About a week ago I linked to a video called the secret powers of time, here’s another from the RSA series titled Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us by Dan Pink. Another really interesting 10 minute look at the psychology that drives us.
I’m starting to become addicted to this series.
There’s been various reports of poor battery life in particular with the iPhone 3G and iOS 4. After updating I noticed battery life was reduced for my phone, but not as bad as many others were reporting (I’d say a ~15% reduction in battery life). I did however find what appears to be a fix. It’s quite simple actually.
Plug in your iPhone 3G either to the wall charger or your computer’s USB port and let it charge while on for several hours (overnight should be cool). Power down your phone, then turn it back on. For me this brought the phone’s battery life back to where it was before the update.
Why does this fix work? I’m not sure but I do have a theory. It appears when the OS was upgraded your spotlight database needed to be updated. This requires indexing all the data on your phone. Needless to say all this effort kills your battery. Apple must have some algorithm in place to do this work and preserve battery life but it obviously changed between iOS 3 and iOS 4. By leaving it plugged in it appears to complete the process and by restarting it will make sure that any hanging process on your phone is killed and memory fragmentation is cleaned up. iOS 4 runs tight, swapping kills performance and battery life. This also seems to help performance as my phone doesn’t lag as much anymore (though it’s hardly a speedster like the iPhone 4). It also explains why some people would see different levels of the problem as it would depend on how much you have to index.
Let me know if this fix works for you.
iFixIt has their traditional teardown posted. After analyzing every picture, a few things are noteworthy:
The stainless steel antenna strikes me as more than just an antenna, but Apple will never admit it. The iPhones before all suffered from the same structural weakness. If dropped so that it lands on a corner or a side, the body flexed putting pressure on the glass and possibly digitizer if the impact was strong enough. This resulted in the shattered glass you sometimes see people walking around with. If the phones land on their backs or faces, they are often fine minus a tiny scratch or two. This is because the sides of earlier models were not very strong. The metal band you see on the earlier models isn’t enough to hold up to the force of a drop from 5 feet. It was a thin piece of stainless steel around what is otherwise plastic. Most of the metal in the previous phones are actually thin EMF shields, not anything structural.
I suspect this new frame also serves to strengthen the phone and prevent this type of damage.
The previous iPhones pretty much just had a large EMF shield like we see in most consumer appliances. The new iPhone has a bunch of tiny EMF shields. The advantage to this approach is that they can cram more things into small nooks and crannies. Apple is clearly desperate for every nanometer of space they can get.
Nothing inside circuitry wise is even remotely surprising. Samsung flash memory, Broadcom WiFi, Bluetooth (BCM4329), Cirrus Logic audio codec, TriQuint/Skyworks GSM/GPRS chipset, STMicro accelerometer. The new gyroscope is suspected to be STMicro, which isn’t shocking. There is a Broadcom GPS (BCM4750) chip, same as the iPad. Prior to the iPad, the iPhone 3G and 3GS used an Infineon Hammerhead GPS chip which was questionable in performance. Perhaps this will finally give the performance necessary for eventually making turn by turn directions a reality.
It’s becoming clear looking at the iPhone 4 that Apple made the right decision to make the battery non-removable. The hardware and extra material to make it removable would have really bulked up the phone. At this point the battery is by far the biggest single space consumer in the iPhone. Look how dense the circuitry for the phone is in comparison to the hulk sized battery. Apple crammed what a few years ago was a full PC into that sliver on the side of the phone. The rest is largely the battery with glass and LCD in front and various speakers, microphones, cameras and sensors mixed in the otherwise empty nooks.
Apple really needs to find a technology that can offer a higher power density ratio for the iPhone to get any lighter or longer battery life. Custom silicon will help them, but it’s only going to go so far and so fast. It’s becoming obvious that power is a major concern and limitation for Apple engineers. I suspect Apple spends a ton of R&D time and money trying to figure out how to deal with this limitation the best they can from the physical space requirements to power efficiency and software innovations.
Don’t be shocked if Apple either invests or just acquires a company who is doing something interesting in the battery space just like they picked up P.A Semi.
