Gregory Tarnoff » short circuit http://tarnoff.info Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:36:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Don’t Wash Your Bluetooth Headset With Your Laundry http://tarnoff.info/2008/07/dont-wash-your-bluetooth-headset-with-your-laundry/ http://tarnoff.info/2008/07/dont-wash-your-bluetooth-headset-with-your-laundry/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:38:17 +0000 admin http://artryst.com/?p=168 Continue reading →]]> Sunday my phone needed a charge. When this happens I plug my iPhone into the computer and put on my headset so I can walk around my house and still talk. The headset was bugging me that day so I put it in my shirt pocket. I proceeded to eat lunch and naturally spilled on my shirt. Since Sunday is a laundry day in my house, I dropped the shirt into the washing machine with the next load.

Fifty-nine minutes into the 60 minute cycle I realized that I forgot to take the headset out of my pocket. Panicking I race to the washing machine only to have to wait until the cycle finishes to unlock the machine. To no surprise upon finding the tiny device inside the pile of laundry, it is dripping wet. I set it to dry in a well ventilated part of my house for several hours.

After about three hours I tried plugging it into the charge. No fire erupted (I wasn’t sure if it would or not) and the little LED indicating it was charging came on, then went out. I left it on overnight. The next morning I took the headset of the charger and tried to turn it on…. Success! It turned on and connected to my phone with no problems. Ten minutes later it let me know they battery was dead and promptly turned off.

Last night I put it on the charger again, this time the LED stayed on until an hour later which is the standard time it takes to charge. Trying the headset this morning it not only turned on, but stayed on, and made calls that sounded fine. Either I got extremely lucky or LG build quality devices. Whichever it is I don’t recommend washing your Bluetooth headset with your laundry.

]]> http://tarnoff.info/2008/07/dont-wash-your-bluetooth-headset-with-your-laundry/feed/ 0 The iPhone’s Achilles Heel http://tarnoff.info/2008/07/the-iphones-achilles-heel/ http://tarnoff.info/2008/07/the-iphones-achilles-heel/#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:14:32 +0000 admin http://artryst.com/?p=163 Continue reading →]]> Many probably don’t consider this, but I had to this weekend. Over the holiday weekend, my phone performed as needed until Sunday when I went to call my tennis loving mother about the epic battle between Nadal and Federer at Wimbeldon. My call appeared to go through as I could see the little timer counting my time connected, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Upon further examination, I didn’t hear any of the little clicks either. It rang, but that was the only audio coming out. I thought for sure my phone was dying.

I rebooted the phone, but there was no change. I restored the phone, but there was no change. I couldn’t imagine being without a phone for any period of time, so I scrambled to see if I could get into the genius bar that afternoon. It was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, the store closed at 6:00. I was lucky enough to be able and get an appointment and grabbed the kids (who had to skip swimming because of this) and scrambled to the store.

It turns out that dust had gotten into the headphone jack (probably when I went to the gym that morning and used my headphones). This caused a short circuit that fooled the phone into thinking headphones were still plugged in. The great people at the genius bar (they have been very helpful to me on many occasions) took my iPhone  in back and used a special machine to remove the dust putting my phone back in action. Since my phone was fixed I began to walk away, but then I turned around to ask if there was any technique to clean it myself so that next time it happened (I am confident it won’t be the last) I didn’t need to scramble up to the Apple Store to get it cleaned. However, Apple doesn’t recommend doing this on your own. The genius that helped me did recommend looking online for a plug to cover the ports when not in use.

Most cell phones have a rubber or silicone protector to go over their ports, but the iPhone doesn’t come with them. I looked online at over 40 pages of results for various Google inquiries and found no plug of any kind for the headphone jack. There are companies that make them for the dock connector, but not the headphone jack. I found several articles that homebrew solutions using erasers and other paraphernalia, but they seem like they will just cause more problems over time. Has anyone found these plugs anywhere?

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