Since purchasing the iPhone 5, I have noticed something peculiar. The battery just seems to be draining much too fast. I did not measure CPU usage or minutes used but as someone with a technology background, something tells me that the battery life on my new iPhone 5 just does not seem to be performing up to par. After some searching, it looks like others are also having the same battery drain issue. There are lots of posts floating around reporting that when an iPhone 5 was initially activated via a “Restore” from an iPhone 4(S) backup (versus setting it up as a new phone), battery life drained much faster as compared to the iPhone 4.

iPhone 5 – Reports of Battery Drain Problems

Personally, I never activated via a back up and instead set up the iPhone 5 as a new phone; and oddly enough, I was also suffering from the battery draining way too fast. More digging lead to many articles discussing ways to disable features and services on the iPhone 5 to minimize battery usage. Yes, it does make sense to slim down push notifications, location services, Bluetooth, Siri, screen brightness and even vibrations etc… The thing was, I have already tweaked all of these settings. Many users also reported disabling WiFi or even LTE allowed them to get more life out of the iPhone 5′s battery. This was not an option for me. I paid for a phone with these capabilities and I want to use it at will.

Yet more reading let to recommendations to put the iPhone 5 into DFU mode and re-run a clean install; citing that a firmware will be updated through this process. For those who don’t know what DFU mode is, not to worry. The solution that I am sharing with you does not require you to enter into this mode.

My Own iPhone 5 Battery Problems

Before following these instructions, use of the iPhone 5 on WiFi plus being on the cellular network would drain the battery at about 10-20% / hour. This was not heavy use either, just some social media apps, email, short voice calls and texting. At this light usage rate, I would barely get to the end of the day before the iPhone needed a re-charge. When out and about without WiFi, the battery drain was even faster. As an example, before I finished breakfast and reading a few important emails, the phone would lose about 3-5% of its battery. This was through very light usage for only 15 minutes or so and it is just not acceptable.

The worst example I can share of the high battery drain is throughout the day, I would swipe to unlock the iPhone 5, quickly check emails, Facebook and Twitter, then leave the iPhone to dim itself after 1 minute. This was in both WiFi and LTE modes. Each time I did this, I can see the battery drain itself by 1% almost every single time. Again, this is just not acceptable.

Reports also show that users in a poor cellular signal strength area will use more battery as the iPhone is continuously trying to connect to a better signal (or something to that effect). LTE in my area is just ok, 2-3 bars and at times would bounce to 4 bars (out of 5). And apparently, LTE sucks up more juice than 3G and we all know that 3G usage already eats up battery quickly. Given this, the odds were stacked up against me in trying to find a fix. I just could not live with the fast battery drain and with more research, apparently this time, I beat the odds.

iPhone 5 Battery Draining Very Fast – SOLUTION

I am actually not sure who suggested this fix (I read quite a few tips and solutions during my research that I lost track) but this was what I tried and it completely reversed the ill effects of the iPhone 5 losing its battery way too quickly. Checking emails, Facebook and Twitter for 1 minute no longer costs me 1% of battery life! In fact, after the tweak, I have checked my email, Facebook and Twitter about 10 times AND sent an email with a photo attachment and have yet to see any battery % drop! Talk about a night and day difference.

If you also have a fast draining battery on the new iPhone 5, I hope this can help you too.

Note: I am running iOS 6.0.1 and experienced the fast battery drain. This solution fixed my problem!

1. Backup your iPhone after it is plugged in to your computer. Use iTunes to make a backup. Note, this is not just a Sync, it’s a backup. Plug the iPhone to your computer, wait until iTunes detects it. Inside iTunes, right click on your iPhone and start the backup.

2. On your iPhone 5, go to General >> Reset >> Reset All Settings (follow on-screen instructions). This should not (but I cannot guarantee it) delete any apps or data. It should only revert Settings of the iPhone like, Siri, ringtones and other settings to a default state. But do back up your photos and videos just in case before proceeding. I take no responsibility if your iPhone crashes, dies or if you lose any data after following these instructions.


3. After the Reset, the iPhone 5 will reboot. Use the remaining battery all the way down to to 0%. In fact, use it until the iPhone powers itself off. Just to be sure, wait 10-15 minutes after that just in case there is residual juice left over.

