About a month ago my son managed to reach the limits of elasticity as far as the digitizer was concerned. it smashed into so many little pieces that i was glad we had the screen protector, it held them in place and left the iPad operational.

So i decided to fix the iPad on my own, as an adventure, so i hopped online to look for the parts i will need. i looked around and everybody is fixing a non broken ipad with a complete digitizer. This was not very useful as i figured out later.

I ordered a new digitizer and waited to get it in the post. it reached quickly after a few days, so i started the gruesome task of opening the iPad. since i never did it before i expected it to be simple as the people explaining the process on iFixit, it isn’t so simple. my recommendations are to start with the LHS near the top or bottom corner with 2 metal openers as the plastic ones wont handle the force of the clips. also be aware that the bottom LHS is a very delicate plastic that will squish when force is applied. my take was shatter the frame just be careful of the LCD.

Another thing i noticed when trying to get the digitizer off the plastic frame was that its not easy to remove shattered glass even when heated out of a plastic frame. so be prepared to get a new frame, its better and so i did. i was ooo so exited getting the new frame out of the box, i had an open iPad with all the parts waiting to be assembled and i even bought a set of clips to put to the frame as the ones that were on the old frame just bent and broke. alas the screws are too small for the holes the frame has, something was missing.

After a short look around the internet i found 2 things that are important for the final assembly, screw nuts that go in the frame and the adhesive that holds the digitizer to it. order that and wait a week to get it.

Yesterday it all came to be, all the parts are ready and i am about to put it together with my son, and i realize the nuts are not fitting they are very hard to press in. i decided the brutal way is just what the doctor ordered and took a hammer and an elan bit to push the nuts in, it was the right way.

From that moment onwards it was just an assembly game screw the LCD then the clips and then put the adhesive in the right order stick it all up and you got the screen assembly done. the next phase is to put it all together and here comes iPad back to life.

After a month of lacking the iPads presence i have it back. it is such a nice feeling.

So what is are my lessons?

The biggest is don’t mess with apple, the way everything is tightly positioned into the packaging and the way it is assembled is to prevent you from dealing with the internals of the thing seems to be well thought out. though it is much better then an iPhone 4 situation it is still not the easiest thing to open and close.

If you are going to fix it yourself either buy all the items in one go, list below, or but a fully assembled digitizer and frame with the clips and all as it is available these days from some places.

List of items to buy:
Digitizer
Frame
Nuts
Clips
Digitizer adhesive strips
T4 screw driver
Metal opening tool (expensive but worth it)

I hope you will have a quicker and easier fixing experience then i did after reading this.

Good luck

The way Tim Wu is presenting the internet’s future is quite daunting, an internet that is no longer open and free for all but controlled by commercial entities like Google, AT&T or even Steve Jobs. This a truly grim picture of our future.

His book The Master Switch starts with a description of the “Miracle” of wireless phone, an invention made by AT&T in the 1960 and brought them the market dominance for years to come. it also stands out that the way communication was handled in america those days was in the spirit of UFO and Spaceships, less in the spirit of technology and achievement that we have today.

Fears expressed in his book are partially intimidating, when our recent history shows us how governments just shut the internet down partially or fully as in Egypt and China. This is a fear inspiring book to read which raised a question in my mind, is the future of the internet to be controlled in this way? are we stepping in the verge of the end of information flow and freedom of speech?

I believe not.

I have a feeling that the Author is abusing our innate fear of technology and big companies to instill fear into us. he also abuses the lack of knowledge about the internet structure, making people think it is that easy to just shut it down in places where there is no single point of entry controlled by a single entity. The case of China, Egypt, Libia, Syria and Yemen is the latter one where the backbone connection is through a single junction controlled by the national company of telecommunication.

But the trut is that when you are aware of initiatives like http://buythissatellite.org/ making the access to the internet pat of your basic rights, you get the picture that this Master Switch is nowhere to be found and that information accessibility is becoming that basic human right.

No i am not covering my head in the sand screaming your wrong. i am just opening my mind and looking at the world with the highest resolution i can get. the way it looks in the more modern world it seems that with the rate of adoption of network technology the future is open and may i dare to say free. We will institute the internet as part of the basic human necessities, as education should be, some where in the future.

Rumor or not, google is going to fight the social network market. its not an obvious reason of why they are doing it for the third time. The value of the social networks is only starting to emerge in Facebook and that is also debatable over what is the next phase there. it seems the fight here is not about the social network side of things, nor it is over the direct monetary value though its growing and can become huge.

The way Facebook is distributing its resources in login API, restore identities to the rightful owner and expanding the identity attributes and security settings, makes me ponder what is the value in that?

