A Leslie Wong Blog

We bought a Samsung USB data cable from Verizon – the rep at the store said it was difficult to get. I thought we could charge our Verizon SCH-i730 with our Minty Boost USB charger. It’s wasn’t that simple.

For some reason, Samsung decided to add another plug in the middle of the cable – so you could plug in your charger! If you wanted to charge your phone while it was plugged into a USB port, you needed the charger. I thought the USB cable was supposed to obviate the need of a charger but Samsung must have a different idea.

I called Verizon tech support and they said that the Verizon stores didn’t even sell the cable. They didn’t tell me much.

After opening up the box in the middle of the cable, I traced the +5v from one end to the other. It was obvious that soldering a jumper would enable +5v to charge the phone.

Once the jumper cable was in, I reassembled the connector in the middle of the cable and plugged it into the phone. The phone icon changed to the charging icon meaning that it was being charged by the Minty Boost.

I looked on eBay, and found there were cables that didn’t need this mod for about 75% less than what we paid for this supposedly difficult to get (according to the Verizon rep at the store) cable.

At least it works.

To get your own Minty Boost charger, that works with iPods, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS/GameBoy Advance, Blackberry and a lot of other devices, go to Adafruit Industries. For a technical overview of the charger, go to ladyada.net.

Lisa Nadile, writing for CIO.com gives advice on integrating Macintosh computers into existing IT infrastructures.

The article discusses in-house support, application integration and management. The one thing that she fails to address is the state of enterprise hardware support from Apple. AppleCare Enterprise Hardware support, for example, offers premium support for their enterprise hardware – XServe and XServe Raid. The standard Apple Warranty and AppleCare Protection Plan has limited on-site service. That just isn’t going to make it in the enterprise.

I must state that currently, I am not an enterprise customer. I’m railing because my Macbook is sitting in Tennesee (the national Apple Laptop Repair Depot), waiting for a main logic board. I just got off the phone with Apple Support and they indicated that it could be up to 5-7 business days for the part to become available for my repair. Wouldn’t one have common parts available, if one were in the repair business? Luckily, I don’t do anything or I couldn’t afford to be without my primary notebook for two weeks.

On the other hand our, Dell Inspiron 700m experienced a trackpad problem, and the next day, a Dell representative replaced the part on-site.

Apple Inc (AAPL), stock hit an all time high today (it closed at 98.84), while my two Macs hit lows.

The Ethernet port on my Macbook (13″ Late 2006) failed. It seems that the connection to the logic board is loose. The nearest Apple Store is 72 miles away, and since I figured it’ll need a new logic board, I sent it off Apple Mail-In Repair in Tennessee. It’s still under warranty. They received it today and the repair status says, “On hold – Part on order (26-Apr-2007).” I guess that means they’ll fix it “real soon now.”

My other Mac notebook, a 4-year-old Powerbook G4 12″ (rev A) decided that it was going to have an intermittent connection with the DC power connector. I purchased AppleCare for this computer when I bought it, but that ran out about a year ago. So I had to fix it my self.

I highly recommend ifixit.com because they give step by step disassembly instructions with photos. It was a pain to take apart, in spite of ifixit.com’s excellent instructions, because the part I needed to fix required that everything else taken apart (except the display) first.
When I finally got everything apart, I could see the broken solder joint (circled in red) that was causing my intermittent power connection.

I guess it did “Test OK” when it was manufactured, but not now. A few seconds with a hot soldering iron and the connection was fine. Then it took me another hour to put it back together. As I said, a pain.

From CNET News: “NASA is celebrating the 17th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in April 1990…”

All I can say is the photographs are amazing.

Two days ago, Chris Pirillo warned about usernames and passwords being exposed in Google Calendar.

The security hole still seems to exist, I just tried the search.

I also just got an email from The Google Team entitled “Google Apps Status Alert: Maintenance upgrade for Google Calendar on April 26th” “…that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar…”

Seems to be a connection.

You can download this OPML file and import it into your RSS reader and see what I read every morning. Some of the things I share are in my Google Reader Shared Items.

(Windows users: Right click on the link, choose ‘Save Target as…’ to download the file. Mac users: Option-Click on the link. Linux users should know how to do it.)

Find out what an RSS reader is.

Subscribe to the RSS feed of lesliewong.us and read about all the fascinating things I write about.

Geoff Boucher, at latimes.com, writes: “It looks like Spider-Man will be swinging over to Broadway � and bringing Bono with him.”

A musical? I must admit that I’ve never seen one of Julie Taymor’s productions, but did she read Spider-Man when she was a kid?

SustainLane.us, “the largest community-powered directory of green products and businesses and user reviews,” recently rated Oakland, California, the top city in the US that “provide(s) citizens with the highest percentage of power produced from renewable energy…”

“SustainLane Government determined the percentage of each city’s electricity that comes from renewables such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro energy.”

That’s great positive news for Oakland, my hometown.

If you’re a geek, you probably know how to use the command line interface. This is the way it used to be prior to the GUI (graphical user interface). Most real CLIs don’t work with a mouse, you just type text into the computer. Try it here (you can use your mouse for some things with this version).

kukukuan has written a WordPress plugin (so I don’t have to manually change the code in CLI 2.3) that allows readers of this blog to use a command line interface using Rod McFarland’s CLI 2.3 WordPress theme.