4. Now charge it up to 100% and leave it on the charger for an additional 30 minutes (just in case). This should take 2-3 hours.

Voila! The above fixed my iPhone 5 battery drain problem. The results were instant (right after the 0 to 100% charge up). The iPhone battery meter (image below) showed I used 11% during this 30 minute session of heavy usage – LTE / 3G going through about 10-15 MB of data using email, Facebook, Twitter, various apps, Safari surfing websites and the whole time with music playing. This may or may not seem good to you but I would have never gotten this prior to Reset All Settings. This battery usage rate, although not great, is much more acceptable than prior to the reset.

iPhone 5 Battery Draining Very Fast – Possible Solutions

I am not exactly sure what fixed the battery drain issue on the iPhone 5. Based on what I did, it could be any or all of the following:

A. Simply performing a Reset All Settings
B. Simply draining the iPhone to 0% before re-charging
C. A + B

In addition, I did remember seeing 4-5 crash reports before the Reset. Twice for the Skype app and at least once for the Camera app. Maybe the heavy battery usage was related to these app crashes? After the tweak, I only see a low battery log under Diagnostic & Usage. Perhaps the Reset cleared up some software issues that was somehow related to the battery drain?

So, a good tip is for all new iPhone 5 owners to perform this Reset right after you activate your new phone (before you install apps and add data). Doing it at this time has no downside and may just save you a bunch of hair pulling. Hope this helps.

Note: Did the above tweak work to fix your iPhone 5 battery drain problem?

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Over the weekend, gamers from and around Vancouver congregated at the Richmond Olympic Oval and took part in LANcouver 2012. For those who may not know, LANcouver is the largest LAN party around the Vancouver area where gamers bring their own computers and compete against one another. Complete with vendor booths, expert panels and even a live broadcasting team, LANcouver 2012 took up a large chunk of the Olympic venue and injected the sports complex with ample geekery and game strategy. I had the chance to witness some of the best Starcraft 2 and Counter Strike players compete against one another. Actions per minute (measurement of how fast gamers make react in a game) were off the charts and over 100 gamers hauled their computers and LCD monitors to take part in this event. Thanks to Stephen Fung, founder of Futurelooks.com for the invite. Enjoy the photos!

Stephen Fung and I. This is what happens when I pass my camera to a professional photographer at the event. I get a blurry pic back.

Notice the 5 green Olympic rings in the background?

Dennis Pang from Asus speaking and handing out swag

Lights and liquid cooling is the norm for gamers

Players receiving final instructions and seeing their tournament match ups for Lancouver 2012

Cool keyboard?

Michael Kwan testing out the PS3 system at a vendor’s booth

Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics podium used by presenters

The Richmond Olympic Oval was the venue where many speed skating events took place during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

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On June 21, 2012, Gloria Tsang, Founding Editor of HealthCastle.com, and I were invited to attend the grand opening of Minami Yaletown Restaurant. Located in the heart of Yaletown in Vancouver, Minami is poised to spread Aburi style sushi from Vancouver and beyond. In fact, we were there when Miku Restaurant, sister restaurant to Minami, first introduced Aburi style sushi to North America in 2008.

Owner and restaurateur Seigo Nakamura kicked off the evening by welcoming distinguished guests and media with an opening speech. This was followed by a traditional sake barrel-breaking ceremony. Traditional Japanese culture permeated the air this evening and the event was filled with plenty of good food and refreshing sake. A completely successful launch party indeed and thanks to Erica Pang for the invite. Here are some photos from the evening.

Here is a photo of Gloria Tsang and Seigo Nakamura, owner and restaurateur

Here, I am working hard

Here, I am hardly working

With the beautifully smart Teresa Lee

With the famed Ed Lau

Look for this sign at Minami Yaletown Restaurant

Fantastic Japanese mural at Minami Yaletown Restaurant

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Apple’s Home Sharing is a pretty powerful setup to share media on your home network; when it works that is. Unfortunately though, sometimes clients like an Apple TV would just lose connection and then complains that Home Sharing is not turned on. Sure enough, when you check iTunes, Home Sharing is not enabled. Here is a method that worked for me to keep Home Sharing on iTunes always enabled. This is meant for Windows 7 users.

