iPhone troubles

Don't be afraid of messing with your phone. The legendary WKRP's "Phone Cops" need not be feared.

As of late, I have been noticing that my iPhone 3GS has been having a really short battery life. I would charge it overnight, put it in my pocket in the morning, and by 6 PM would be down to about 20%.

I know that rechargables lose life over time, and my phone will be two years old come July, but this seemed a little extreme. I would hardly use the phone during the day, if at all, and experience significant battery drain. Something else was going on.

I tried deleting apps that I had recently installed, thinking that they were sucking the battery dry, particularly the Denon and Peanut apps. No change in battery life.

And then, a few days ago, I accidentally dropped my phone. HARD. It fell from the kitchen counter to the hardwood floor, a distance of about three feet. I cursed, because I treat my expensive stuff like it is expensive, which it is. Unlike people I know that think nothing of dropping their phones or iPods in the toilet and complaining that they don't work any more. "Apple builds sh*t!", they would claim. But that's a subject for another blog post.

After the drop, the display would say "No Service". I couldn't make calls, and couldn't get texts, though I could access WiFi without problem. BlueTooth worked as well. I basically had an iPod Touch, but with a really short battery life. Now, to be honest, this wasn't the first time I had dropped my iPhone, but the drops were "gentle", as from the seat of a sofa to a carpeted floor. Not good for it to be sure, but nothing I would think to be fatal, either.

After the hard drop, battery life dropped faster than ever. I tried resetting the phone in software as found on several websites. No joy to be found there, either.

After perusing the net about this problem, I grew some cojones and decided to try opening up my phone, thinking that I had broken the cell antenna in the drop. Replacing the antenna/dock module seemed to be a routine remedy for this situation. A friend had an iPhone with a broken display that he offered to me for parts. Very kind of him. (Thanks, Robbie!)

I'd never opened a cell phone before, but I found it's not hard to do. On the 3GS, it involves removing just two miniscule screws (using a Phillips #00 screwdriver, available at your local Sears or big-box retail hardware store) and a suction cup, similar to one of those to hang chotchkes on glass windows. The rest is mostly undoing snap-together connections. But be warned, these components are extremely tiny and hard to work with even if you have slim fingers. I followed the instructions at ifixit.com, which is a great resource for a lot of electronic woes.

My problem turned out to be that connector #7 had come loose (the connectors inside the iPhone are marked with orange numbered labels), most likely completely becoming separated in the last drop incident. It had probably begun to to work loose (causing rapid battery drain) in earlier drops, and the drop to the kitchen floor finished it off.

Five minutes of futzing to reconnect the wire, and battery life is back to normal!

EDIT June 10. 2011: It's been quite some time since (almost 2 weeks) since I opened my iPhone and checked the antenna lead. So far, my phone feels new again, at least as far as battery life goes.

Technology: Massive Fail or Just a Screwup?

I went to the dentist this morning. The tech, who I have been seeing for years, and who I thought was familiar with my history, asked me:

"Have you been taking your anti-biotics?"

I replied, "I didn't know I was supposed to be taking anti-biotics."

She: "Our records show that you have an artificial heart valve."

Me: "Unless you put one in at my last appointment or aliens abducted me and implanted one, I don't remember ever having heart surgery. I think I might remember that."

I thought it was amusing this morning. Now I am not so amused. Has my health care record been corrupted, either accidentally or intentionally? How in the hell do you find out?

Will this mis-information propagate to an extent to some point in the future where I might be denied coverage due to erroneous information, or be mis-diagnosed?

I can imagine a future scenario in a hospital: "Hey, his records indicate that this guy has an artificial heart valve. It might be failing. Let's replace it with a new one."

Photojournalists killed in Libya

War is stupid and useless. Especially when it takes the lives of non-combatants working to tell the tale to the outside world.

Laughable news!

Supermarket tabloid Weekly World News today posted about an upcoming shutdown of Facebook:

http://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/27321/facebook-will-end-on-march-15th/


Like the young whippersnappers say, "As if! Duh!"

Let's face(book) it: There is no logical reason right now that Zuckerberg would shut down Facebook.

Normally, I wouldn't post much - if anything - about Facebook here. Though I have an account there, I rarely check it, and I have misgivings about FB's privacy policies, anyway.

I found out about this link through my daily checking of one of my favorite sites, Snopes.com. I find it funny that a rumor-clarifying site had the news of the hoax so early in the news cycle.

iOS 4.1 to have HDR capability

Of all of Apple's announcements today, the one that has me stoked is the capability to do HDR photos on the iPhone, with the upcoming iOS 4.1 update, which may be as soon as next week. Cool!

New features of iOS 4.1 at Apple's site

Edit: Bummer. Apple has decided that HDR is only worthy of the iPhone 4, though technically my 3GS is supposedly capable of it if I were to jailbreak it or buy an application to do it. Since I don't want to do either of those things, I guess I'll have to be happy doing HDR photos with a real camera and not a teeny-tiny, crappy cellphone sensor shooting through a smeary, fingerprint-covered plastic lens cover.

