Here’s a simple iPhone fix that others may appreciate. A few weeks ago my microphone started to cut out — I could listen to music over the headphones, but with both pairs of earbuds the microphone would cut out, and disconnecting and reconnecting them would cause the call to drop. I finally took it to the Genius Bar today and they immediately took out an otoscope and discovered that the hole where the headphone jack fits in was filled with pocket lint! One quick burst of compressed air later and it was working perfectly again! (Apparently they get this problem a lot, as they’ve got a special mini-jack attachment for their compressed air can.)

A nice side effect was he noticed the screen’s hairline crack I’d gotten when the phone fell out of my pocket. From all I’d read on the Net I thought I’d have to pay $250 to have that repaired, but he said so long as it was just a single hairline crack and there was no damage to the case itself they could do a warranty replacement — five minutes later I was walking out of the store with a fresh-out-of-the-box iPhone.

I’m probably biased living here in Silicon Valley, but this Here Comes Another Bubble by The Richter Scales is brilliant!

(Thanks to Nat for the link!)

For some reason Fink has not yet updated their version of GNU emacs. While there are several other options, including Aquamacs, xemacs from Fink and the terminal-only emacs that comes pre-installed on OSX, I missed my traditional GNU Emacs running over X11. Luckily, with a few tweaks to this guide, the process was pretty painless — assuming you’ve already got Fink installed, just do the following (all from the Terminal):

 mkdir tmp cd tmp cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs cd emacs fink install libungif libjpeg libtiff export LIBS="-lresolv" ./configure --without-carbon --with-x --prefix=/usr/local make bootstrap make sudo make install cd /usr/local/bin/ sudo ln -s emacs emacs23 

I have a long history of biting off more than I can chew when it comes to Halloween costumes. It’s in that tradition that, when my friends suggested Star Wars as a theme for costumes this year, my first idea was to go as an AT-ST, the 2-man chicken-walker mech that the Ewoks beat up on in Return of the Jedi. After several design iterations I had left the Star Wars Universe behind in favor of a steampunk flavor, and thus was born the Steam Walker.

The idea is to make it looks like I’m sitting in a chair riding atop a steam-powered mech that walks on two robotic legs. In reality my seated legs are false, and my real legs power the robot’s legs. This is basically a variant on the age-old circus-clown costume where someone looks like they’re riding a horse, and is also inspired by Ben Hallert’s APU costume and the paintball mech costume called Steel Dawn.

While not fast enough to keep up with 6-year-old trick-or-treaters as they went from house to house, I was still able to walk down the street and show off to passers by. The most common reaction was along the lines of “Wow! That’s the coolest costume I’ve ever seen — what the heck are you?!? (Best answer so far: Luke Skywalker: The Later Years.) I also got little kids (and some older kids, who really should know better) asking me how the thing was powered, several adults admitting they couldn’t figure out how the thing worked, and at least one little girl bursting into tears as she saw me ambling towards her. All in all, I’d say it was a big success :).

For more information on how I actually built the thing, take a look at my Instructable.