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I was fiddling around trying to find a good position (on a desk) for my iPhone yesterday in order to get good reception for a phone call, and it reminded me of the “old days” when I was first an amateur radio (“ham”) operator.

Can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent fiddling around with antenna positions in order to get good reception. In those days they were mostly long wires strung from buildings or trees, but the principle is the same for a mobile phone antenna. It all depends on the direction the antenna’s pointing, the distance from “ground” (actual earth or metal objects below the radio’s antenna) and other factors that are just too hard to predict. And so we “fiddle” until we get it right.

In the case of a mobile phone, which is also a radio transmitter and receiver, the variables are pretty much the same. They include whether you’re holding the phone in your hand or not, whether it’s near metal objects, whether you’re inside a steel or concrete/brick building, and your orientation with respect to the cell you are currently connected to. So when you hear “can you hear me now?” what’s going on is that you and your callee are each adjusting or moving your radio and antenna to get better reception. We have all become amateur radio operators!

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Apple Computer had already announced that there are problems with power bricks for the old PowerBook and iBook computers (now officially discontinued) – the small cord coming out of the brick (carrying low voltage) is under a lot of stress and strain, and can short out right where it comes out of the brick’s case. So I was kinda ready for this intellectually. My brick is carried in my backpack almost every day, with the cord wound around the brick, and I can attest that the stress at the point where the cord comes out of the body of the brick hasta be a factor in weakening the cord, even though I’m always careful. Over the course of four years, being coiled and uncoiled every day, that’s thousands of flexions we’re talking about.

So on Saturday, I was sitting on the floor using my computer, with an external LCD monitor attached to it (also sitting on the carpet), and noticed a plume of smoke rising from the top of the monitor. I thought a little bug had probably crawled into the monitor and been tazered to death by a high-voltage supply. But I noted the acrid electrical/plastic smell of the smoke…which didn’t really smell like delicious fried bug.

(continue reading…)

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