Gimme Shelter

Marie's home for broken, abandoned iPhones got a new family member yesterday, courtesy of Ed Ward who was passing through town.

I can't wait to see if I can make it work. Unfortunately, this project has to wait for next week as I'm on a deadline, editing a prose novel for my alma mater-comic book company.

Hanging on the Telephone

Remember these?

They seem so gross now. Not to mention broken.

Packing Up the Guidebooks

Ugh, I have all these old guidebooks to throw out or recycle. I don't know if you can recycle paperbacks—what about the glue in the spine?

You can tell these are really old by their design. The current Lonely Planets don't have bands across the top and bottom.

How old are these? Embarrassingly old. I used the East Africa, Central Asia, and Berlin ones in MariesWorldTour.com 2001. Eek. The information in these books is not going to be real useful to me.

Or to anyone else. I can't even donate them.

But I've learned my less and am being proactive this time. I bought a lot of Bradt guidebooks before I left home for my 2011 trip. I took notes, scanned in what I could, and left these heavy books home in favor of my Kindle.

So now, before they get old, I've boxed them all up for trade-in. Angola, Nigeria, two copies of the Congos guidebook, and a Lonely Planet Tahiti, all going out to the third-party reseller. I can't even take the time to sell these myself on Amazon, or they might end up past their pull date.

They go into the post tomorrow. 

At Least They Were On Sale

Sometimes you have to buy the whole box to get the stegosaurus.

Fun with Gadgets

I found an old 3G iPhone in my electronics recycling pile when I got home from MariesWorldTour. (When Ray sublet from me, he wasn't sure what to do with some old hard drives and a broken iPhone, so he asked me to recycle them, which I can as a resident of Jersey City.) 

I don't think he counted on my fascination with taking things apart, though.

The 3G phone wouldn't turn off. The case was broken—Ray found it on the ground, cracked and semi-functional—and the power switch doesn't work. I tried to erase the phone but can't get past the start-up pineapple icon. I tried letting the battery run out as a restart, but I still get the pineapple when I plug the phone in. (iPhones unlocked with the pwnage tool give you a pineapple instead of an apple.)

The next step is to take the case off and sort out the on-off switch manually. I ordered a $14.95 back case for this thing, which might help, but I may still end up with a pineapple that won't stop when all this is over.

But look at all the fun I'm having in the meantime.