Looking at the WWW space there is some thing missing, some thing that no government will be happy to expose. its the identity management system, there is no way i can prove online who i am through any government institute. they give me my identity card and that is it. though in some countries you are needed to use your ID when making a transaction with a credit card over the internet it is still not a very robust way to achieve identification.

Facebook is attempting to get to the status of WWW Land identity management company/organisation, something only governments do in the real world. this indicates to me that the real social network value is not short term capitalization like advertisement or social marketplace but in the identity management of the WWW Land.

The firm that will rule the social network of today will rule the WWW identity management market of tomorrow.

But wait!! what is the value in that? well, ask AMEX/VISA or any other identity theft fighting company that will tell you how much they spend a year figuring out who is a legit person. How about making that donation on every transaction to Google or Facebook?

Google probably know this and are making their efforts to create an easy to adopt alternative to Facebook, that said they have not been ultra-successful in doing such and are losing ground, and people, to Facebook’s new buzz words like Social Marketplace (did i hear ebay and amazon?).

What do you think?

Reading through the recent posts of the new HTC dream users who left the phone in the drawer and gone back to iPhone i hear a very interesting underline.

Android is not iPhone OS, its Symbian OS or Windows Mobile OS! its not going to be a single phone branded with Google android and its hoping to be spread as the smartphone OS.

It might succeed in that aspiration though i highly doubt it due to the success of the iPhone and the competition that apple are giving.

But i think there is something wrong with the paradigm of Android OS, its inconstant and thus not a reliable branding. People already have problems with it been Google big brother related, and yes Apple are not better but its not part of the brand Apple so they can do things Google cant, its getting some bad reputation from been abused by implementation based issues.

Apple hold the Hardware and OS in their hands and it was a mediocre success in the PC/Laptop arena, but the Smart Phone arena is different, the paradigm is well adapted to the market and supplies great value and better experience then any other Smart Phone. All you need to do is ask some one with BlackBerry what phone do they want.

Google in my oppinion needs to take this into their heart and stop spreading the OS as the basis for abuse by manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and others. Android should be seperate to the OS and should become a brand making Google a worthy adversary to Apple.

But that is not going to happen, Google are in the 1990 thinking of ruling the world like Symbian did, this is going to make the battle a bit skewed and help Apple sell the next version of iPhone like hot potato’s.

So i call the Google bots to think about making the change in paradigm and start tightening the belt on manufactures or even starting to make the phone on their own, i will get one of those if it can hold more then 6 apps, for now i wait for June to get the new iPhone.

As my son will put it it is very very very very sad, seeing this great service suffering from this problem. and sadder to see all the services around it fearing their livelihood.
Hope it gets back up quick this time as it is not a welcomed crash.
The reason is unclear at the moment as to shy it is down but it seems to be a big thing as oppose to the quick drops from the past.
Time will tell what effect it will have on trust and especially of transition into buzz the main competitor.

No no no, i did not get an iPad on ebay, its still missing some basic specs i need like a camera, though the WePad seems more like what i want.
The iPad is starting to symbolize the death of the Searched web, where website page was king, this is done with the help of mobile OS’s perception of usability standards.
iPad is pointing on the change we are making to the internet, from the even spread internet to Silos of information instead with vertical content, the Apps!
There are some people in the industry that compare the iPad with the CD-ROM publishing phenomena, where CDs were sellotaped to the front of a magazine, and their inability to bring extra profit. they were only done to glorify the news paper brand.
Apps are wonderful things they are focused on a single realm of usage and the put the rest of the world aside, but they are changing the way we build our internet and structuring our content.
We used to have silos of thought and very productized information consumption long ago when the internet was nothing more then a dream in some university, they called it news paper.
But the internet broke these silos to pieces and enabled a generation of people to produce news and information sharing in the forms of Blogs, Micro blogging and Collaboration Sites.
These enabled us to publish everything and surpass governments to display real footage from places like Iran.

But the iPad is becoming the icon of the reversal of that, its iconic because of the broken promise of creating the ultimate publishers tool.

What we get is a big App driven solution resembling the iPhone and Android phones supplying segregated content streams that are awesome on the go but lack when you hit a certain size and commitment.
The phenomena we are getting now is that many companies invest efforts in becoming iPad capable with applications, especially publishing houses, which in this age of the web should not happen. The web standards should have sufficed with a browser.
Some will claim that the Appcelerator IDE and alike just create a web interface over the same content i supply, i disagree as to the point that web standards should have driven the product to be able to display and let a person interact with content without the need to re mask it under an app.

