In February, I swapped the Taptic Engine and then moved the NFC chip from Tina’s old (broken) Apple Watch Series 4 display to a new display. The NFC transfer had me on edge, but Circuit Trama’s instructions and technique were fabulous. One improvement to Circuit Trama’s approach, like this video I placed droplets of alcohol on a razor blade and gradually slid it in, no heat, and it worked so much better and it was much faster. I’ve got some pics I can post later.

Prior to these improvements, the watch entered a recovery mode and I figured I’d make the improvements before restoring it, since it was mostly broken anyway. After the hardware improvements the watch refused to restore, instead erupting with a “Failed to setup Apple Watch” alert. There are several options to get past this:

Option 1: Access the hidden lightning port where the watch band slides in and complete a wired restore. Unfortunately, the adapter fetches $100 or more plus more time, bleh.

Option 2 (failed approach): the trade-in value for the Series 4 is $60 and mine appeared to meet all the requirements, so I decided to take Apple up on the offer and FedEx took it off my hands. I replaced it with an Apple Watch Series 8 in Product Red that was heavily discounted by Amazon Prime Days. I looked at iFixit’s battery replacement guide and it appears battery replacements will be easier in the future and I should have all the tools to do it. Let’s hope the first battery lasts at least 3 years. Unfortunately, several days later, Apple returned the Series 4 to me, because they said they couldn’t restore it! What a joke. They obviously didn’t try Option 3, below.

Option 3 (worked for me): I wished I had learned of this before trying Option 1 and 2. During a hard restore, I put my iPhone on the older 802.11b network in our house and then the Apple Watch Series 4 properly restored! I didn’t record all the steps I used to implement this, as I’m writing this a couple months later, but it ultimately worked and my daughter is now rocking the Apple Watch Series 4.

The only side effect of my NFC transfer, was that I used a bit too much heat during the soldering process and now the side of the screen no longer responds to touch. The portion that doesn’t work isn’t required for most interface tasks and my daughter doesn’t mind – we also enabled Assistive Touch, so she can always get past interface hitches if the screen doesn’t respond to touches. If I have extra time on my hands, I may replace the layers between the screen and the glass to correct this unresponsive touch issue, but for now I’m moving on.

I also still have a bag of parts for one more Apple Watch 4. It needs a new battery connector soldered to the board, a new screen, and its NFC soldered to a new screen. If used parts dip low enough, I may give it a whirl or dump the parts on eBay while they still have value to others.

My daughter likes her old digital camera, yet Ventura’s Disk Utility doesn’t seem to show FAT16 as a default partitioning format. Never fear, others have already encountered this. First, I verified that the Compact Flash card’s location using this command:

diskutil list

This showed me it was sitting at /dev/disk2. Next, I executed this command to create a single 1 GB partition on the memory card and while leaving the remaining disk capacity as free space:

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 MBR “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME 1024M free “” 0B

Finally I executed this command to create 15 2 GB partitions on the memory card while leaving the remaining disk capacity as free space:

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 MBR “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME2 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME3 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME4 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME5 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME6 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME7 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME8 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME9 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME10 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME11 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME12 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME13 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME14 2048M “MS-DOS FAT16” NONAME15 2048M free “” 0B

All these disk partitions mounted without a hitch on my Mac, but the Kodak EasyShare M530 refused to see any of them. Boo hiss. I must have done something wrong with the formatting type. For now, I’m sending her to Denmark, Sweden and France with a Lightning to USB-B and mini USB-A to micro-USB so that she can use her phone to import all of her photos. I tested it with my XS Max and it works great – she’s going to love it, especially since her 13 Pro has 512 GB of storage.

Along the way, I found this source helpful.

For a simple, easy-to-make, and mostly homemade bike tire sealant I’ve resorted to the following recipe where the parts are mixed by mass:

3 parts Splash Original Blue windshield washer fluid (-20 degree F formula)
1 part FX Latex, Molding Liquid Latex, HV-65 (UPC 811832013546, 16-ounce bottle)

Splash’s Safety Data Sheet notes the windshield washer fluid is mostly water followed by methanol (to reduce freeze point), denatonium benzoate (a bittering agent), and patent Blue Dye L85000 (for coloring). The SDS also notes that the product’s methanol content is 30-32% by weight, which may be important should Splash ever stop manufacturing this product and we need a replacement.

