Wesley's Tool-Box

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.

After replacing the entire display assembly on my iPhone 6 Plus, everything seemed to be okay, except for one thing. The Touch ID sensor was not working for some reason, and it wouldn't respond to my fingerprint touches. The home button itself was working, and I could press it to go back to the home screen or call up the multitasking view.

When I went to the Settings app, Touch ID option was disabled. When I tried to re-enable it, the process immediately failed, showing the above on the screen. Also, the Reachability function that brings the screen area down half way did not work, either. This relied on lightly touching the home button quickly twice, so it must have been recognizing the fingerprint to function.


I remembered that the Touch ID cable on the display assembly's shield plate got weak while applying heat to loosen the adhesive. Thinking that maybe the connector was damaged, I ordered some replacement shield plates with the Touch ID cable on them.