Apple denial + soldering iron = fixed Smart Keyboard for 10.5” iPad Pro

Many of us who have iPad Pros know about the Smart Keyboard problems. After a while, the darned thing just loses connectivity with the keyboard. This failure is often accompanied by messages that the accessory isn’t supported. After a lot of frustration, I took to my favorite search engine for relief. When I saw an article proclaiming that Apple had extended the warranty support to 3 years for Smart Keyboards, I got excited, only to have my hopes dashed by reading that only the 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch models were covered. I purchased my 10.5” model in the fall of 2017, and Apple apparently doesn’t care what problems I—and other 10.5” iPad Pro owners—have, even if they’re the exact same problems people with the other sizes have.

What the actual heck, Apple? You know that doesn’t make any sense, right? Why are you picking on the middle children?

All was not lost, however. Just before I was about to commit to a purchase of a new keyboard that wasn’t made by Apple (hey, if they’re going to force me to spend money that others don’t have to spend for the same issue, then I’ll give the money to some other company), I did some more searching, and I found a couple of beautiful videos on YouTube about vloggers who fixed their iPad Pro Smart Keyboards using soldering irons. 

The wheels started turning. I have had a soldering iron for a long time, but my one attempt to use it was a dismal failure. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this at all. Even one of the vloggers had a mishap; his hand slipped, and the iron burned a bit of the strip that houses the keyboard connectors; fortunately, the damage was just cosmetic. With my lack of experience, I thought it was too risky. I settled for bending the connector strip so that the nubs on the base protruded more, and that worked for a few weeks, though I had to bend it a little bit more as time went on.

Tonight, however, I started to bend the connector strip again, and I heard a tiny crack. I thought my little Smart Keyboard was done for. It was giving me the unsupported device error messages, and nothing I was doing could convince it to cooperate. I had finally reached the point my soldering iron was waiting for: things were so bad that I couldn't make things any worse. It was fix or toss time. 

I took a flat piece of metal and drew some tiny dots on it with a Sharpie. I used that to practice the technique of getting a bead of metal on the tip of the soldering iron and dabbing a spot to leave the metal right where I wanted. Once I thought I had the timing and aiming down, I went for the keyboard. Unlike the YouTube vloggers, I couldn't see one contact lower than the rest; they were all depressed, so I put a dot of solder on each one. Like one of the guys, my hand did slip, and I burned a little bit of the plastic, but I think my keyboard fared better than his. It sure is an ugly job, though; no pretty, rounded and even mushroom caps for me:

I’m using the keyboard to type this, so I guess my grandmother was right: pretty is as pretty does. Thank you, YouTubers! I’m now a little less angry with Apple. I'm still of the opinion that I shouldn’t have had to do it, but I’m really pleased with my success.

A Tale of two Siris (not really)

I LOVE Google Now, especially with the Touchless Control on the Moto X, but it's not answering certain questions helpfully, though Siri handles the same questions like a champ. When I ask questions like the one below, or if it's going to storm, I'm not looking for search results on Alcorn State University or links to weather.com, I'm looking for Google to find some info and, like Star Trek's Mr. Spock, make an educated guess! Now, this may not be what Google wants, but it's what I want, and the lack of this is what makes me have to occasionally put my hands on my iPhone, which has no Touchless Control.

HTC blah blah yeah?

I have to admit the HTC One M8 "blah blah" commercial really appeals to me. I used to love HTC as a brand, but then I had the HTC HD7, and my relationship with them soured. Random hard-resets, compounded with Windows Phone 7.5's lack of a decent backup solution, really rubbed me the wrong way. It's time to consider replacing one of my phones (my Motorola Photon 4G can't hold a charge long enough to be useful as a backup phone, even with an extended battery), and somehow this commercial has me reconsidering my decision to never look back. Maybe it IS time to ask the Internet. 

AVAST! me hearties (and now hard-of-hearing)

Yep, I know what this is like:

 

source:  http://doblelol.com/5/funny-daily-quotes-for-work.htm 

How does your site look on mobile devices?

The screenshot above was lifted from Inside BruCrew Life. Interestingly enough, I have only one issue with the site; while I'm no expert on web design by any stretch of the imagination, I think they gave some thought to making it easy to access their site from mobile devices. I'm glad that it's so easy to share the content you find there, but it's difficult to read the content on my iPhone 5 (with Safari or Chrome) and my Motorola Photon 4G (native Browser or Firefox), because the share links obscure the text and part of the photos

So let's say that, incredibly, you have a website and don't have the kind of technology obsession that propels you to own multiple mobile devices. How can you make sure your pages look great on phones and tablets you don't own? Here's a link, for starters:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2012/11/6-free-mobile-device-emulators-for-testing-your-site/

I created this post from my iPhone, so I can't make the link pretty. It should still be useful (I hope).

