The Home button on my iPhone 4 has been getting progressively less responsive over the last 2 months. It was at the point where I was having to press it 7-10 times for it to register a click… that is, until a co-worker reminded me of one of Khoi Vinh’s posts from January 2012.

Khoi’s solution? Spray a little WD-40 on the Home button, and press it a series of times to get the liquid to work itself into the device. I did it over the weekend and my Home button feels brand new.

Tip: I sprayed it on the tip of my finger so I wouldn’t accidentally drown my iPhone in too much of the chemical.

Speculation: Occasionally I have to remove lint that accumulates in the dock connector opening on the bottom of my iPhone. I wonder if lint and debris are also what cause Home buttons to get less responsive over time by covering up the contact point between the Home button and the surface underneath it.

Warning: Like Khoi, I have no idea of the long-term damage this can do to your iPhone.

My parents and I just finished watching John Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly in The Rumble 2012. What should have been a great television experience ended up being a horrible television experience because of an unreliable video stream (Update: If you don’t believe me, check out #rumblefail on Twitter).

We watched it on their Samsung plasma screen TV which was connected via an HDMI cable to a brand new, WiFi-enabled HP laptop. Despite the fact that my parents’ cable modem averages 29 MBps, my father and I had to reload the web page playing the (Flash) video at least a dozen times.

On one hand, it’s great that the debate was available on the web for anyone to watch (granted you had $4.95). What’s unfortunate is how hard it was to watch it at home on a television. Even though the television is Internet-connected, there was no way to watch the debate natively through any of the ‘apps’ on the TV’s software.

The other options were to watch it via Boxee or Apple TV, and my parents have neither (note to self: get parents Apple TV for Christmas).

I’m happy my father and I were technically savvy enough to get everything set up to watch (and know what to do when things went wrong), but this experience proves how far we still need to go to make it simple for the average person to access the Internet through their television.

On a positive note, in between the stuttering video stream, the debate was great. Stewart, as I expected, demonstrated he’s still at the top of his game when it comes to clearly articulating his sharp thinking while simultaneously using the term “Bullshit Mountain” through the debate.

via Instagram

It’s hard to have a favorite Steve Jobs speech or quote when there’s so many great ones.

A bicycle for our minds. Values. We won’t ship junk. Giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell. His commencement address at Stanford in 2005.

In the last few years though, his vision of the world has become something of a daily matra for me (hat tip Craig Hooper):

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

I expect I’ll be learning from Jobs for many years to come.

Promila Shastri on Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs was, not surprisingly, a complicated man, both great and awful, capable of incomparable vision and shocking lapses in judgement, who saw some things with singular clarity and others with no benefit whatsoever of wisdom. To have been his mother or wife or daughter, I’ll bet, was not much fun. But for the rest of us, Steve Jobs was nothing, if not fun.

As is expected from Promila, a beautifully concise remembrance.

Influencers

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Skid Row Big Bird is now on Twitter. Quick thinking, PBS.

via PaidContent

My mission is to bring humour into fine art.

—Wayne White

Yesterday I posted a nitpick from iOS 6, so here’s something I like.

Now when you update apps in the App Store, iOS no longer yanks you out of the app to the Home screen. The App Store also no longer requires iTunes password authentication for free apps, just the paid ones.

Two minor updates adding up to a lot when you apply them across the dozens of apps on my iPhone (and iPad).

(via Marcel Brown)