Month: June 2012

I cracked my iPhone 4 glass pretty badly a couple weeks ago at the playground and while I tried to live with it, the cracks were getting worse and glass chunks were starting to come off. Not good.

I decided to go the DIY route and fix it myself. There is a lot of misinformation out there so hopefully I can bring a little bit of clarity to the subject.

If you are going to replace the glass you have to replace the digitizer and the screen at the same time as they are all one piece bonded together. This makes it a little scary since we all know that a big part of what makes the iphone 4 a nice phone is the nice screen.

This is the kit I went with: Apple Iphone 4 4g (AT&T) Black Screen Glass Replacement Digitizer with Frame + LCD Assembly + 6 Piece Tool Kit

Apparently in the iPhone 4, you need to purchase the CDMA (Verizon) or GSM (AT&T) version separately, but the 4S they are the same.

There are no instructions that come with these things, so you need to go watch YouTube videos. I went with the Zeetroninc version. There are two parts to the video, about 20 minutes total.

Actually making the repair took me about 90 minutes of start/stopping work. There are a ton of tiny tiny screws all with varying degrees of tininess, so it is super important to be organized. I took little white notecards and drew the locations of the screws and placed them on the paper when I removed them so I would know how they all go back in. This step is pretty much essential or you’ll get confused incredibly easily.

One thing I wish I had done was ordered a replacement battery at the same time, since in order to replace the screen the battery needs to come out too. Just replacing the battery would not have been very difficult if you had the right star bit screwdriver (included in my kit) for the bottom screws, so if your battery isn’t doing as well as it used to and you are comfortable voiding your warrantee, I’d say go for it.

The last thing to note is that my kit didn’t include a screen for the earpiece and you have to use the one from the broken glass and move it over. I forgot this part, oops.

The best news of all is that now that it is fixed, my phone’s home button is working much better than it was and the overall snappiness of the phone has improved. I suspect that when you do a shutdown of the phone, it doesn’t really shut all the way down, but when you remove the battery it is forced to start up fresh. Just guessing.

Follow @coreyh

First off, I’ve been loyal to Tweetdeck for a few years now and every time I use the main website “in a pinch” I feel like there’s no way I’d use Twitter as much as I do if there were no third party apps.

The layout I’ve gotten used to in Tweetdeck looks like this:

TOP – Home – Search:RecordSetter – Activity – F1 – Interactions

• TOP is a custom, private list I created that has my top 20 or so people in it. I don’t read every single thing here, but I try to stay mostly up to date. Folks here include: @snerko (business partner), @ewrun (wife), @kenjennings, @shalenseman, @codinghorror, @michaelianblack, @malecopywriter, @sacca, @cdixon, @cshirky
• Home is my actual feed. As of this writing I follow 594 people. A lot of those are dormant and I could clean it up, but why bother? I don’t even try to read all of this. For the most part, I don’t even scroll this list beyond what I can see on my screen. I don’t make it a habit to keep Tweetdeck open either, even though I have enough screen real estate that I could because it updates so frequently that the motion is enough to be entirely too distracting.
• Search:RecordSetter – keeping tabs on what is going on with my company RecordSetter.com. Fortunately our name has low non-related noise. Maybe once a day someone will tweet something like “just showered in 2 minutes #recordsetter” but it is not enough to be a problem.
• Activity – This is pretty noisy, but I find some gems in here in the form of people favoriting tweets that are relevant or funny to me. I’ve been finding lots of interesting new people to follow this way.
• F1 – a list of Formula One personalities. I almost always watch F1 races a few days delayed via DVR, so on race weekends, I’m very cautious about what I look at on Twitter. Frankly it is a healthy break from being tuned in all the time.
• Interactions – when people tweet at me, etc.