Apple hasn’t published their environmental report yet on the iPhone 4. I’m curious how the greenhouse gas emissions changed between the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. Several things have changed about its composition including the glass and steel frame that should make it interesting. The iPad’s slightly different (and larger) power adapter boasts an 80% efficiency rating. The iPhone 3GS is only in the 70% range. I’m curious if Apple quietly updated the adapter at all or not (I suspect not, but it’s possible).
Image courtesy iFixIt
Those from my generation will obviously remember The Goonies. For those who aren’t, you should know it is still occasionally shown on cable TV. Apparently they did a 25th anniversary reunion. As a bonus some cut scenes are coming out, including one with this terrible mechanical octopus.
I’m glad that never made the final cut.
Professor Philip Zimbardo on how your perspective of time impacts pretty much everything in life and how it’s fundamentally changing thanks to technology. There’s been a lot of talk about this lately.
I guess this is pretty much the idea behind his book The Time Paradox. I guess I should add that to my list of books to read if I can ironically ever find the time.
Several months ago I was looking for a good way to monitor not just my server, but the actual services on the server. Just responding to a ping doesn’t mean everything is OK. As the old saying goes “if you can’t find it, build it”. The result of this is a little project called It’s All Good.
At its core it’s a light framework for checking various aspects of a server and deciding if things are operating within defined parameters or not. So far it has “out of the box” support for:
Like I said, it’s just a framework, so adding other checks are relatively easy. There’s lots more I want to include (memory, disk IO, process monitor for example). It’s designed to monitor the host, not a series of servers (though technically doable). This isn’t Nagios, it’s a way to get a quick glance at your key services on a host.
On its own it doesn’t send any notifications. It’s designed to be combined with the keyword monitoring feature of services like Pingdom, Monitis, Host-Tracker, SiteUptime, or Howsthe.com among others. This way you not only check services, but the server itself. If anything fails, you will be notified by your monitoring provider.
It’s All Good also has a UI for an admin to view which can give you the status and a basic rundown of its polling data. It’s also designed to so that it’s pretty easy to read on mobile devices like the iPhone, making it a great dashboard for on the go.
Lastly it’s designed to be pretty light and quick, so unless you are monitoring a ton of things on your server, it shouldn’t have any real overhead.
So far I’ve only implemented real support for the checks for Linux. I suspect most will work on BSD, and Darwin (though not all). Windows still needs some help. Patches are welcome. I’d also like to support things like IP whitelist/blacklists (automated via RSS fetches), and lots of modules to extend what it can keep track of.
Licensed GPL v2.
There has been some ongoing debate the past few days about if Apple’s new Retina display is really better than the human eye can detect. Some have even gone as far as calling it false marketing.
Phil Plait, whose background includes calibrating a camera on board Hubble wrote a really great blog post that sides with Apple. I’ve been a fan of Phil’s blog for some time and remember when our websites were hosted by the same provider many years ago. It’s not too math heavy, and as always he does a great job explaining everything. Totally worth reading.
Essentially if you had absolutely perfect eyesight, which almost nobody has, you’d still see pixels, but again virtually nobody does. People will still make silly claims, but remember there are audiophiles who claim they can hear subtle differences that $10,000 worth of scientific equipment can’t detect. Despite humans having worse hearing than a dog, who can’t hear what the equipment can pick up not to mention them being older. So I’d take those claims with a grain of salt.
Jabra, the company known for their mobile headset did an interesting survey of driving distractions. We’ve all seen a ton of these in the media over the years, generally we know that pretty much everyone eats at least occasionally while driving (72%). We also know people talk on the phone. We know some even text while driving (28%). Some even play video games (5%). The winner however is this little gem:
29% of respondents admitted to kissing others while driving, whereas a smaller, but surprising number (15%) said they’ve performed sex or other sexual acts while driving.
How about a public safety campaign to help bring this closer to the number playing video games (5%). I propose the following slogan: “Pull over before you pull it out.” Poster designs welcome.
Here are my general thoughts on the iPhone 4 since the announcement. Hopefully I’ll be able to check one out in the store soon enough.
iPhone 4 photo courtesy Apple Inc.
Back in December a Firefox was featured on Bing. They did another one today:
