Grey dead pixel lines on iPod Touch screen

A year and a half into my first apple product, the iPod touch 2G, and I was hit with a screen defect that happens to surface after just the product warranty expired. *thumbs up to Apple product quality*

So what exactly is the problem? The screen develops a number of permanently grey pixels, so that no matter what colour those pixels needed to display, they’ll always show up as grey.

No, it’s not a cracked screen – the glass touch input panel is fine. The LCD is not cracked, it’s just dead pixels. What’s worse is that those dead pixels are somewhat contagious. Those grey lines would extend until it reaches the edge of the screen, killing off more and more pixels in due time.

Now if you’re unfortunate enough to have this same product defect as I did, the obvious question is, "How can we fix it?" I asked the Apple store, and they were willing to fix it for me – for about AUD $200. Well why might I want to get Apple to fix it for me at that price, when I could almost get a brand new iPod Touch?

There are sites out there that claims to fix iPhone dead pixels, but it certainly won’t fix this particular problem. You see, it’s a physical degradation, which can be seen under bright sunlight, even when the device is powered off.

If I’m not willing to pay 4/5 of the price of a new one to fix an old iPod Touch, what are my options? Throw it away? Nope. Here’s my plan. use it with the defect until it becomes annoying enough. Then, I’ll buy a replacement screen on eBay for about $AUD 15 (with free shipping) and fix it myself. Hah – take that, consumerism!

e-Record 6 – can’t add a new business?

e-Record is a free tool offered by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to help small businesses keep records needed for tax reporting. It uses FileNet Desktop eForms application (now belongs to IBM), and it is terribly out of date (just like Windows XP).

So what happens when you install it on Windows Vista or Windows 7? Well it kind of breaks. I ran into a problem while trying out e-Record 6.1 build 3 on Windows 7 Ultimate x86, and it can be reproduced like this: add a new business, and click through the initial steps.

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Outlook Live Answers Sydney Mail Questions

In response to the mounting questions about the new hosted Exchange services, a new website has been launched at http://outlookliveanswers.com/ to support your everyday email.

Already, it answers a range of questions from “What is Outlook Live?” all the way to synchronising contacts with other Live services. I think this site will be welcomed by many students, especially those who are a little more technically inclined. It even tells you how not to use the Outlook Live web interface, and fall back to POP and IMAP mail access.

It looks like that this website is intended to be a specialised community revolving around solving issues and problems with Outlook Live. A feature many would find welcome is the service availability status, which we hope would remain green most of the time.