About 2 weeks ago my HTC Evo Shift 4G slipped out of a pocket and landed face-down on a concrete slab.*  Now for a full-size droid with some heft to it, this has been a pretty hardy smartphone and I’ve been really happy with its durability and performance — but the concrete was just too much for this little trooper.  As you can see from the first slide, the glass was literally crushed (but held together rather well by whatever enamel coating they use - it’s tough stuff and there were no cuts or shards)

Panic only set in for about 10 seconds, until I remembered having purchased the $8/mo Sprint Total Protection Plan when I picked it up from the Pentagon City Sprint Store about a year ago.  As you can likely guess, the scenario of breezing into the Sprint Store and walking out with a new phone was an endearing fantasy.  In real life, the words Total, Protection and Plan have very little relation to one another, and especially in conjunction.  What I did receive was a business card with the number of an insurance agency that would gladly issue me a not-too-badly-used refurbished model for the low, low price of $100.

Undaunted, a quick Google search brought me to this fantastic distributor of mobile replacement parts, RepairsUniverse.  The simple-to-follow Take-Apart Video convinced me I could make the repair myself — For $50 I purchased a complete kit including a replacement touchscreen digitizer, adhesive strips, and torx/phillips/safe-pry tools.  

As you can see from the slideshow, the replacement procedure was easy to follow, and successful - but did require a little extra elbow grease and improvisation once I got inside the case.  In particular:

1. (4:05) These tiny ribbon cables are even tinier in real life than they appear in the video!  Have some tweezers on hand (preferably dull ones).   The model I have also had some tan-colored adhesive tape covering and fastening the ribbons to the clips — just get in there and (gently) peel them back before attempting to remove the cables.

2. (4:40) The flexcable has some mild adhesive attaching it to the back of the LCD screen.  It comes off readily, but does not re-adhere quite as well.   Since this is in an area that comes in contact with the slider mechanism, I covered these with a little scotch tape upon reassembly (hey, NASA runs on duct tape!).

3. (5:05) The video misses a key step here when removing the second flexcable.  This flexcable includes a ribbon that needs to be removed from a clip at the top of the phone (same concept as #1 above). My model’s cable was also shaped differently, requiring it to fold back over to reach the clip — I was concerned this might damage the ribbon and so took extra care to treat it gently — so far, so good..

4. (5:30) This is the elbow grease part.  That glass does not come out easily even if you heat-gun it.  Don’t be afraid to manhandle it a little to get it out - that enamel coating on the glass (even crushed glass) is tough as nails, it won’t rip.  Once it’s out, a fair amount of heat-gunning and scraping will be required to remove all the adhesive remnants from around the edges of the frame. (The included easy-pry tool makes a fantastic scraper, and the plastic won’t damage the metal frame.)

5. When you’re cutting strips of replacement adhesive, get creative and try and cover as much of those curvy little spaces (and in between the button detectors) as possible for a good, moisture-proof fit.

It’s a little bit of grunt work there at the end, but the result is quite satisfying —  almost as satisfying as cancelling your Sprint Total Protection Plan!   :)  

* Names have been redacted to protect the guilty parties :)    

This is why I love coding

Ask a good question, and 1 hour later… 

http://ci.milkbowl.net/job/Heroes/1363/

Bam! Done!

Grinding..

No updates in awhile — still here, just going through one of those ‘grinding out the work’ phases .. 

About two months ago the kids and I started getting into Minecraft.  In addition to being a lot of fun it’s a great platform to start learning about basic game design, online community building/management, and programming..  

Here are some screenshots of our own multiplayer server under construction — private and invite-only at the moment, but the plan is to take it public in the coming months.  

We started out whiteboarding the overall concept for a family-friendly, user-friendly (but still fun) experience that serves a particular audience .. we’re doing a fair amount of playtesting on other servers to figure out what works, what doesn’t, what features are popular, and making adjustments as we go along.  Together we’ve installed, configured (and often discarded) a number of plugins that handle chat, PVP, economy, community, towns and factions, world-editing and security, etc.  

In addition to getting out the grid paper and playing with creative mode and redstone circuits, the kids have been learning basic command-line instructions to the server in linux, using FTP, and setting permissions/config files in YML.  As we go along they’ll be doing more and more of the maintenance and coding themselves..

In their online adventures the kids have also been making some cool friends with building skills ..  we’ve made liamp2001 a builder/admin on the world and he’s been bringing some awesome concepts including a waterpark, spleef arena, and our first real Town.. 

Anyhow, check out the slideshow!   More to come soon.  

USING YOUR GOOGLE APPS DOMAIN FOR ZENDESK EMAILS

Thanks to @__chrismc, got my zendesk and google apps email working together nicely!

Yelping with Cormac: Jamba Juice

yelpingwithcormac:

Financial District - San Francisco, CA

Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Three stars.

I’ll have another, he said.

The clerk wiped down the counter and would not look at him. We’re not supposed to give customers more than three guarana boosts, he said.

I aint askin.

The clerk…

Source: yelpingwithcormac

Learn. Do. Teach. Repeat.

superpop playlist

Fire up Outlook/Google Apps emails quickly for multiple accounts (finally!)

In my consulting work I find myself managing several email accounts, each tied to an individual client or project.     Setting up my Google Apps account to manage all these is simple enough - but I also use Outlook 2010 (with Google Apps Sync) as the front-end so I have a decent GUI to manage my calendar, email and GTD/tasks system.

The one thing that’s been driving me to distraction is the inability to have a quick and easy way to create a new Outlook email that’s automatically tied to one of my outgoing email accounts.

[Yes, it’s possible to select the appropriate account using the “From..” button with each new email, but with the volume of work I do, that’s just impractical and prone to ‘accidents’ .. nothing more embarrassing than sending client emails from other client’s domains :) ]

What I really need is a button for each account that fires up a new email.   I know how to customize the toolbar, and how to link a new button to a macro.  Easy enough - but the only solution I found out there didn’t quite do the trick:

Sub SentAccountone()
    Dim msg As Outlook.MailItem
    Set msg = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
    msg.SendUsingAccount = Application.Session.Accounts(1)
    msg.Display
End Sub

Sub SentAccounttwo()
    Dim msg As Outlook.MailItem
    Set msg = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
    msg.SendUsingAccount = Application.Session.Accounts(2)
    msg.Display
End Sub

…

With 5 email accounts being managed simultaneously, this elegant little solution actually unearthed a bug (whether Outlook or Google Apps Sync is to blame is unknown) ..  Each time Outlook loads, the Application.Sesson.Accounts settings are jumbled in a manner utterly unpredictable.  

This threw me for a couple of days, until I came up with this rather simple solution:

Sub SendAccountone()
 Dim oAccount As Outlook.account
 For Each oAccount In Application.Session.Accounts
  If oAccount.DisplayName = "Google Apps - name@domain.com" Then
   Dim oMail As Outlook.MailItem
   Set oMail = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
   oMail.SendUsingAccount = oAccount
  oMail.Display
  End If
 Next
End Sub

Which works like a charm.   Just create a subroutine for each managed account, and be sure to define DisplayName accurately (here’s a handy macro that will tell you all you need to know about your account properties), and you’re off to the races!