Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
–Dr. Suess
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In April, I made a trip to Austin to see Daniel Tosh, and I made it a point to go to Franklin’s Barbecue. For whatever reason, I decided to bring my drone. In my head, I thought that I would take some photos of the skyline in Austin, but the weather was not the best when I was down there. I ended up getting it out for a quick flight while waiting in line at Franklin’s, and I took the photo below. I was going to take more, but the clouds were rolling in. I didn’t want to risk the drone getting soaked in a random Texas rain storm. You can see the line is all the way into the back parking lot. I was right behind the stairs on the left side of the building.
We got there around 7 AM, and we got our food around 12:30 PM. It was worth every minute of the wait. It was the best brisket I have ever had.
I got some other photos while I was there with my phone. I got a nice picture of the sign and my food.
Since Aaron was walking around, I also got a photo with him. From what I understand, he is there most days, but I am not sure that I will ever get a chance to meet the Barbecue legend again.
Here is a photo that I really liked from a trip to Oklahoma City. The Devon tower dominates the skyline of the city, and I think that I got a nice shot of it.
At the beginning of every year, I try to knock out as many projects as I can. This year has been no different from earlier years, and this is another project that I have completed so far. The hard drive on this 2007 iMac finally died, and I replaced it for a friend of mine. He uses it for random things, and he wanted to get it back working again. I am extremely impressed that the drive lasted 10 years, and I jumped at the chance to change it out because I have never opened an iMac case.
After reading a few how-to’s, I got this thing apart pretty quickly. The most surprising part of the repair was how easy it was to get the glass off. I had no idea that it was held on with magnets. A suction cup and light pulling gets you access to the screws that need to be removed, and I think it was only 10-15 screws total that had to come out. The whole job of changing out the hard drive and getting it back together took 30 minutes, but the attempt to recover the data was longer.
On the drive, the partition table was corrupted and damaged beyond repair, and it was unable to be mounted under normal means. To get the data off, I used a data recovery program, but it was heavily duplicating the information on the drive in some instances. To solve this, I used a de-duplication program, and I was able to remove 30 GB of duplicated files. In the end, I think that I was able to save most of the data on the drive.
Based on how new drives are built, I doubt that this one will achieve the same length of service, but the first one was a surprise so I am keeping my fingers crossed.
The other day I was asked to change the back glass on the Samsung S6 after it had cracked. I believe that placing two pieces of glass on one phone is Samsung’s second worst design decision in recent memory. The first is the Note 7 battery debacle of 2016, but I think that everyone has discussed that one enough so back to the repair.
The repair on this is straightforward. The back glass is held on with just adhesive, and you just have to heat the adhesive to allow the back glass to separate from the device. Since I don’t own the tools that people recommend you have, I just used a hair dryer. It took about 5 minutes to remove the glass, and I got it back on about a minute later. I wanted to give the phone time to cool down some. I have included the photos I took of the repair below. The hardest part was making sure that I had the correct color and phone carrier for the part.
© 2019 Drew Clardy