It’s frustrating when people don’t post updates or additional details on how their homemade sealant works or how much it costs. I plan to report back here with updates on its performance as I use it. I mixed up a batch last week and plan to pour it into my Big Dummy’s Surly Extraterrestrial tubeless tires before RAGBRAI L. Ride on!

On cost I was curious if this recipe is any cheaper, per ounce, than name-brand sealant. This spreadsheet shows average per ounce costs at a local bike shop for 8-ounce and 16-ounce bottles of Orange Sealant. Based on those costs, the homemade recipe costs half the price of Orange Sealant’s 8-ounce bottle and it is about 30% less than their 16-ounce bottle.

** UPDATE 3-12-2024 **
I made 4 bottles of sealant and already used all of it up plus an 8-ounce bottle of Orange Sealant that I had to buy. I made a few tire replacements and helped others. I’m glad I have this recipe, I’m going to make another 4 bottles tonight or until I run out of time. After making the sealant, I poured about 3 ounces into my rear Surly Extraterrestrial tire.

** UPDATE 3-14-2024 **
Sealant in the rear Extraterrestrial is working great. The tire had been slowly going flat over three days before I added sealant on 3-12. After 3-12, the tire is holding pressure just fine again.

** UPDATE 3-15-2024 **
I think a contributing reason the recipe above is so successful is because of the ingredients, specifically the ammonia-free liquid latex. How do I know it’s ammonia free? Safety first is my motto. I contacted the manufacturer, Liquid Latex Fashions, to request a Safety Data Sheet and their brilliant customer service promptly provided one to me. Thanks, Liquid Latex Fashions!

I posted about this earlier and had it happen again: I foolishly had 4 Safari windows with a zillion tabs open, updated macOS Ventura to 13.4.1 and Safari 16.5.1, patched with Opencore Legacy Patcher, and when I reopened Safari I noticed all my windows and tabs were gone. No sweat I had a Time Machine backup.

1. Click on your desktop, press Command Shift G, and paste this file path:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Safari/Data/Library/Safari
or (updated 3-27-2025)
~/Library/Containers/Safari/Data/Library/Safari

2. Go up to the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and choose “Browse Time Machine Backups”.

3. Click the up arrow to go back in time for the Safari window, I chose the previous night just before I had initiated the Ventura system upgrade.

4. Hold down the Command key and select/tap on each of the files highlighted below, then click the “Restore” button. Here’s a list of the files as shown in the screenshot:

CloudTabs.db
CloudTabs.db-shm
CloudTabs.db-wal
SafariTabs.db
SafariTabs.db-shm
SafariTabs.db-wal

Files to recover when restoring your tabs from a backup.

5. Quit Safari and when you’re prompted choose to Overwrite the existing files.

6. After the copying is complete, launch Safari and from the menu bar choose History->Reopen All Windows from Last Session.

Boom, your windows from the previous session should now be restore. I’m leaving my previous post up just in case Apple fiddles with Safari’s structure in the future. Also note, following these instructions does not erase your history, even information between the tabs you’re recovering the current time – this history remains.

* Sorry for the lack of a screenshot, I have it, but WordPress is giving me some fits. Must be a permissions issue I’ll fix later. *

Bleh, Microsoft’s Public Folders feature worked wonderfully on Outlook for Mac. My company recently moved to Group Mailboxes when Microsoft deprecated Public Folders. We were told that it would be possible to archive messages from an inbox to a Group Mailbox on iPhones (and Macs) just like Windows, but six months in and the feature does not exist outside Windows. Microsoft Support recommends that we request the feature and folks did 7 months ago, but there’s still no official word for if or when this feature will show up. Microsoft, please bring feature parity across platforms.

Ella’s right headphone speaker stopped working on her Beats Solo 3 headphones. I found this guy’s video helpful, specifically the first half of his video. Her headphones appeared to have a wire that broke, so I ran some a couple inches of wire in the left headhphone and the right headphone appears to be working again, but Ella and I swear it cut out briefly – may be another break somewhere else.

I’m going to order some replacement ear cushions and if the cut-outs continue, I’ll just run replacement wire between the ear pieces. Also note, in the case of Ella’s headphones, another guy’s video did not help nor did this one, and this one might have minimal promise if I want to try and cut corners with the right headphone and replacing wire.