The issues i see with this from the content management side are huge, since we are now using a different interface to display content you will not be getting the same content as it is probably not looking “Good” on the App you just built, this will mandate an “iPad” version of the same content and thus will create content duplication and degradation to fix display issues that could have been avoided.
We are talking about multiple content formats to maintain partially duplicated content with same metadata and probably the same tags and classification, all in the sake of the App.
This will create the duplication of resources in the team to manage the Website and the App’s, iPhone/iPad/Android etc, content.
I wonder how quick will somebody build a publishing plugins/system only for iPhone/iPad and the likes?

But i think that the product is incomplete as with the iPhone that was released in the first version without the GPS who its competitors had.
So i am not claiming i will never buy an iPad, just not this one.

As for some other perspective i got thinking about when i was reading Jeff Jarvis article, the inability to open the packaging, with the ability to close it back, makes these items throwaway like and very unfriendly to people who can repair electronics or inquisitive child.
This is something i can understand in a phone a bit more, may be as a construction stability, but not at a personal computing unit.

The new Apple iPad was titled the new way to produce content.
But that seemed a bit far fetch considering the configuration and hardware spec, no camera for instance.
Everyone quickly realized that this tool is for consuming content, lots of types of rich media will be the biggest segment.
Yes it has the potential of a book reader but lets face it, LED display is not good for book reading its good for movie watching.
looking at all the information around i think we missed the big picture.
Apple business path is missing in most of the talks and the focus is on the purchasers and what will you be able to do with iPad or the ways it will be delivered.
Apple in my opinion is looking for the new iPhone trick.
if you are not aware of the iPhone trick i will elaborate a bit, when the iPhone came out Apple bundled it with a store, the application store, this step was based on the success of the iTunes store when the iPod ruled the world.
The business move was to diminish the telephones company to a mere pipe supplying Apples content to the Apple hardware, the traditional way was that the phone company sold you the content and not the phone manufacturer. Apple turn the table and AT&T were pissed, they now lost a big margin and have to upgrade the hardware to support the traffic, but they got loads of money for that data traffic.

Nokia tried and failed the iPhone trick with the Nokia Store, it never soared to the heights of the App Store, my quick guess is that they were not strict about the production of software and the location of its sales to their store like Apple did and that doomed the store as useless.

iPad is looking like the second try of Apple over the Networks, after the failure of the Apple TV Steve jobs probably wondered how to get his way in controlling another retail channel.
iTunes is a great platform to support the purcahse/rental of movies but it never had the hardware counterpart to elevate it up to the level of a network.
There were always movies/tv shows to be purchased out of the iTunes store but this has never been a big segment of the store.
last year apple sold around 3 billion songs compared with the mere 5 million videos.

iPad will change this, its the best video mobile device, big 9.7 inches LED backlit display, 10 hours of watching video and 16-64GB of storage.
The video interface is great.
The price is reasonable.
What else can you wish for?

You probably could but this is not the place… talk to Steve and while you at it remind him the MacBook Pro update.

Lets hope that the networks wont find out that most of their grays anatomy/desperate housewifes fans got the iPad and are buying the show from the iTunes Store now and loving it.

A few things to make this a true success will be to introduce subscriptions to the iTunes store like you have in your local cable company. this will be the nail in the coffin for both the networks and the Tivos out there.

This second take on the networks makes AT&T smile ( scream is more like it ), Steve Jobs promise for more traffic then they can dream of is just around the corner.

I have to also correct my standing over the iPad, i though this is another MacBook Air flop but i think its not going to be that.
As for the flash support, enough was said but my 2c on the subject are that its not relevant for a media tablet and that the performance/heat that will be produced by supporting flash will render te iPad useless. taking into an affect the business plan i just thought of i think it makes sense not to support flash as it is not going to support the business.

There is another option for the video distribution and that is YouTube with a premium flavor, it could happen though apple are too centric to let it happen.

I have joined the crowd and bashed the iPad on my twitter, i guess i had to let off the steam for the silence in the MacBook Pro front.
I was waiting for a new release to get me one but i guess i will get it later if at all.
Back to the iPad.
The iPad is funny, at first look it resembles a big iPod touch with some 3G voodoo.
Its a bit fragile looking were my initial thoughts, this will be only tested through time but i am sure to get, if they ever manufacture, the incase rubber back ontop the carrying case.
Just incase it decides to jump out of my hands.

The ipad in my opinion has great opportunity for a few people.
Its simple enough to get my grandma on a computer and use facebook.
Its robust enough to enable a friend roaming the country to control his server farm through logMeIn.
its good enough to entertain my boy for hours.
its screen is god enough to read an ebook or the news, not for hours though.

In summery it seems that iPad is good enough to do most of the tasks, in a good price point.
The pricing at first seems to be aiming at the kindle, but i think it is not. its priced to hit the netbook and atom machines.

