Wesley's Tool-Box

Apple Watch can do many things, but it is first a wristwatch. Naturally, the watch face is the default screen of the device. It is customizable, but in order to do so you need to know a new touch screen interaction method called Force Touch. Basically, you press on the screen as if to push a stiff button. Once you do that on the watch face, you can browse through ten choices which includes various analog, digital, and celestial faces.

After choosing a watch face, it can be further customized. The complications around the time display can be set to show various information, which includes the day of the month, upcoming schedule, temperature, workout progress, and the phase of the Moon. Some of the elements of the watch can also have their colours changed and the styles of some of the analog faces can be altered.

At the time of the writing, 3rd party custom watch faces cannot be loaded into the watch. But the UI seems to suggest that this may become possible in the future; you can add or subtract the existing choices. Having ten choices with varying levels of tweaking might not leave a massive amount of choices, but at least they are pretty solid ones that can get you by for the time being.


I've talked about the locking of the watch previously. This happens if you set up a passcode and the device is removed from your wrist. As long as it's on your wrist, it assumes that the user is the rightful owner and stays unlocked.

If it does get locked, the time telling functionality is the only thing that remains functional. Attempting any interaction results in prompting for the passcode as you can see here. You can either enter the correct passcode, or unlock the paired iPhone to authenticate your identity and regain normal functionality.

Currently, like the rest of the wristwatches or smart watches, Apple Watch lacks an activation lock that prevents anyone stealing it from resetting it and using it as one's own. However, the passcode and lock should guard your personal information from someone trying to peek through the device.

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.

I had been using my iPhone 6 Plus with the repaired screen for a few weeks without issues. But one day, I put the phone down on the desk a bit hard... and the screen somehow cracked like crazy even though the screen was facing up. I suppose the previous incident weakened the screen already and this was sort of a final blow.

You can see that the cracks occurred near the original hairline cracks and spread dramatically. Much of the original cracks were held together by the glue, but the nearby areas were already vulnerable to crack anyway. While the touch screen functionality was not affected, the cracks undermined the safety of my fingers and the visibility. It was time to try the Screen Glue again.

I've cracked the back side of an iPhone when it was made of glass, but never the front side. That changed with iPhone 6 Plus - the screen got hairline cracks when the device was dropped from about 50cm (1 1/2 feet) high onto a brick road. Getting an iPhone bought overseas serviced by an Apple designated service center in Korea isn't possible due to local warranty (as opposed to world-wide), so I looked for other ways to get this fixed.


This is when I found this "Screen Glue" manufactured by DiYPRO which claimed to fix screen cracks by filling the gaps with a UV-curing glue. The package, which costs about US$17, comes with 5 ml of the glue and a sheet of instructions. Frankly, the price seemed steep for the amount of glue provided, but if it could get the job done, I thought it wasn't too bad. So I bought a bottle and got to work.