iphone 3G screen repair kit

The kit came with zero instructions, so I just hit up youtube for some instructional videos. There were plenty. Unfortunately the videos make it seem a little bit easier than it really is. Apple really doesn’t want you to take this thing a part.

My first error came when I was trying to split the iPhone open. A circuit board got caught on the screen and started to crack.

a slight crack

At this point, I kept going forward, because even thought it seemed to be cracked I thought it might still work.

Then I really messed up, shattering some crystals in my LCD.

So at this point, I gave up and I am using a 5 year old Samsung flip phone that my roommate had laying around. I haven’t decided if I want to attempt to replace the LCD or try to aquire a new phone.

So now my desk just looks like this:

zomgbbq, so sharp

Luckily, Amazon has replacement iPhone 3G glass kits for about 15 bucks.

My contract with ATT expires in July. You can bet come end of the summer I will be thinking about switching to Verizon. My buddy summed it up perfectly:

I never thought I’d see the day when Verizon was more progressive than AT&T. For the longest time, VZW was full of shitty “smartphones” with no WiFi and no ingenuity, while AT&T experimented with all sorts of BlackBerry devices, early-model HTC devices, etc.

Now the tables have turned, because AT&T is anchored to the iPhone. It’s amazing.

For example, if you needed to change some information across the board in WordPress, going through each record is very time consuming and prone to human error. By simply executing a SQL query against your WordPress database, you can make the necessary changes quickly and efficiently.

13 Useful WordPress SQL Queries You Wish You Knew Earlier

What follows is a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts. Many of these fonts are bundled along with modern operating systems, but most are free for download on the web. A few, notably Consolas, are part of commercial software.

Top 10 Programming Fonts via Hivelogic.

Looks like I am set for the next 3 months. I’ll report back more when I start reading them.

With the start of a new year, I’m taking a little time out of my vacation to make sure everything is safe, secure, and backed up.

First is the local backup copy. Being an OSX user, my application of choice is SuperDuper. If you are a PC user, Acronis has excellent backup software. SuperDuper is $30 and worth every penny. It lets me duplicate my hard drive to an external drive. In the case of a HD crash, I can simply boot of my external backup drive with no down time.

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper’s built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically.

A local backup copy is great, but that isn’t worth a shit if someone breaks into my house or a fire engulfs my residence. The second move is to have a remote backup copy. Online backups are really important, and up until about 3 days ago, were left out of my backup scheme. Not anymore. I am not backing up all important documents over the interwebs using BackBlaze.  If you are a PC user I recommend JungleDisk. Regardless you can look at this handy chart of online backup services to decide which is the best for you.

You download a tiny application that installs in three clicks and doesn’t require a credit card or any information to start using it. This online backup application automatically finds all your photos, music, documents, and other irreplaceable files—no matter where they are on your hard drive—and compresses and securely encrypts them. When you’re not using your computer, it sends them over the Internet to the remote Backblaze datacenters.

BackBlaze gives you unlimited storage and a handly little OSX to assist with backups for only $5/month.

So do yourself a favor and start off the new year right – make sure your data is backed up. I know I sleep better at night knowing that in the worst case scenario I can recover my files.

Just wanted to wish everyone happy new years. For me 2009 was one crazy year and I can’t even begin to imagine what 2010 has in store – yet I am both optimistic and excited.

A new year means new goals and new resolutions. One of them being to post more often.

Again, hope everyone had a great Christmas and I wish yall the best of luck in 2010.

Whether you call yourself a user experience consultant, web developer, or content strategist; whether you design customer flows, buttons, or brands; no matter what title you hold as a full- or part-time web professional, your work shapes our future and ought to command the world’s respect. But we won’t win that respect without understanding, and we can’t hope for understanding without data and the knowledge it reluctantly yields to the patient hand and steady eye.

So go fill out the survey. It will only take about 5 minutes of your time!

I’m a full believer in new years resolutions. The new year gives me a “fresh start” feeling and a clean slate. By the time the clock hits midnight I usually have a neatly compiled list of things I’m going to strive for in the new year. Unfortunately, my track record with following through is not as impressive.

Project52 is one of the points that will be on my 2010 list. What is Project52?

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

With Twitter, Facebook, forums, and other forms of media I’ve never been one to be good about posting content on a consistent basis. I’ll do my best to fix that in 2010.

The short write up, titled Distributed Wordpress admin account cracking, exposes a malicious script which was written specifically to crack Wordpress admin passwords.

The acquired script is written in PHP and performs brute force cracking attempts to Wordpress admin accounts

[...]

Now, the interesting thing about the script is that it allows distributed cracking. Information is saved in a MySQL database and the script actually connects directly to the main database. This allows the attacker to run many simultaneous scripts – each of them will take 200 new URLs and mark them with the brute forcer’s ID ($colo).

There is nothing new or revolutionary about this script. If you have a beefy password and are up-to-date (2.8.6 as of today!) there’s no reason to worry. But I believe this illustrates the importance of doing everything possible to secure your website.

In my last post, I embedded Brad’s Wordpress security presentation he gave at WordCamp NYC. It contains simple yet effective ways to secure your Wordpress installations – definitely worth a quick look.

I’ve had a few people ask me what are the quickest/easiest ways to get started securing their WP site. Almost every single thing in Brad’s presentation is important, but in my mind 2 things are the most important and can be executed in a matter of minutes.

Delete your ‘admin’ account. Yes, that’s right. Nuke it. Scripts such as the one mentioned above try to gain access to your website by logging into the admin account – the account with the user name ‘admin‘. Create a new account, something like RobSmith (or anything other than admin!), give it admin privileges, and then delete the default admin user. You will thank me later.

Don’t use wp_ as your default prefix. You probably don’t remember, but when you were flying through Wordpress’s famous 5 click install one of the options it asked you for was the default Wordpress prefix to use with the database. That’s right, I figured you didn’t remember. By default it’s set to wp_ – this should be changed. If you have already setup your blog, you can change it using some phpmyadmin trickery, but make sure you know what you are doing first.

As Wordpress becomes even more mainstream (gasp!) it will continue to be attacked by script kiddies and other nefarious characters. However by staying up to date and taking the appropriate steps to secure your site, you really don’t have anything to worry about.