Tamron Giving Away 60 Lenses

Tamron is giving away 60 lenses, one a day for 60 days. All you need to do is sign up for their enewsletter. Tamron's site.

I have had and still have some Tamron lenses. They are a great value and nicely built.

Bitten by the Bug

I decided that I just had to have an SX-70, partially out of nostalgia, but mostly because they are such a fine piece of industrial engineering.

When I was a kid, my parents had a white SX-70, probably around 1975 or so. My Dad bought it for my Mom for Christmas, I think. I loved the mechanics of it, and would play with it for hours, opening and closing it, watching how it folded up. I never got to shoot many pictures with it, though.

I set out to buy a single SX-70. I ended up with two.



I found Marty Kuhn's comprehensive Polaroid site The Land List, which was very helpful.

I had no idea that there were so many variants of the SX-70, or that it had been produced and sold as late as the 1990's. Prior to finding the Land List, I had only known of three types: The original silver one, the white one my parents owned (now I know it was a Model 2), and the one with the sonar auto-focus system.

Yes! Sound waves focusing your camera! I know it sounds weird today, with just about every camera having computer-controlled auto-focus as standard equipment, but back then it was pretty slick. And it was successful, as Polaroid went on to produce many cameras with the sonar focusing system for several years.

The Land List helped me eliminate what I did not want to buy, such as the very odd Model 3, which has all the mirrors and motors as a regular SX-70 SLR, but has an optical viewfinder. I can't imagine what possessed Polaroid to produce this model. But then again, Polaroid's industrial design philosophy had never strayed anywhere near the conventional.

Of course, I did what everyone does when they are looking for used cameras: Go to eBay. That was a bag of pain, as the selection was low and the prices were high. This is probably due in part because The Impossible Project has renewed general interest in Polaroids, I suppose. Just look at me and why I'm writing this post.

I looked around on Craigslist and found a fellow photographer, Brad Smith, that had four SX-70s listed for sale. Brad was a really nice guy, letting me fiddle with the cameras all I wanted. By the time I got in touch with him, he had already sold one of the SX-70s, but still had one of the original silver models with brown "Porvair" (a vinyl, leather-looking substance) models, and a couple of black-on-black SX-70 Alphas. I bought the original silver and the black Alpha SE from him. Except for the decaying black leatherette on the Alpha SE, both cameras were in good shape, with the original silver model being in very good to excellent condition.

So why did I buy the second one, the Alpha SE? Initially, I was thinking I would use it for parts if the silver one needed repair. The differences, I thought, would be fairly slight, and it would be easy to scavenge from the Alpha to repair the other camera, if need be. Also, one could be a guinea pig for experiments for mods, should I decide to do any. Such as hooking modern strobes to it.

An aside: By the way, Brad is cleaning out his equipment, and he has a lot of it, judging by what I saw. If you are interested in older film equipment from cameras to enlargers and other darkroom equipment, you might want to contact him, either by looking him up on Craigslist DC or sending me an email and I'll put you in touch with him. He asked me to pass along anyone interested in film-based equipment.

I took my new babies home and cleaned them up a little. For cameras that are 35 years old, they have been given amazing care. I ran a search on the serial numbers of each camera on the nifty Land List serial number lookup tool, and got this info back:



For the black-on-black Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera Alpha SE

Your camera has the Alpha 1 shutter design with the "hybrid" focus wheel.
Your camera is probably an SX-70 model 2 or Alpha 2.
Your camera was made on December 6, 1976 during the A shift.

...and…




For the original "stainless steel" Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera:
Your camera has the original SX-70 shutter electronic design ("hybrid shutter").
Your camera is probably an original SX-70 or Alpha / Alpha 1.
Your camera was made on July 5, 1974 during the B shift.

You might wonder why I put "stainless steel" in quotes just then. The original SX-70s were not metal at all. Actually, like all subsequent models, they had plastic bodies, with the original model having some very heavy, high-quality metal coating applied. The metal coating was so well done that some people swear that their SX-70 is made of brushed stainless steel, which is not the case at all. The white Model 2 and the black Alphas reveal the actual plastic construction of all SX-70s.

Next, I looked for the user manual for the SX-70, in case I had forgotten anything since my experiences with my parents' SX-70 as a child. Turns out, I had mentally filed away all I ever needed to know about this camera in order to use it. While SX-70s are extraordinarily technically complex machines, and doubly so due to their folding capability, from a user standpoint, they are very easy to use.

While searching, I did find a part of the instructions on focusing the camera that no longer has a current frame of reference. Over on this site, you can find a scan of the original SX-70 instructions, with this to say:

"Focusing is like tuning [a] radio or TV set to get best reception. Turn slightly past perfect setting once or twice to be sure you have found it."

Wow, I had forgotten about the "fine tuning" knob on my parents' old TV until I read that. Another tiny thing eliminated by the Digital Revolution.