1. Go to the Windows/Start Menu, type “Windows Firewall With Advanced Security” into the search box. Launch this application.

2. On the left menu bar, click on “Inbound Rules”. In the center area, look for all “Bonjour Services”. Then find Advanced >> Profiles. Make sure all 3 checkboxes (Domain, Private and Public) are checked off. Make sure Private is checked in both windows. Click apply. Note, if you don’t run Domain or you don’t know what Domain is, then make sure BOTH Public and Private are checked.

Hopefully, this will help you maintain a stable Home Sharing connection to iTunes. It did for me thank goodness.

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For all Blackberry owners who are having issues with Desktop Manager syncing properly with Outlook, you may be getting this or a similar message “Cannot log on to Exchange Server error. Please check server access or provide a valid password.”

Here is a quick fix that might help you get back on track.

1. Connect Blackberry to your computer’s Desktop Manager

2. Click “Organizer” on left side of Desktop Manager

3. Click “Reset Settings”

4. Run the set up process again

5. Sync your Blackberry

With any luck, this may help to fix that dreaded Exchange Server error.

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Recently, I ran into a major road block trying to record a few news clips from an HD DVR / PVR to a PC. A ton of research pointed me to try using firewire to download videos from the DVR to a PC. Unfortunately, there were no drivers available from Motorola for the DVR in question. There were, however, third party drivers available but they were not supported in a Windows 7 64-bit environment. Even if they were, I would not have installed them regardless since it was not supported by Motorola. My only option was to find a cost effective way to capture directly from the HDMI or component out of the DVR. Here is how to download and capture video from an HD DVR; see final video below.

>> Read the rest…

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This morning, a client noticed a malware warning from Google Chrome when they tried to edit an article in Drupal. It turned out to be a domain (svc.spellchecker.net) from CKEditor (a WYSIWYG editor) was the cause. After some digging around, here are 2 ways to disable CKEditor spell checker from running. Both methods solved the malware warning from Chrome for Drupal 6:

Method 1:

1. Go to /admin/settings/ckeditor
2. Select the profile that you use or go through all of them if you wish:
3. Click on “Advanced options”
4. Set Spell checker: No
5. Click Save
6. Clear cache just in case

Method 2:

1. Go to /admin/settings/ckeditor
2. Select the profile that you use or go through all of them if you wish:
3. Click on “Advanced options”
4. Add “config.scayt_autoStartup = false;” without quotes to “Custom javascript configuration” section
5. Click Save
6. Clear cache just in case

Based on the Chrome warning, spellchecker.net has been notified of the malware warning. Hopefully, there is a fix sooner rather than later so we can enable the spell checker for CKEditor once again.

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As a long time publisher in the digital realm, it’s always great to be able to shoot images myself that we use in articles, but most of the time, it just makes sense to buy an image. This frees up time so I can concentrate on the creation and publishing of the actual content instead. Over the years, I have been using iStockPhoto.com to purchase images for a publisher client. Recent policy and pricing changes at this royalty-free stock image site has encouraged me to look elsewhere for images.

Before I share my new source of stock images, let me share some thoughts on why we are looking for a supplement to iStockPhoto. When we first joined iStockPhoto, images used to cost about $1 USD / image for the lowest resolution size (which was higher resolution at the time than currently I might add). We mainly publish online so most of our needs are met by choosing the lowest web version. With increasing image prices and decreasing resolution size, it was time for me to find another source for royalty-free images.

>> Read the rest…

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Mobile carriers that allow internet tethering gave iPhone users the ability to share their mobile internet connection with notebooks and tablets. This is game changing technology and has been proven very useful for users not near a Wifi hotspot or those who choose not to use a free hotspot connection. Currently, not many mobile carriers allow internet tethering so when Apple launched the latest iPhone 4 and recent iOS’s with the new Wifi hotspot feature, it was warmly welcomed as it allowed iPhone 4 users to set up their own mini Wifi hotspots to share internet connectivity. The bad news for 3G and 3GS users was that this Wifi hotspot feature was only available for the iPhone 4. So unless you jailbreak your older iPhone, there is no way for an iPad or iPad 2 to use the mobile internet connection from a 3G or 3GS iPhone…. until today that is. Well, not exactly today, but it is only now that I found out that iOS 4.2.1 has enabled Bluetooth tethering for iPhones (even 3G and 3GS). This means I can now share my 3G mobile internet connection with an iPad without having to jailbreak. This let’s an iPad 2 grab and share the internet connection from my iPhone; although I have not tested this with other devices, I assume this would work with other Bluetooth enabled tablets like the iPad 1 as well. Of course, this only works if your mobile carrier allow your specific data plan to tether. Read on for detailed instructions on how to tether your iPad to your iPhone 3G or 3GS.

