Apple Recalls iPhone 3G USB Power Adapters

It seems that Apple just announced that the USB power adapter that comes with the iPhone 3G is being recalled due to some safety issues. To quote Apple:

Apple has determined that under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter's metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating a risk of electric shock. We have received reports of detached blades involving a very small percentage of the adapters sold, but no injuries have been reported.

This could lead to some pretty serious issues if people aren't careful, so it's best to get your adapter swapped out even if it seems fine. I've had my iPhone 3G since launch day and I've noticed that the prongs on my USB power adapter do feel kind of wobbly, but I haven't had any issues thus far.

They let you order a replacement online or you can go to your local Apple store starting October 10 to swap it out. Head on over to the Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program Website for more details and to request your replacement online. I put in my order for a replacement and it says it'll ship in 3 weeks, so if you want it sooner rather than later, it'll probably be best to make it to a store.

Are you the father?

Today over at dealnews, we listed the following deal: Ancestry.com: 50% off DNA Tests + extra 20% off

This struck me as kind of an odd deal, because for web-based companies, you may see things like 10% off the cost of membership, or a few bucks off a product a site offers, etc. But in this case, you get a DNA test for half off... plus an additional 20% off of that! A DNA test! That's not exactly something you see discounted every day... or ever, at all, I would imagine.

Someone should forward this on to Maury:

Battling the hurricane

So my hard drive story hasn't quite come to a peaceful close like I hoped... over the last few days my RAID has failed twice more. What's odd, is that it's the same drive bay that keeps having issues- the brand new drive is the one that has failed again. I'm currently in the process of rebuilding from failure #3, so I called up Apple to attempt to get it fixed, since it sounds like there has to be something wrong with that particular SATA connector or the ribbon, etc.
I got pushed up to a specialist and he confirmed that he also thinks it's the drive bay itself that's the issue and said I could either have someone come out to my house to repair it in the next day or so (I didn't know Apple offered this sort of support) or I could take it to an Apple store or authorized reseller and they'd fix it in-store (although it may take a couple days depending on various factors).
I opted for the store option and will be heading out to the Apple store tomorrow evening. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but the eye of hurricane Hanna is set to be on top of my location around 8 am tomorrow. I set my appointment for 7 pm to try to avoid as much of it as possible, since by 8 pm it's projected to be a bit further North.

This is, of course, my work computer, so it will be very painful if I'm without it for even part of a work day... but this needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. At least from all of this, I've learned that Apple offers an option to come to your house to fix a problem if you're using a desktop. Sending it around overnight would cost an exorbitant amount of money, among other things.

Playing the Stock Market Game

For the last few years I've been pretty interested in jumping into the stock market to see how I could do. It's basically like a game, as you jump on stocks you predict to be hot, watch them grow, and then cash out at the right time to collect your earnings. Then, if you want to keep playing, rather than collect that money, put it right back in the stock market to watch something else grow, cash out again, and keep repeating as your own cache of, er... cash... continues to grow... or shrink.

Yeah, the shrinking part is what keeps me apprehensive about it, because I don't want to dump a lot of money in there and end up losing it. Plus, with having to file it with your taxes and trade commission fees, you'd want a sizable amount of money in the stock market to make it worth the hassle.

That's where UpDown.com comes into play. You're given $1,000,000 in virtual money and play it against the real stock market. Not only does this let you get a feel for the market, but at the end of every month, if you beat the stock market, you're awarded with real money. That sounds pretty sweet. Granted, it's not much (I've made about 11 cents in real cash for the month of August after playing maybe 4-5 days), but hey... all I have to do is make stock picks and sit back and let it do its thing and I have the potential of getting real money out of it, but I won't lose real money. I like those odds.
If you decide to give them a shot, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave a comment or click the link below to use me as a referral. One other feature is that, as your invitees make money, you make a percentage by having invited them. So let's start a chain of winning stocks and help one another make some bank.

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Google Chrome Wants Your Content

I'm not one much for reading the EULA on the software I install since most of it will likely never affect me in any way... however someone pointed out to me a few passages from the EULA of Google's new web browser, Chrome:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in
Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the
Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give
Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-
exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish,
publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which
you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license
is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and
promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as
defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make
such Content available to other companies, organizations or
individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of
syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the
provision of those services.

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and
may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may
be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services,
queries made through the Services or other information.

