Wesley's Tool-Box

This post should have been up much earlier, but thanks to a week-long business trip it was inadvertently delayed. Anyways, going back to the day I got the Apple Watch two weeks ago, I noticed that the longer sport band was pre-installed on my 42mm version. I have a relatively thin wrist, around 170 to 175mm circumference, which is at the lower end of the Apple's 165 - 195mm range for most men. So I felt that a shorter one would do just fine.

Switching the band was quite easy. I just pressed the button at the back of the watch near the band and the band was slid out smoothly. Then I inserted the shorter band into place, after which the button clicked and the band was locked.


With the right band in its place, I put the watch on my wrist. Initially, I had the pin on the 3rd notch from the end as you can see here. After a day, I felt that the watch was put on too tight - there was a bit of an ache where the watch's back pressed on my wrist. So the pin was put on the 2nd notch thereafter.

This was much more comfortable, as the Apple Watch was able to shift around the wrist more. But this occasionally made the watch go into the locked state because it thought that it was no longer touching the wrist (more about locking in another post).

Apple Watch first arrived at the hands of the regular users of the first wave countries in April 24, 2015. But it would not be sold at the Apple Store for the first few weeks, so either you had to get your order practically within seconds of the start of the pre-ordering back in April 10, or buy it at a handful of retailers that did get to sell them in the store at the launch. Because of this difficulty, apparently only a trickle have made over to Korea as of this writing, with the official launch date still unclear.

Meanwhile, my American friend Andy accidentally ordered two Apple Watches during the pre-order phase. His first choice, a silver Apple Watch Sport with green sport band, was slated to arrive between April 24 and May 8, but arrived at the launch day (April 24). He's been enjoying it since. His second choice, a space gray Apple Watch Sport with black sport band, was to arrive between May 13 and 27, but it arrived much sooner, on April 27. I asked him to ship the second one over to me, as I would pay him fully. He gladly accepted the offer, and sent it to Korea just after receiving it. Children's Day delayed the arrival a bit, but it finally came into my hands today.


I got to make this unboxing video soon after. You can see how one hand was recording the action and the other was furiously trying to open the box. Once everything was open, the full extent of what came with the package became visible. There's of course the watch itself, and the shorter lower strap for people with thinner wrist like me was also there. The magnetic wireless charger and a user manual was also included.


In the coming days, I'll post incremental reviews of the watch as I try to blend this into my daily life.

For the past two weeks, I've been having a strange problem when attempting to place calls with my iPhone 6 Plus. Many of the phone numbers that I know for sure exist would be met with "the number you dialed is not in service". If I switch the "Enable LTE" option in Settings app to "Data Only" instead of "Voice & Data", the phone calls would go through just fine. So it had to be an issue with VoLTE.

I first contacted my carrier, SK Telecom, to see if this was a problem at its end. But nothing turned up and I was eventually advised to contact Apple instead. Sure enough, colleagues using iPhone 6 on the same carrier did not have the problem. Digging deeper, I discovered that the problem did not occur only if I had country code prefix (e.g. +82 for Korea) on the phone number. So while +82-10-xxxx-yyyy would work, 010-xxxx-yyyy wouldn't.

Seeing that it might be some sort of a weird software issue, I contacted Apple support about this. Unfortunately, no clear solution came up, either. As a last resort, I was told to do a complete factory reset and see if that helped. As the troubleshooting was reaching a dead-end, I got a carrier settings update as I opened up the "About" page in Settings app. It updated the carrier settings from SK Telecom 18.x to 19.1. I told the support that I'd see if this update did anything, and if not, I might try the factory reset.

I attempted several calls to various places with the VoLTE setting on, and I saw that all of the calls now made through regardless of the country code prefix. The update apparently fixed the problem. It was indeed a software problem, but it was somewhat caused and fixed by the carrier. I reported this success to Apple support.

I've mentioned earlier that one of the collimator screws on my Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope was completely stuck, preventing proper calibration. It was so bad that the screw's head became stripped in the attempts to unscrew it, and pliers were of no use, either. To fix this problem, I ordered Anex ANH2-065, a stripped screw extraction kit made in Japan for US$20. It had a lot of favourable reviews, so I thought I might as well try it.

The kit came with two drill bits, one for working with 2.5 to 3mm screws (red) and the other, 4 to 5mm screws (yellow). One end of each bit is used for drilling a small hole in the middle of the screw and the other end is a reverse-threaded tap that gets inserted into this hole. As you turn the bit counter-clockwise, the tap burrows into the screw. Eventually, the screw is supposed to turn with it and come out.


NexStar 6SE's collimator screw is the same one used with C6, an M3 (3mm) type with 12mm length, so I got my old cordless drill charged up and inserted the red bit. I set the torque level to low to reduce the risk of damage, and carefully drilled out a tiny hole about 4mm deep into the stuck screw.

Rear camera on iPhones doesn't seem to have any gaps for dust to get in, but for some reason it gets in on rare occasions. You could take the phone to an authorized service center for either cleaning or refurbishment, or if that's not a viable option like my case, you could do the cleaning yourself.

To do that, you need to first open up the phone and separate the display assembly from the rest of the phone. The cables connecting the two are held by five screws and a cover plate, so once you take them out, the four cables can be popped off with a spudger.


To access the rear (back) camera, you need to remove two screws that hold the cover plate for the camera on the top right area of the phone. The screw on the left is obscured by a black pad, so you need to lift it slightly with something like a flathead screwdriver while you unscrew. The cover plate may not completely become loose, but it does not need to be.