Dear Auburn WBB coach, champions don't quit!

University of Kentucky Hoops hosted the women of Auburn today, and I had the pleasure to attend. Yes, the scoring was very lopsided, and the Auburn coach had the poor grace to complain. Sure, it hurt me when my beloved Alcorn State University (which, by the way, dear UK announcer, is pronounced ALL-CORN, not AL-CORN) was so horribly mauled by my Cats (I'm an alum of both schools), but I understood. The Wildcats are champions, and champions do not quit. Conference play started just weeks ago, and I do not anticipate every game will be this lopsided. A game that's pretty much in the books is still an opportunity to practice and hone skills against an opponent. UK Hoops have to be prepared for tougher games, when the score is much closer, and that means not shutting down when any game is all but assured, because what you practice now will be what you play later. You, Terri Williams-Flournoy, ought to know that as well as anyone. It's not about you. It's not about Auburn. It's about being champions. It's about the 40 Minutes!

[Yeah, this is not at all a post about technology, but my non-tech blog was killed by Microsoft long ago, and I figured I might as well start putting my non-tech posts here; that way, maybe I will actually start posting again]


GO BIG BLUE!

The truth doesn't always hurt; sometimes it amuses us

My colleagues are laughing right now, because now that we're being forced to remove whatever antivirus software we were running and install McAfee, our Windows 7 machines are reporting that no antivirus protection is installed. Me? I don't really see a joke, there.

Earlier, the guys were crying about how much slower their computers were running. I'm a little behind--currently at the stage of uninstalling the unapproved app (in preparation for installing ePO), so I will be crying in a couple of hours, I'm sure.

Waking up to tech woes

A tech-head who spends too much time playing with technology late at night needs help waking up. Sometimes, it's just hard to find good help. My mornings go something like this:

Standard alarm clock: "Howdy! I am loud, and I have nine-minute snooze intervals. In addition to beeping, I can play the radio for you!"
Me: "What can I do with nine minutes? That's entirely too short, and I don't want some radio personality blathering at me when I am trying to go back to sleep wake up!"

HTC HD7 phone with Windows Phone 7: "Check me out! I have five-minute snooze intervals, and you can set different alarms for different days of the week!"
Me: "Five minutes? That's worse than the alarm clock! Not to mention I don't like ANY of your alarm sounds; why can't I set what I want? No, no, please don't cry; your SharePoint and Office Live support is really nice, but it just won't get me out of bed."

Samsung Moment with Android 2.1: "I can set alarms for different days of the week, too! And if you choose me, you can have 10-, 15-, 20-, 25- or 30-minute snooze intervals. Plus, I can crow like a rooster!"
Me: "Annoying rooster noises aside, that would be GREAT...as long as you aren't stuck in a reboot loop...you know, kind of like the one you were stuck in this morning!"

iPhone 3G: "If you would just take me out of the backpack sometimes--"
Me: "Shhh! Grown people are sleeping!"

Lacking an extremely reliable device that has truly flexible alarm options, I almost always use the Moment as the primary alarm clock. As a backup for when the Moment is having one of its moments of FAIL, the HD7 is set to go off at the last minute, in case I'm not yet awake and getting ready for work, the workout, or play.

Thanks, Facebook, I think you botched it again

You see, I'm pretty sure I had my wall visible to everyone before your meddling. My posts were set by default to be invisible to a couple of groups of people; since permissions for individual posts can't be set from phones, this seemed the way to handle things for when I'm out and about. If I really wanted a post to be visible to all friends or a broader group, then I'd find a PC for that status update, link, etc.

Now, it seems you've gone and "fixed" things so that individuals in my default "no-see" categories can't see my wall and, therefore, the posts I intended for them. Giving them the ability to see the posts they should apparently means setting the default for new posts to a visibility level I did not desire. My friend was right, I suppose, when he said during our BSD arguments that simpler just means having fewer options.

Can you be any more annoying?

Will punctuation help you get your point across?