I do fail to see people watching videos with iPad on the train in rush hour. the ips is great for sharing with friends but not with your cellmates on the train, nor that the size helps to stand holding it in one hand while been pushed.
But home/park/coffee/flight/sitting in the office that is where it will rule.

The other market which will be the greatest is the iPod users looking at shelling 150$ more to get the bigger screened iPod.

Multitasking is a big issue and my guess is that it will deter youngsters from moving away fro iphone as it only disconnects them from their friends.
So its not going to be a y-gen success in my opinion.
Some thing about not having multitasking makes me ponder about the HP slate, how will it affect the market amongst the y-gens and tech savvy people.

Will i get one? i dont think so, i got the kindle iPhone app to read books and i use it allot, my needs are for a much stronger processing warehouse that will be capable running my experiments.

Steve will you give me the i7 MBP please? as much as i like the iPad i have no use for it at the moment.
Please….

Looking at the news it seems that all parts of the Australian society are crying against this proposal to make Australia the first modern country in the world who stepped back from democracy.
The proposal has been so tightly coupled to child abuse that when earlier tonight an article from computer world citing Child protection group Save the children claiming this effort is futile and money is better off some where it will make a difference blew the whole argument out of the window.

One of the best arguments is one that technology people raise allot

The filter could lull parents into a false sense of security, thinking that it is working, but we know hackers are always ahead of those filtering technologies

but coming from a non tech sector makes you believe that other people are aware of this Australian mockery and the joke we have become as a nation.

It saddens me to see that the news reports are short and futile in engaging the members of the parliament in explaining why this is even supported, if it is at all.

If you are interested in a more simpelton explenation of the initiative look here at whirlpool

Ways you can act immidiattly
Rob Manson has his old HTML page updated, you can twit and send an email to the minister.

Sign up for the GetUp campaign and register

Educate the peope around you who are not tech savvy

Help @Lozz to create his education campaign.

Contact your representatives , you want to know who they are? go to geo2gov.com.au and find out who they are (Thanks to Adam).

Yesterday the Australian government announced it will go ahead with its plans to mandate the Australian ISP’s to censure the internet based on a black list.
The green light was given after a small scale a “live” field pilot has been done with a few ISP’s, most of them small, on a very small segment of the list (1000 sites) and with marginally leagal techniques including DNS poisoning.
The Report of the modest pilot looks like it was designed to pass.
The issues that came up from the report pretty quickly are

• Who is controlling the black list?
• How is the blocking going to be done?
• How much slower will our slow internet go
• What is the carbon footprint of an effort like this

I agree with the idea of protection against the dangers that lurk on the internet and the need to protect our children from these but have a bit of a problem with the implementation.
This implementation is insufficient in the best scenario and is missing the point of protecting our children.
This tool is not selective and blocks things in a generalised manor rather than enabling the public to select whether they want or don’t want this to be present.
Why do people without kids need to be filtered?
Will you block facebook if a child rapist use it to seduce kids? will you block digg if some sort of illegal content raises to the top (as it did with the DVD encryption code)?
What is the benefit of a blockage if it is not going to stop me from getting my content elsewhere? or through different networks like Tor?

But beyond the technicalities the mere introduction of an idea like this in a modern country is quite disturbing and feels not right. The width of the blockage and the nature of it are not yet heard of in a modern society and have been noticed by Google as problematic also

Some limits, like child pornography, are obvious. No Australian wants that to be available – and we agree. Google, like many other Internet companies, has a global, all-product ban against child sexual abuse material and we filter out this content from our search results. But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.

Also noted is the EFA technical approach to the success of the filtering

There are a few things that need to be done to make this filtering a true solution but i think the biggest one is to give the people the ability to choose.
Sen. Conroy needs to change his tome and give the option to citizens and residents who wish to filter their network to do so for free through the ISP. and no grants for the ISP’s to enable extra content filtering while charging clients (as described in the FAQ)

The Government will also establish a grants program to encourage and assist ISPs to offer additional filtering services on a commercial basis for those families that wish to have a wider range of material filtered

There also should be an open list of blocked sites that will be available freely through the government sites.
There should be a process where you can specify wrong doings/additions in the list and mandate them to be corrected/added.
This will be a dignify the solution make it a good solution for the people by the people and not an undemocratic secret service Stalinized solution.

But i have a gut feel this is all a sham to get the games rating slipped through the radar. the new scheme for the games is bizarre and does not match, with the film and tv rating, in turn lets kids over 15 to see a movie that they cant play the game of it later since its too gory/violent/sexy/etc.
Time will tell if i am on the right track or not.