Thanks to iPhone 5S’ new fingerprint touch ID feature, I used it to lock my iPhone out of the reach of my daughter, who liked to play video games on it. During our family vacation travel, my daughter decided to try to break in my lock code without my permission to use the iPhone. The iPhone quickly locked up after 3 failed attempts, after which you would have to wait 1 minute to enter the PIN, if failed again wait another 10 minutes, next 15 minutes, next 60 minutes, then the complete lockout. The worst part is that after using the Touch ID (fingerprint) for so long, I eventually forgot my original unlock PIN. After my several failed attempts to “guess” my own code, the iPhone finally decided to lock out my iPhone completely. Why Apple would not allow Touch ID to unlock the iPhone after 3 failed attempts are beyond me. The only way to unlock it now was to connect the iPhone to my iTune account on my PC, which I decided not take with me to vacation to avoid checking work emails. So I lost last few days of using my iPhone except for receiving phone calls. Not too bad, I thought.

As soon as I came home from my vacation, I discovered the ugly side of extra security; all the photos I took with my iPhone during my vacation were all gone because I couldn’t backup the iPhone before the restoration. (You’d need to agree on the iPhone before the connection to iTune but since the iPhone is locked out, this step is not possible).

Finally, I was able to restore my iPhone to the same backup copy I made a month ago. Better than nothing…

From now on, I’m leaving off the Touch ID and Locked PIN feature. It’s too painful to justify the added security.

The lessons learned: be wiling to pay the price for the extra security: remember your lock PIN and backup often to iTune, especially before your vacation. Do not attempt to “guess” the lock PIN lest you get locked out of your mighty mobile device that’s getting harder and harder to do without in our daily lives.

Two weeks ago, I had been experiencing for several weeks “Unable to Purchase At This Time” warning message on my iPhone when I tried to purchase and download an app from the App Store. I googled around and found that it has to do with a bug in iOS 7. There were several recommendations on how to fix it. The one solution that worked for me was to change the keyboard from “US” to “US International” keyboard (Setting ->General -> Keyboard-> Keyboard then select “English – US International” instead of “US”). After power cycling the iPhone by holding Sleep & Home buttons at the same time, now I was able to purchase and downloads Apps on the App Store. All the Apps were queued up to download all of the sudden. I thought that was the end of the story. But no, yesterday, the problem acted up again. This time, I selected “English – US Extended” keyboard and it started working again. I suspected this bug may have something to do with the fact that I have turned on several keyboards (English + Chinese).

Also, about the same time, I was experiencing a constant prompting for Apple ID and Password for the iCloud backup on my iPad. I applied the same trick and I haven’t seen the problem since.

So there you have it. Switching around US keyboards among all US keyboards may fix the problem. What a strange bug it is!

I recently acquired an interest in cartoons/caricatures, thanks to my daughter’s introduction. Downloaded this MomentCam App from App Store and created the below 3 cartoons by snapping a self photo and adding the hair style and face shape and selecting a theme. Voila! Check them out. It’s a lot of fun.

My Daughter was complaining about the slow sink drain in her bathroom. She bugged me to “take care of it.” I had some success cleaning the sink drain with this wonderful tool in the past. So I went to Home Depot and purchase a couple of the “Zip-It” sticks. Came home and proceeded to drag out the ugliest bunch of hairball out of the sink within a minute. See the picture below: It took care of the problem pronto. I highly recommend this product. It’s made like a fish bone, easy to slip/push into the drain and snare/drag the hairball/craps out of the drain hole. For just $4, you can save many hours of frustration and nagging from your family members and hundreds of dollars of service charge from your friendly neighborhood plumbers. More information from their website.

Yesterday, I was prompted by my wife to hang the Christmas lights outside the house. It’s one of those rituals that are dreaded by most husbands of the households but the wives/kids couldn’t get enough of it, as if the redistribution of wealth from the breadwinners the rest of the families wasn’t enough. I know, I sounded like a scrooge. Happy holidays!

This was my second year hanging the same lights on my residence. I should have drawn a wiring diagram for next year as it’s hard to remember what we did last year. It’s supposed to get easier but it didn’t.

Fuse Problem:
After hanging up the Xmas lights, I noticed one of the two light branches kept burning the 3A fuse. I didn’t have a problem last year. Suspecting a bad Xmas light link within the chained 7 links, I brought out my Kill-A-Watt and measured it was registering 3.5W! So I turned it off right away to avoid burning the 3A fuse again. Now I need to isolate the “bad” link. I figured I should just characterize one link at a time to determine the current requirement. Sure enough, each link uses 0.5A (or 60W (0.2W per bulb)) and 7 links makes 3.5A. There was nothing wrong with the links but the way I chained them to the outlet. After re-distributing the current load to another chain, I no longer have the burned fuse problem. Each chain would handle 2.5A. One down!

Bulb Problems:
Next, I noticed one particular segment of the link no long have lights. Sigh! Diagnosing down to the light bulb out of 50 in a chain was going to be a nightmare. I googled around and familiarized myself with how the Xmas lights are wired together and how the circuit works, thanks to this website. I also checked Youtube videos and found there is this Light Keeper Pro tool that’s supposed to be a panacea for all the Xmas lights woes. I went to the local hardware store and bought one for $20. Also bought some spare light bulbs just in case.

Well, I was able to fix one of the Xmas light link with this device. By pulsing/zapping from the bulb socket, this device worked to short/bridge the bad weakest-link bulb (each bulb has a “shunt” or electrical bridge to engage when the bulb turned bad), allowing the rest of the stringed bulbs to work. Then I replaced the bulb and all was well. Another down!

On another link, Light Keeper Pro’s zapping/pulsing didn’t work. I used the hum/tracing function and found 3 bad bulbs! The zapping function wouldn’t work if there are more than 1 bad bulb – it didn’t have enough energy to zap more than 1 bulb. But the humming function worked well. One more down!

On my final link or a mesh/net, neither the zapping nor the humming worked. The humming allows me to trace to a smaller branch but it couldn’t isolate down to a particular bulb. I need more time to debug this case next couple of days. 3 downs, 1 to go!

Overall, it’s a good Xmas light hanging experience. I didn’t realize I had such a great opportunity to learn about something interesting and refresh my circuit background.