There’s a thread on FriendFeed that quite appropriately warns people of the dangers of failing to use a comma when tweeting. Anyone who’s given it much thought understands that punctuation can be key in getting your point across (or mangling it). However, sometimes using or omitting punctuation properly is lost on those who don’t give it much thought, and reading that funny thread made me recall just such an occasion.

Years ago, a friend and I'd had a discussion about my frustration with UNIX help files. After he'd made yet another suggestion, I went home and tried it, then emailed him to complain. His response was basically "why are you telling me about your sex life?" His suggestion? Enter "man man." In my subject line, I told him I “did a man man;” In the body of the email, I told him I received useless information for my efforts. My lesson? Sometimes the comma—or lack, thereof--doesn't help.

I no longer tell anyone I did a “man man.” In fact, I just don’t do a “man man,” just to save myself from having to explain later. If I need to know anything while working in UNIX, I just may hit Google up for answers. Almost all of us are doing Google, and like one FriendFeeder said, he tried Binging someone and got a nasty rash!

 

 

Technorati Tags: UNIX

Playing with FaceBook apps: What Element Are You?

I used to find FaceBook apps immensely annoying, but they're starting to grow on me. I'm not sure if they are changing, or if I am. I'm still not going to be in any games that glorify crime or criminals, and I'm not so much into racing, but there seem to be plenty of things out there for the RPG-lover and strategy game addict I've been known to be. The latest of the apps I've given in to is the one that determines which element you resemble. As with my Inner Nationality Quiz results, I was not expecting the answer I got. Metal? me? really?

The new FriendFeed beta – what I want

If you don’t know about the new look and functionality that is being scrutinized by the FriendFeed beta users as of today, then you probably aren’t reading this (unless you’re a family member). There’s a lot of talk going on about whether or not the real-time feature should be the default, whether the color scheme is tragic, or even how much it might resemble a certain other popular social media service. Lindsay D., well-known FFer, suggested that we FFans (well, the graphically-oriented ones, anyway) draft a comp with how we want our FF to work. Never mind what I’ve been doing with my new Dell Mini 9, my little brain decided this was a blogging opportunity I couldn’t miss.

The above screenshot shows roughly what I see in the FriendFeed beta now. Compare/contrast with the below:

As you can see, my mock-up does away with the grey that seems to offend so many and replaces it with a lovely aqua. Sadly, I’m not graphically-oriented, so the uneven coloring is due to the edits I was doing with the grey background before I re-colored. More important than the color, though, is the ability (optional, of course) to have a preview of a subscription area before I click. How many times have I seen (under the current live UI) that there was an update to a room an hour ago, but I go to that room to find I’ve already read the latest news? If I could see the last two or three entries of certain rooms or contributors on my sidebar, I could determine beforehand if it might be worth a click-through; a plus would be that I could absorb more information without having to leave the main page (or, as I often do, open another tab or page) at all. Sure, this stuff all scrolls through the main feed, but sometimes it flies right past my face before I know it; that’s what happens to those of us who want to know it all.

These couple of features aren’t all I want out of FriendFeed, but this is something I wanted to get out there. Maybe I’ll have more later, but if you read this blog, you know how likely that really is!

 

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed,Social Media

iMage to the rescue? iPod Touch troubles

A co-worker was bummed out today, because she and her daughter had been trying for days to get the girl's iPod touch working. It seems that it stopped responding one day, when she tried to sync it, and calls to Apple support eventually resulted in being advised to take it to a Genius, with a caveat that even those hardy souls may not be able to bring the machine back from the dead. The closest Genius, however, is 60 miles away. The young iPod owner was so distraught over the device's apparent demise that she had been losing sleep (I fully understand!); throwing another $400 after the first bundle wasn't really an option. So what do you do when you're in this position and you see your PC support technician strolling down the hallway? Well, duh, you grab me--I mean her--and ask her if she knows anything about iPods.

I, of course, have extensive experience with iPod Touches, having had an iPhone for nearly three whole months and having been through the reset/jailbreak/awwcrapdoitalloveragain stage at least six times or seven times. Oh, wait, I mean I hesitantly told my co-worker that I knew something about iPods, wondering if I was lying. It took me a while to figure out that the multi-talented device was just stuck in recovery mode; you see, for the longest time, my iPhone has been showing me a drawing of Steve Jobs when it's in restore mode, and I must admit I had to resort to a YouTube video (embedded below) to confirm my suspicions. But, hey, being a good tech doesn't mean I know it all; it means I know where to get answers when I don't know enough. And it means that I got to show my co-worker the iPod's colorful home screen; hopefully it also means there's a young'un somewhere smiling tonight because of me.

