eastwood movie had the nun in it. I am sad. What ever you do, do not set your phone down in a wet spot long enough to allow it to wick water under the screen or past the home button because if the screen stops working, you are screwed. I suppose the dial soap had an added “screw you” feature to the situation. Anyway I off to get the 3G iPhone…

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iPhone vs Dial Soap

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Well I found out on Sunday that placing your iPhone glass face down next to the sink where your 4 year old washes his/her hands with Dial soap can have detrimental effects, like not being able to use the water and soap logged iPhone for anything but a flashlight, or a clock. I can not even power the phone off since you need to do the neat little finger swipe across the screen to power down, which no longer works. I let the phone power down to a thin red battery line, but it would not go all the way dead. Grr… You can’t even remove the battery, so like when my wife washed her old Samsung phone we just pulled the battery, and let the phone dry, and then bought a new battery and her old phone worked fine.

Well I am not done. I have a vacuum evaporator at work so I am going to pull the water out of the phone in a 4×10^-5 Torr vacuum over night. The guys at work joke that I now have a $500 brick (orig 4gig iPhone bought July 29th, 2007), I counter that if placing the iPhone in a vacuum overnight does not fix it, I will coat it with gold so then I will at least have a $500 gold brick.

As it stands now:
Dial soap: One
iPhone: Nothing

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