Iphone Home button

Iphone users can tell you how important the home button on the phone is. Time and again it goes out of calibration (it did it twice for me in last year and half). In my case It got so bad that some times I had to click multiple times before the click got recognized and the ,more frustrating the behavior was random for it sometimes would treat multiple clicks as multiple clicks itself. I would have taken it to the Apple’s Genius bar but the phone was out of warranty. 

While looking for solution on the web, I came across a simple one. The solution was to turn off the phone and stick a vacuum cleaner or an air blower to the place where stick the charger. Since I had nothing to lose, I decided to give it a shot. Instead of air blower, I used the vacuum cleaner and vola it fixed the problem.

I have repeated this step twice so far and have gotten good results both times, so give it a shot before tearing apart the phone or driving up to the genius bar.   

ps: There is one more software solution, I came across. I haven’t tried to see if this works, but you could try.  

Kids and hi-tech gadgets

We usually let our daughter play around with some of the hi-tech gadgets at home (TV, computer, Iphone, Ipod and so on) but do it under fairly close supervision. The reason is 2 fold, on 1 hand if she can break the system then it is not worth to be around her and on the other if at all there are a few things she manages to change and make it unusable there is always Dr. Google to help us bring things back to shape.

Surprisingly, there is a 3rd reason too. Thanks to her and her out of the box thinking, I have learnt a new thing or 2. For ex: I was not aware that my Samsung TV had something called “Store Demo” mode which can be turned on by clicking a few buttons in the front of the TV. In this mode the TV over rides any display settings you have and shows pictures in high brightness with 100% contrast, of course can’t watch for too long in that mode and since I am not that as savvy with the buttons as her I had to use the graphical UI to debug the problem. On the other occasion after she had played around with my computer keyboard, all it was doing was to print special characters and upper case letters only, this time around the fix was to ask Dr. Google and solution was to hold both “shift” keys simultaneously for a few seconds. My favorite is when she showed us that Windows 7 allows for screen to be oriented in 4 different ways (landscape, portrait, straight and reverse) and that the DELL laptops have a keyboard shortcut to achieve the same (CTRL+ALT+ Arrow key). 

The one equipment/gadget I am scared to let her play around is the IPhone, for its easy to use interface is so easy that she has accidentally deleted couple of pics and videos recorded on the phone. Of course that hasn’t stopped me from letting her play with it, I am more careful with her around. There is another side effect of letting her play with the Iphone, she thinks any screen of that size (like the camera) is touch sensitive and she can can go to the next pic or video by just moving her fingers across the screen.

I don’t know how long we can let her play for she is getting bigger and stronger and now getting in the mode of learning to throw things.