KaiSchaller.com

When the headphone jack on my iPhone stopped allowing plugs to click into place I figured there was some tiny piece of metal that had either broken off or gotten stuck somewhere down inside the hole. After putting off a visit to one of the Apple Retail stores in the area I finally made an appointment for Monday evening so that I could swing by on my way home from work. Imagine how silly I felt when the employee (or “Genius”, if you prefer) shone his tiny LED keychain flashlight down into the opening only to declare, “there’s a big piece of lint in there!”

It all began to make sense. The first time I noticed there was a problem was in the pitch black of the bedroom after not being able to fall asleep. Thinking I’d listen to a podcast or two while laying in bed, I grabbed the phone from the headboard and pushed the headphones into place. Or at least I made the attempt. There must have been a piece of pocket lint just inside the headphone jack which was promptly shoved further in and compacted by my fumbling nocturnal efforts.

After removing the lint we had to test that everything was working properly. Since I didn’t have any headphones with me the Genius pulled out his own personal pair to test with and double-tapped the home button to play the most recent audio file. He gave a very abrupt “Uh… it’s working.” and stopped playing the file. It was only later that I found out that the file that had started playing was an old episode of The Dawn and Drew Show podcast, the intro to which sounds like this. I can only imagine what that poor guy was thinking.

Lesson learned: always shine a light into a problematic hole and assess the situation.

In other news, I can’t wait for this kind of weather to return:

Taken while driving back to St. Louis on I-70 E.

It looks like my video card was going bad. I definitely prefer that outcome to my motherboard needing to be replaced. Aside from cost it’s a pain in the arse to remove CPU fans.

I swung by Best Buy after work and picked up a dinky little PNY nVidia 8600 GT to test things. Plugged it in and the monitor sprung to life… current plan is to return this card to Best Buy and get a much better one from NewEgg for about the same price.

In other news, my dad may be sending some money my way in the way of a Christmas advance for a Mac mini! Now I just have to play the waiting game and hope Apple rolls out an updated line in September…

Sadly I am once again experiencing problems with the PC’s video signal. Every now and then it will just refuse to output anything to the monitor when it is turned on, which puts the LCD into a power save mode as a result. When this started happening a couple of months ago it seemed to be enough to just switch DVI ports (the video card has 2) or reboot the system, but it’s become a bit trickier since then. When I ran out of easy options about a month ago I carried the thing outside and gave it a good air-dusting. After blowing out a fair amount of dust — mostly from the processor’s heat sink — and reseating the video card in the PCI-E slot, everything was running well again. The problems returned this evening, though, and I’m not sure what is causing this strange behavior.

In other hardware-related news, I’m currently very interested in acquiring a Mac mini for use as a HTPC. There is a plethora of great-looking software out there that I’m itching to use, but I have to get the hardware first. I’m waiting (and hoping) to see Apple release an update to their mini product line, which is rumored to happen sometime in September. 802.11n wouldn’t be too shabby at all. Waiting isn’t so bad considering I don’t have the money to go out and buy one right now anyway!

For the first time in my years of Apple coveting I find myself being displeased with how one of their products is functioning. I recently upgraded to the 2.0 software for my iPod touch and the number of problems I’ve had with the device since then has increased from none to many.

Last night I was suddenly unable to transfer podcasts to the iPod. Music would go over just fine, so this was baffling. I couldn’t get it to work on the PC either. After not being able to find anyone with a similar story on the ‘net I bit the bullet and initiated a restore, confident that I could restore my settings, etc. from the handy backup iTunes offered to make for me.

After the restore was finished, I was told the backup was either corrupt or not compatible with the iPod I was trying to restore. I would also be unable to restore my applications (some of which I’ve purchased). Luckily the App Store recognized that I had already purchased certain applications and let me re-download for free.

These kinds of usability issues are unacceptable in any product, even more so an Apple product because they’ve set such a high standard for themselves. Compounding the problem is that there never seems to be a real solution to any particular issue except “Backup and restore the iPod.” Hey, I’d love to , but that doesn’t seem to work reliably either.

One other small thing that’s been bugging me lately. I know that some of the problems that people experience with iPods are due to copyright-protection technologies that limit what users are able to do with their devices and media. Just another reason to scrap the whole mess and get on with it — DRM and similar technologies do nothing but hurt the end-user.