water filled iphone recovery

Having just recovered the MacBook Pro that was inadvertently filled with water, it's time to move onto the equivalent iPhone. This one fell into the loo, which apparently is a more common situation than one might imagine.

The rescued dead phone was handed to me to fix. The basics are:

1) Power it off by holding down the power and front buttons for 4 seconds.
2) Remove the SIM, so that more air can get inside.
3) Put it in a ziploc bag of uncooked rice.
4) Place it on a warm to hot radiator.

The 'power it' off step is slightly futile, because if it was on when it hit water any shorting out will have already occurred. The remove SIM is mainly because the space created improves airflow. The rice is something that readily absorbs water, like those little bags of silica gel sometimes in the packaging of electronic devices. The radiator is to heat up the innards and hopefully assist recovery.

Leave 24 hours and it should all be back to normal.

If it doesn't recover, there's still a good chance that the iPhone will be readable in iTunes. That's because the screen is the most likely piece to fail, which doesn't affect the rest of the operation of the device. If so, back it up - it can be recovered to another device.

In this case, normal service has been resumed.

wired again

I've been playing around with some of that personal area network software over the last few days. The kind that runs at a very local (body) level. Its really an extension of the cycle iPhone applications and I've been interested to see what is available for a few quid that boosts insight and maybe works with stuff I already own.

My old Polar Heart Rate Monitor is an example, as is the cadence detector and wireless speedometer on my hybrid bike. Add the GPS detectors from the iPhone, plus maybe a digital blood pressure reading and there's a lot of data available which can be fed through into the SportsTrackLive type of applications.

Maybe the embedded skinplex system and 6LowPAN options need to be ruled out at the moment; suitable for arctic predator monitoring but it involves physically implanting chips - I'll only do that in combination with a fish supper.

Wireless Body Area Networks(WBAN) running at 10 to 20 Mb per second are already faster than the design of early 2000 office networks. Thoughtfully, FCC Part15.209 has drafted radiated emission limits to stop us all from overheating with this stuff.

However, I suspect this technology will diffuse into the next generation of iPhones and similar. The ant + technology is -er- small and embeddable into the various monitors to then commune with items like gym equipment to track personal readouts.

Plus the emerging generation of applications like iBike Dash and iBiker , which will look so much neater with the receivers embedded like Bluetooth.

I shall be "monitoring" this body of work.

cycle rides with cyclemeter and sportstracklive

Since I discovered the superb Cyclemeter application which runs on the iPhone, I've been using it when I take the bike out. It's quite handy, because I just switch it on then use the 'off' switch on the iPhone and throw it into the backpack. It keeps a GPS track of movement, speed, altitude, location and plots it into kilometre or mile timings for a route. It even has a go at calculating calories. The recent update also deducts 'stopped time' which is useful as I sometimes switch it on when I'm making a cup of tea before a bike ride or similar.

Cyclemeter has its own application for recording the rides back to the internet, and it's just necessary to sync it every so often. This provides a useful map and various timing information about the ride, and its good fun to retrace it on Google maps and to use the mapping to decide possible extensions.

I then discovered sportstracklive a few days ago, which will happily upload the iPhone file generated by Cyclemeter.

The additional information provided in sportstracklive is mainly some statistics about 'personal best' and similar, as well as a splits by kilometre/mile and an equivalent mapping function.

Sportstracklive also adds a replay function, where you can watch a course thats been cycles/run/walked etc as it replays at an animated speed. Again useful for adding sections or options to a route. The same mapping can be used with the 'personal bests' so its possible to zoom into the map where they occur and to think about whether to do those sections faster.

Those that have read my previous posts around bicycling will see that I stop to look around and take the occasional photo as well, so I don't think I'll be turning in wildly amazing times, but its still fun to have this form of telemetry by just throwing the phone into the backpack. Oh and it works for walking, running etc as well, each of which can be separately classified.

cyclemeter GPS track experiment

A little experiment today, using one of the iPhone GPS trackers whilst I took a short spin around part of tourist London.

