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my name is michael ciccarelli and i'm a web designer & developer out of buffalo, ny. currently available for freelance and other opportunities.

Archive for March, 2008

Tips to fix your soaked cell phone

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Since I’ve been talking a lot about cell phones lately I figured I’d share some knowledge I gave to a co-worker that saved her Blackberry the other day. I got a call on Monday from Kristen, She apparently had dropped her Blackberry in the bath tub while it was filling with water. The Cellphone was lifeless with no display or LED lights.

I instructed her to remove the battery asap, and use a blow dryer on both the device and battery until they were dry. After doing this for a few minutes, she put the battery back in her phone, tried to power it on and nothing happened, still dead. So at this point I told her to either leave it out in the sun in attempt to remove all the moisture form inside the battery/device, try a replacement battery and hope the actually Blackberry is not damaged or there was one last thing she could try that I recently just learned. Apparently leaving a soaking wet cell phone in a bowl of uncooked rice over night would suck out all the moisture and bring life back to the once lifeless cell phone.

Since there wasn’t any sun light available, she proceeded with the bowl of uncooked rice trick. The next morning her phone powered on and everything appeared as it was prior to the dip into the bath tub. She was thrilled and thanked me a million times.

Obviously if you are bringing your cellphone anywhere where you could potentially drop it into water, just be extra careful. In the unlikely event you do happen to submerge your cell phone into water and it no longer works, I would try the following steps before spending the money on a replacement.

  • Remove the back of the phone and battery right away.
  • Try to get both the device and battery dry as possible with a cloth.
  • Use a blow dryer to remove the moisture that may have gotten inside.
  • Leave your cellphone in a bowl of uncooked rice overnight.
  • Leave the battery and the device with the back off out in sun light for an extended period of time.
  • Try a replacement battery before replacing the device. Hopefully you have a friend with the same phone or maybe your provider has a shop nearby that would let you use a battery while in the store.

Prolong the Life of your Laptop Battery

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It’s impossible to avoid the life of any lithium battery declining over time. Eventually your laptop that once ran on battery power for 3+ hours will only last under an hour before you need to connect the power adapter.

I recently purchased a new MacBook Pro and have been researching the best ways to prolong my battery life and the most efficient way to use my Magsafe power adapter. Here’s what I was able to gather up.

You should disconnect the power adapter once your laptop is fully charged and wait until your system gives you warning as “Now your running in reserved batter power” or “Low Battery” use that as a notice to connect your power adapter. Running a charge through your battery that is already fully charged not only wastes electricity but runs unnecessary energy through your battery which can eventually cause damage.

Best method to prolong your battery life is to calibrate you batter every 2 months to increase the capacity and life, if you use your laptop Daily, Follow as below.

Calibrating a MacBook or MacBook Pro battery
Calibrate the battery in your MacBook every month or two to keep your battery functioning at its fullest capacity.

To calibrate the battery:

    1. Plug in the MagSafe power adapter and fully charge the MacBook or MacBook Pro battery until the light on the MagSafe connector changes to green and the Battery icon in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
    2. Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for two hours or longer. You may use your computer during this time as long as the power adapter is plugged in.
    3. Disconnect the power adapter with the computer on and start using it with battery power. When the battery’s charge gets low, you’ll see the low battery warning dialog on the screen. Continue to keep your computer turned on, save your work and close all applications when the battery’s charge gets too low the computer goes to sleep.
      Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or longer.
    4. Reconnect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged. You may use your computer during this time.

1 week with Mac OS X Leopard

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I’ve been a Windows user for many years and just recently I’ve started to venture out to different operating systems. I spent some time with Ubuntu Linux, loved it. Then I moved on to OS X (10.5.2 Leopard) and one word could sum up my experience so far, wow! Although my positive experiences with OS X may hold some type of advantage over my prior operating systems due to that fact I am running it on a brand new Macbook Pro. So my following review will be a combination of working with OS X as well as my new Macbook.

