I’ve been learning the iPhone software development kit and programming in Objective-C. Objective C is weird. Anyway here are my first apps I’ve written while studying tutorials for a few days.

How’s it done? Here is a video showing how I used the iPhone SDK to make these apps.

WORLD RECORD

Official Rankings

Shortly after I boosted the power to my Xbox 360’s DVD laser, my Xbox suffered from total hardware failure.  Maybe it’s because I turned my Xbox off and on about 100 times while messing with the DVD drive.  When my box first failed I saw the E79 error on my display, which means HDD error.  The HDD wasn’t even plugged in!  Subsequent restarts resulted in no video output, just the dreaded red ring of death.

By holding the controller pairing button and pressing the eject button, the red lights will flash in sequence to indicate a diagnostic code.  The north bridge had failed, the chipset which bridges the CPU, RAM, and GPU (the 360’s north bridge is actually integrated into the GPU, similar to PC chipsets with integrated graphics).  The only known fix is the x-clamp repair.

The x-clamps are on the bottom of the motherboard and hold the two heat sinks against the GPU and CPU for cooling.  However, there is a major flaw in the design of the x-clamps.  Because the x-clamps are curved they cause flexing in the motherboard.  Overtime, the flexing combined with heat can cause the solder joints to loosen and fail.

The deficient x-clamps on the bottom of the mainboard, inset is a close up profile shot showing the curve of an x-clamp.

The first step is to pry off the x-claps with pliers.

Without the x-clamps anchoring the heatsinks onto the CPU and GPU, I could remove the heatsinks.  I took the opportunity to remove the crappy thermal paste applied in the factory, and replaced it with high quality silver thermal compound.  Removing the old thermal compound with alcohol took three hours of alcohol cleansing, but polishing the chips to a mirror shine ensures optimum heat transfer.

I replaced the heat sinks and affixed them with machine bolts, spaced with nylon washers.  The problematic x-clamps do not belong in a properly cooled 360, and are now a trophy of my success.

Close up of the bolts.

My box has been running for a few days without issue.  Maybe I was lucky, or maybe I’m a badass.

Update: Keen observers may have noticed I did not perform the overheating step of the x-clamp repair.  This is because sometimes the pressure of the heat sinks themselves are enough to restore connectivity to the GPU.  Unfortunately when I opened my box again to perform upgrades, I jarred it enough that it broke again.  Luckily I was able to repair it again by overheating the solder joints.  Here is an exciting video:

Serious props to lawdawg from xbox-scene for pioneering this method.

The DVD drives Microsoft puts in the Xbox 360 are cheap pieces of crap. They suck at reading discs. I took mine apart and boosted the strength of the laser and now I get less dirty disc errors.

The resistance on the DVD potentiometer was 4.6k ohms, I reduced it to 3.7k ohms.

Look at the cool pattern the laser reflects, I didn’t expect to see pretty lines.

After I finished boosting the laser power I decided to play some Half-Life. Enjoy the video.

The disc has a lot of circular scratches now, but it still plays fine.  Maybe the laser boost really did help, or I’m just damn lucky.

This Saturday it was so sunny and pleasant outside we decided to visit the cherry blossoms in DC. We drove to the metro station which was thoroughly packed, when the train pulled up it was packed too, even though there is only one station before us. At each stop more and more people packed in, the crowd was full of murmurs about cherry blossoms.

The metro ride was worth it because the cherry blossoms were beautiful. We were lucky enough to run into a badass peditaxi rider (a bicycle with a two person carriage attached). He took us from the Tidal Basin to the White House in only a few minutes, weaving through cars and once or twice on the wrong side of the road, it was awesome.

This is my second HD YouTube video. I used Path Tracker, an iPhone 3G application to track our movements for over two hours. Below is the raw GPS data from Path Tracker.

The iPhone (or touch) supports up to 9 screens of apps. That’s 16 apps X 9 screens + 4 in the dock, 148 apps! Don’t let this amazing device go to waste with a measly two or three pages of apps, get to the app store and start downloading these standouts!

Google Maps
	Smooth tracking with real-time traffic, high-res satellite and 3D street imagery, and the quickest way to locate and contact yellow page entries.	Base
Google Reader
	Surf to google.com/reader and press + to add this efficient feed delivery system to your home screen.	Bookmark
Wikipanion
	Fast Wikipedia access with large font size and orientation lock.	Free
Path Tracker
	Records, caches, and uploaded data-rich GPS tracks to Google Maps [View Map] and Google Earth [Video].	$1.99
GPS Tracker
	Allows your or others to track the iPhone in realtime over the web, otherwise same as Path Tracker. (Requires Network Coverage)	Free
Weatherbug
	Fast weather report. Four Simple options; conditions, radar, video, and live cameras.	Free
Pulsar
	With the brightness maxed this flashlight app can illuminate a room. Also includes flashy color trips.	Free
iStat
	iPhone performance stats, remote Mac monitoring [image], can also free memory, traceroute, and ping.	$1.99
Air Sharing
	Turn your iPhone into a mobile web server capable of transferring files wirelessly between other computers on the same network using a browser. [Image]	$4.99
Shazam
	Great song on the radio? Shazam can usually identify it.	Free
AccuFuel
	Track your fuel consumption. Easy data entry, fancy graphs [image], export to email.	.99¢
Clock
	The included alarm, stopwatch, timer, and world clock are very useful.	Base
Chinese Menu
	I keep my favorite Chinese menu handy with a bookmark.	Bookmark
Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing
	Draw shapes and brief messages collaboratively with another iPhone wirelessly.	Free
Movies
	Uses your location to display nearby movie showtimes, also plays movie trailers.	Free
Quick Graph
	Solve equations and graph them in two and three dimensions.	Free
Pandora
	Thousands of free internet radio streams.  For listening to live sports broadcasts use AOL Radio.	Free
SnapTell
	Take a picture of a movie, game, CDs or book to get reviews, descriptsions, and prices.	Free
Sportacular
	Quickly get real-time scores and charts for all professional sports, you can also dive into player statistics.	Free

Did I miss any good apps? Leave me a comment with your favorites.

Here is another Google Earth animation created from GPS data recorded with my iPhone.  This time I recorded a 21.5 mile track as I drove on the highway up to Wintergreen.  There are 1792 data points in this track, so the animation is smooth.  The colorization represents an ascent from 500 to 3200 feet.

While I was happy with the GPS data I recorded during my previous post, I couldn’t help but think that the rich data I had for each point was going to waste. I wanted to use the time stamp to animate my snowboarding track. I also wanted to colorize the track according to the speed I was going. Fortunately, I was able to export my path from Pathtracks.com in a GPX format, which I was then able to convert to an animated, colorized Google Earth file with GPSVisualizer.com. I then uploaded this Google Earth screen capture to YouTube (my first HD YouTube video):

Click here to watch in HD

I managed to install Leopard on a ThinkPad X200. It wasn’t easy, and there isn’t driver support for wi-fi, ethernet, audio, or accelerated graphics, but the hackintosh community is working on it. Other ThinkPad’s such as the T60 and X61 have been hackintoshed to the point where they are nearly perfect OSXperiences.

I booted from a Leopard DVD in an external drive.

To my surprise the integrated camera worked during Leopard initial setup!