iKeepass (and those of us who need it) waiting on Apple to recover from holiday binging

KeePass is an application I’ve relied upon for years. Not only does it keep my many passwords in one encrypted file, but there are builds for Windows, Pocket PC, Linux, OS X, BSD, BlackBerry, PalmOS and J2ME. In addition to that, it’s portable. Ever since I got my secondhand iPhone, I’ve been waiting for KeePass to be made available for that device. Until tonight, the last I’d read was that the developer was still working out the kinks; now I know from his blog that he’s simply playing the waiting game that’s so familiar to iPhone devs. I’m not a patient geek, so I’m blogging about this. I know Apple will never know, but I need to post something, anyway; why not “APPLE, GET OFF YOUR BAKED CORES AND FREE THIS APP; IT’S BEEN A MONTH!”

 

Technorati Tags: IPhone,KeePass,iKeePass,password management

NOW I know why people find social media confusing!

I’m STILL trying to figure this FriendFeed conversation out!

If you want to try to explain it to me, be aware that ovals at the end of a line cover the name of the person who posted the comment. The black ovals represent one name, and the red ovals represent a second name.

 

Technorati Tags: FriendFeed,Social Media,Culture

If I had 3,000 to spend on tech, I'd have a new Fujitsu P1630

On FriendFeed, someone asked what tech-toys we would get, if we had $3,000 to spend. I decided to spec out a Fujitsu LifeBook P1630. I love the tiny netbook concept, but I've got to have my digitizer; it really helps me get paperwork done at my job without my having to keep up with paper. I really tried to stay below 3k, but it wasn't easy. Couldn't I sneak in a little more change?

Outlook ‘07 fun: why I haven’t enabled Instant Search on my home PC

我真看不懂汉语！

(I’m hoping that means “I really can’t read Chinese!”)

I’ll try again later.

Technorati Tags: Windows Search,Office 2007,Microsoft Outlook

iPhunny: be careful deploying Google Apps to your users

If you are one of the hordes of IT heroes supporting iPhones in your organization, take heed. Be very careful demonstrating the coolness of Google Mobile App's Voice Search. Today, a co-worker called to ask me about Google on her phone, and I talked her through getting the app installed. As we were ending the call, I mentioned that she could now talk to her iPhone to get searches done. Of course, now having said this, I was expected to demonstrate it. I had a few minutes to wait while some software installed on a laptop I'm getting ready for a new employee, so I wandered over.

After gesticulating wildly at the pertinent spots on the screen, repeating myself a couple of times, and then suggesting a random search topic (her favorite tennis player), the first successful search attempt was innocuous enough. However, my friend decided to do another search, this time for "pattycake." I couldn't resist telling her that her phone obviously knew her, when the first link proved to be for something called "Sexy Pattycake." I'm not even going to think about that one much.

My co-worker was delighted (with the phone's new functionality, of course), and she needed to show someone else. Amidst the corrals cubicles, she found an unsuspecting gentleman and told him to think of a search. She pressed the screen, and he said, "beautiful redheads." My friend immediately began reading off the first hit, "Beautiful redheads dancing nak..." and the rest was sort of obscured by the sudden realization that she should stop reading (and by the laughter of all around).

Love the tech, but by pattycake, be careful out there!

GenderAnalyzer guesses if the blogger is male or female

And I’ve almost completely got it fooled. I like that.

GenderAnalyzer is 70% certain that my content on FriendFeed is written by a male, 75% certain that this blog is written/neglected by a male, and is neutral (with a slight preference for female) when it comes to my non-tech blog at Live Spaces. Beeyootiful!

 

via Jess Lee at FriendFeed

 

 

Technorati Tags: GenderAnalyzer

iPhone email ego battles

My second-hand iPhone whispers seductively in my ear. He feels incomplete without a service provider. “WiFi is great, but it isn’t enough,” he laments.

My co-worker told me today that we can’t get corporate discounts on anything iPhone from AT&T, cementing, bricking, mortaring and asphalting my decision to stay away. “You don’t understand!” the iPhone cries. “I’m simply not used to working offline!”

I smirked. “That, my dear boy, is painfully evident! Let’s have a little discussion about how cached email really should work when one isn’t connected. Better yet, why don’t you just read what Nadyne Mielke has to say.”

No, that was not me checking out basic phone/data plans at the T-Mobile site a few hours ago.

 

 

Technorati Tags: iPhone