The initial setup and getting comfortable with everything in OS X was a breeze compared to Ubuntu. Which for the most part was probably related to the fact OS X came pre-installed on my new Macbook Pro and everything worked out-of-box while I had to install Ubuntu from scratch on my old Gateway 4540GZ. Battling for drivers with my hardware was not fun, so I avoided that nightmare with OS X.


Development
I’ve read that Macromedia Studio 8 does not run well on Intel Macs, even from Adobe’s website. I decided to install it anyways and as far as I’m concerned it runs without a hiccup. I installed MAMP for local development, which is an excellent application for running MySql and Apache that can be controlled within it’s own Dashboard widget. I’m still running Firefox with Firebug and the Web Developer tool bar. One thing that I’m missing is Adobe Photoshop. I was considering upgrading Studio 8 to Adobe CS3 Design Premium, which includes the latest version of Photoshop but I’m having problems installing the trial. From what I understand there may be a conflict with Studio 8 already being installed, so I’m going to have to try to remove Studio 8 and try again. For now I’ve been using Fireworks and The Gimp for all my graphics and to be honest I wouldn’t mind working with them from now on. Of course I’ve been using PS for so long that it will take some getting use to the new apps but for what i used PS for I don’t think that I was utilizing 80% of it’s features. IMO Photoshop is geared towards photographers while The Gimp and Fireworks is more suitable for web design and graphics.


Positives:
The user interface and general OS experience is the best I’ve ever seen. I’m loving all the OS X features such as The Dock, Genie effect (when minimizing windows), Front Row and the nice shadowing effect on all windows and menus makes everything look very nice. Finder, which is Mac’s version of Windows Explorer is great, you can choose between multiple views from tiles or thumbnails to a list view of your files and directories which makes navigating around your computer very quick and easy.

Using Windows I would dread putting my computer to sleep because it would take ages to restore from standby, but with OS X I can shut the lid to my laptop or put it to sleep manually and when I recall the system it loads right back almost instantly, which is needless to say awesome. Installing and removing software has become very simple, basically all you do is drag the application you want to install into the applications directory, and if you want to remove an app you simply delete it form that directory.

I am really diggin’ the built in camera (iSight), the lighted keyboard was also an ingenious idea. I spend a lot of time on my laptop at night, sometimes with no light on in the room so having the ability to turn a light on that illuminates all the keys on my keyboard is quite convenient. At first i was skeptical of not having a right mouse click button, but the Mac’s touch pad is engineered perfectly, to right click (as you would on windows) you simply tap the track pad with two fingers, same goes for scrolling, I just anchor my middle finger and let me ring finger do the scrolling.


Negatives:
Very few if any negatives about OS X but one thing that I’m going to need to get use to is keyboard shortcuts. I find my self often trying to use the CTRL key to select multiple files, save documents and other uses that I built a habit of using on Windows. The Apple key or the Command key (I believe is the technical term) is a new addition to my keyboarding life, I’m starting to come around but it will take some time. I also kind of miss the delete key. There is a ‘delete’ key on my MBP but it shares the same functionality as the backspace key on all my prior systems. I do miss the hard drive LED, I used that quite often to determine if my computer froze or not, but maybe I don’t have to worry about that on OS X. The MBP also tends to get very hot at times, from what I understand it’s case was designed to retain the heat, this way creating less stress on the hardware, which although gives an illusion of bad in reality its good?


Summary
Out of the three main operating systems I’ve used with the past few months, OS X Leopard is definitely my favorite. The visual effects, the GUI and the way everything just “works” is just amazing. I look forward to learning more tricks and becoming more familiar with OS X. Although my positive experiences may have something to do with the new laptop I happen to be running OS X on, I plan on installing both Ubuntu and Windows as a triple boot system to see how they run on the same hardware. My guess is they won’t even compare, but we’ll see.

Screen shot of my desktop:
MacBook Pro Desktop