I was really more interested in how the Cyclemeter iPhone software drew the route rather than exactly where I travelled. The phone was thrown into my backpack amongst car keys and various other electronic miscellanea, so GPS reception was far from ideal.

My start was by The Navigator in Belgrave Square and then out towards the eastern extension of King's Road before heading towards Westminster Abbey with views of Parliament, Big Ben the Eye and then around the back of Downing Street and past the Spitfire parked on the pavement.

The Mall is currently closed to traffic giving an easy run to Buckingham Palace which I did twice because it was quite fun zipping along such a deserted street, except for the roadblock quantities of tourists taking photos. Back past a busy Victoria station and then through a few twists around Eaton Square and back to where I started.

Only a few miles, mainly flat with thousands of tourist spots. A good example of how one of the London hire bikes could do simple sight-seeing in a matter of minutes.

Okay, so the map isn't perfect, but its not bad, and sufficiently good for anyone to be able to work out the route.

And, alright, I'll admit I was using my own bike today, but I did have to pump one of the tyres before I could start.

London Cycle : Maps and Routes

I wondered whether there would be any iPhone applications to support the new London Cycle Hire scheme and it turns out there's already about half a dozen. I plumped for the first one I spotted, but actually it didn't work very well, so I then decided to read a couple of the reviews.

The one called London Cycle: Maps and Routes seems to work well and has quite a few features such as a live map of the docking stations and numbers of bikes available, a route planner and even estimated times for journeys. There's also a countdown timer to show how much time left in the 'free' period.


The application also looks useful for general surface route planning, whether using a hire cycle or not. I'm guessing that these applications will eventually overlap with the ones that provide information about pubs, coffee shops and train stations. Otherwise I'll need a whole page for all of the iPhone travel in London applications.

But I'm not complaining, and - guess what? - the application is free.

iSlate

We received some secret samples of the still in development handheld graphically enabled PDA with built in memory, text and reader support. They appeared from within innovative packaging akin to tinsel covered crackers. Along with a supply of apples and peppermints, we took them for a test run today.

There were a few teething troubles, mainly because of the ability to fold the device, and then to find new lines appearing in the text.

This would be okay for a mystery novel, but less so for a more factual account. It may rekindle writing ideas for some, but we wondered if a more permanent form of memory might be better, perhaps supplied in larger quantities. We hear the code name for these under development memory units is 'Pages'.

time to use the iPhone pub detector

We are using the iPhone pub detector this evening to select a venue.

It doesn't tell you how good the pub is, but it does tell you where the nearest ones are. It seems like a fun thing to have on a phone, but then I also have the Star Wars light sabre module which glows and makes all kinds of laser beam swooshing sounds when you move the phone around.

My low serial number iPhone is one of the original ones with the aluminium back, but on the whole, around London, I don't notice the lack of 3G because of the pervasive wi-fi.

Another £1.59 well spent was the GPS Motion-X software which lets the phone run as a GPS tracker, similar to a Garmin unit. Of course, the built-in Google maps does that as well- eerily telling me exactly where I am when I think I'm lost, but the Motion-X creates a waypoint database, which is sort of handy for photography for recording where & when. It can run in automatic mode or you can save waypoints at will, as well as exporting them as pins onto Google maps.

But now, off to GPS reference 51.512668,-0.13168 the pub.


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maximum exposure

I was reading Maximum Bob's adventures after he added a snake picture to his site which created a stir of extra hits a couple of days ago.

"Johanna Cardona!", I thought, "I'd better Skype a few myspace and facebook friends in case they've had similar experiences on google when talking about Ron Paul, Galilea Montijo from Big Brother in Mexico or any UK soccer WAG scandals and gossip.

I suppose my previous posts about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and even the occasional references I make to YouTube inadvertantly add to search hits of dreamhost viewers everywhere. But then I noticed the "skype down" message and as I don't have an iPhone, blogging about it became the solution.

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