>> Read the rest…

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Recently, because a client’s Facebook Share count disappeared, I decided to replace the Share button with the newer Like button. The Like button works but sometimes, the count was still defaulting to zero even though many users have Liked a specific article. To try and fix this, I wanted to add meta info to each Like button. Meta info will allow posts to Facebook to be associated with a pre-specified image, URL and other article properties. Without this info, sometimes the system picks the correct image but most of the time it does not. I was hoping adding meta info will resolve the zero count issue for the Like button. The solution was to implement Opengraph Tags to add meat info to the Facebook Like button. Essensially, Opengraph tags will tell Facebook’s that a Like button is specifically linked to a particular article along with it’s title, description, image, article type, URL and site name. The site in question is powered by Drupal so I decided to give the Opengraph module a try. The only problem was, during installation, I received a server error like so:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mb_substr() in path/sites/all/modules/opengraph_meta/opengraph_meta.common.inc on line 127

>> Read the rest…

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For those who have waited patiently for the Cisco Linksys E4200 Gigabit, Wireless-N, Dual-Band router to arrive in Canadian retail stores, your wait is over. Cisco officially launched the E4200 on March 27, 2011 in Canada. Before I publish a more detailed article about putting the unit through its paces in a real world environment, here is a quick tweak to speed up slow uploads through the E4200. Setup was easy and most settings can be left at the default level. But one particular setting at default resulted in a slow internet upload speed. The E4200 is currently the highest consumer grade wireless router made by Cisco Linksys so take advantage of the new options available in the latest Linksys firmware. Log in to the unit and under Applications & Games >> QoS ,there is a setting for “Upstream Bandwidth“. Default for this is “Auto“. Linksys has an online UI setup so you can see this setting here. When in Auto mode, I was only getting about 60% (1.6 mbps) of my maximum upload speed. Once I manually set Upstream Bandwidth to 10 mbps, I was able to reach my maximum upload speed of 2.5 mbps. If you are experiencing a slow upload speed with the Linksys E4200, try setting Upstream Bandwidth at 2-3 times your maximum upload speed and you may just speed up slow internet upload speeds.

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It came time for me to purchase a new SDHC card and the requirement was that it had to be fast enough to cope with the high demands of dSLR burst-shooting and HD video recording. Given the current price point in Canada, the biggest bang for the buck for a branded SDHC card at this moment is a Kingston 32GB SDHC Class 10 card. For me, this card (including 12% tax) works out to be $2.66 / GB. Kingston is a reputable brand and their memory cards are significantly less expensive than the professional Sandisk Extreme line of memory cards. So after checking a few reviews and speed charts, I decided to buy the Kingston card and noticed Canadian retailers carried 2 SKU’s for this product; SD10/32GB versus SD10/32GBCR. In general, the CR version was about 10-20% lower in cost. Kingston’s website does not show any references for the lower cost CR version. The good news is Kingston support has confirmed that these two versions are identical products. The CR designation is “an international part number which is used for marketing purposes only. There is no physical difference as far as the actual product is concerned.” This was good enough for me. Once I receive card, I will post back about its capabilities for use in a newer dSLR. So if you are considering a Kingston 32GB Class 10 card for your photography and video needs, be sure to check and see if your retailer carries the lower cost SD10/32GBCR version.

***UPDATE***
November 17, 2010
So after receiving the product, I can confirm that although the UPC code says SD10/32GBCR, the actual SD card shows SD10/32GB (just like the image in this post). Looks like these 2 SKU’s are indeed used for the same product. Just find the lower cost version and purchase that one instead.
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