The kitchen and bathroom in our house had several older water supply stop valves that required several turns to close and often leaked even when they were supposedly closed. When putting a bathroom in the basement 14 years ago I foolishly believed the older water supply stop valves were inferior to the newer quarter-turn stop valves that others bragged about.

After installing several of the newer quarter-turn stop valves I’m already finding them to have failed – when turned to the off position, they still allow a trickle or even a stream of water to flow out, and this is described by others too. The older style valves would also fail after several years, but they had rubber washer rebuild kits to rejuvenate the valve’s operation. In the case of the new quarter-turn stop valves, I contacted one manfacturer, Nibco, and spoke to a technical support person, Jeff. I asked if there was a rebuilt kit I could purchase for a failed valve I own and he said “No, none of the parts on that valve are field-serviceable”.

Look, I work for a company that makes a lot of money mine minerals from the ground, but it will be difficult to sustain this bleed rate on the planet if we’re constantly mining new minerals and, even if we scrap the existing valve, throwing energy towards making new supplies. Worse, replacing the valve isn’t even a one-to-one process. While I ultimately purchased a replacement valve of the same model from Menards, Nibco must have changed manufacturers because the new body was shorter than the last one and required me to shorten the 1/2-inch diameter copper pipe poking out from the wall. Putting a new rubber washer on an old style valve would have required 1/10 the time I spent installing a brand new quarter-turn stop valve body.

Don’t believe the hype, quarter-turn valves are great for a few uses, but long-term these valves will cost you more money and time. If you don’t value either, ignore this post.

My in-laws had an old MacBook Pro that they wanted the data wiped from, mainly because the display was missing vertical columns of pixels. I couldn’t bring myself to erase without figuring out what the issue was, surely others were on this years ago. Here’s a summary of people describing the issue with past and current fixes (the last I may attempt at a later date when I’m a bit more mobile).

Apple Community Support – Vertical lines of missing pixels on MacBook Pro

One customer saying that Apple replaced his machine

Apple’s Repair Extension, ended December 7, 2012

DosDude1 describes the repair, he replaces a defective Nvidia 8600M GPU on a 15-inch 2008 MacBook Pro

A1261 2008 17″ MacBook Prorepair.wiki

iFixit.com – MacBook Pro 17″ Models A1151 A1212 A1229 and A1261

Schematics and Boardviews Availability at logi.wiki

My macbookpro11,5 is rocking OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP) 0.6.1 with Ventura. I recently updated from 13.2 to 13.2.1 and macOS updated after about an hour and a couple restarts and log-ins. Afterward, I attempted to use OCLP and its Post Install Root Patch feature and encountered an error message: “PatcherSupportPkg resources missing, Patcher likely corrupted!!!”, which left the macOS running without graphics acceleration (and a bit more slowly).

I first tried building OCLP’s nightly build code from my Mac, but I was left with the same message, above.

Finally, from OCLP’s “Build and run from source” page I clicked the link to download a pre-built binary. Using the pre-built binary to launch OCLP 0.6.2(n), where “n” equals nightly build, I then clicked the button to complete a Post Install Root Patch which loaded the proper GPU code and after a restart 13.2.1 is running nicely on my Mac.

I was replacing some housing on my Pugsley and noticed a few things that might be helpful next time.

First, the darn shifter pulley inside the external gear mech is a pain to get old cables out of. My shift cables refused to let the socket set screw to back out. Sadly, I had to drill all the way through the socket set screws with a 7/64-inch solid carbide standard length drill bit with a 118-degree point and then I reamed the shifter pulley’s threads out with a 4mm-70 tap. This works well, see pics below, just be patient so you don’t bungle the threads and drill straight already! I also found it helpful to drill out the old cable from the shifter pulley using a 1/16-inch drill bit (carbide not necessary for this one); however, this size bit will enlarge the holes for the shift cable – I didn’t see any issues with it for the final setup.

My Pugsley’s Rohloff kit has the old-school Rohloff shifters, so I followed the first 5:45 minutes of this video to remove the old cables and insert new cables. I did have to install one new cable housing, which measured 5 feet 11 inches for my XL Pugsley. For making connections to the external gear mech, I skipped 55 seconds into Rohloff’s video and continued along.

My Pugsley is back in business, though I still think shifting is stiffer than it should be. I may try fussing with the external gear mech’s angle to see if that reduces the stiff shifting.