As for the last one, I've already heard plenty of complaints about Google potentially placing ads in your browser, and if they do, I'll immediately stop any use of it. However, the licensing bit sounds a bit dubious. Sure, they're "allowing" you to keep your copyright on any content you submit, but they're granting themselves a license to use that content. Now, I *imagine* that this license is there simply to cover their backs for stuff like Google Cache, translation services, previews on search results, etc... but what if Google is secretly more evil than we think and they have something bigger in store? I can't imagine they'd find this blog particularly useful in piling on more money for them, but if they've got the license for the content produced by millions of people, the potential for abuse is endless.

I'm generally unable to use Chrome for the time being since there's no Mac version, which I'm a bit upset about. However, at least it gives the browser time (before I get to use it) to be inspected by the masses and if anything fishy is going on, I'm fairly confident it will quickly be made public.

RAID rebuilding

Well, this didn't go down quite as simply as I'd hoped... however, I do believe that the cause of the trouble was my own fault. As you can see in the screenshot in my previous post, it clearly states which drive has failed... however, that exact name is not present anywhere else that I saw... Disk Utility's RAID management section stated that "disk1s2" had failed... however, the RAID renames both drives to "RAID Slice" so you lose most of the differing characteristics, other than the fact that Disk Utility also tells you which drive bay each drive is in.... very great, invaluable feature. The problem, however, was that even in System Profiler, nothing referred to those drives in the precise way the RAID manager did... System Profiler referred to them as "disk1" and "disk2", which made me believe that "disk1" was the same as "disk1s2" since they're both "disk1". I imagine "s" maybe stands for "slice"... but both are listed as "s2" so I'm not entirely sure. I know some *nix, but not enough to get into RAID handling and that sort of thing.

In any regard, I determined that it was the drive in Bay 2 (disk1) that had failed. In fact, Disk Utility told me directly when I selected the drive that appeared in red in the left colum that it was the the bay 2 drive... but I of course wanted to be sure and didn't want to assume too much. So I proceeded to stick in the 500GB drive I received earlier so I could format it and copy the data from the RAID to it as a failsafe in case anything went wrong... but Disk Utility didn't seem to recognize the drive. So I rebooted the computer. Upon rebooting, Disk Utility began to automatically rebuild the array... odd, I thought a drive had failed.

Long story short, about 4-5 hours later it finished rebuilding and all seemed well. I rebooted a couple more times, copied data to/from the drive, ran a disk check, and everything seemed ok, as if the drive had magically fixed itself. However, I was still skeptical, since a drive that's "fine" shouldn't just fail like that... so I decided to replace the failed drive anyway and RMA it. I first decided to remove a drive 1 at a time and reboot to see if the computer would run ok with both. After the first run, it did. However, when I put both back in and rebooted, my dock had been reset to the default dock when you create a new account... but my data was all intact. I removed the drive from bay 3 again and rebooted... this time it failed to login. My home directory is located on the RAID, and OS X couldn't load my directory from that drive. So I shut down, put the drive back in and pulled out bay 2... started up, and the same thing occurred. I put in both, restarted, and it finally booted, but said the file system had failed and needed repairing, but I could operate in a degraded mode. I could use the computer, but not write any data to the RAID. I changed the location of my user directory to the 500GB drive, rebooted, and all seemed well- my desktop looked like it should.

So I opened Disk Utility and tried repartitioning the 2 RAID drives so I could rebuild the array... the drive in bay 3 reformatted just fine, but the drive in bay 2 could not reformat due to some file system error. I tried erasing, repartitioning, etc, and nothing worked. So I swapped it out with the new drive and rebuilt the RAID and am now copying data back to the RAID so I can change the location of my account login folder and be back up and running on the RAID as normal.

It seems the drive was in fact still acting up, so it will be replaced... I'm sure my constant rebooting and pulling out drives when it was probably trying to auto rebuild the array is what caused the further corruption, but it also helped me pinpoint for absolute certain which drive was acting up, so I'm glad for that regard- I'm also very glad I copied the drive to another location before attempting any of this, or there's a big chance I may have lost it all... NOT something I want to happen.

Rebuilding the RAID and getting it back up has been a piece of cake, however. Once this is all done, I still think I'll replace my boot drive with the 500GB one I got, as it has a much larger cache and I think my system will benefit from that. I may wait until the weekend or something, though.