Repairing and Replacing the Nexus 5 Screen

Anyone who has ever owned a smartphone knows the horror that strikes when you drop your phone. The split second as the phone goes air-born and falls towards the ground elongates, your muscles refuse to respond fast enough, and you watch in despair as your $400 piece of electronics falls towards the hard ground. Sometimes it lands on the back and you breath a sigh of relief; other times it lands on the glass but you get lucky. But unless you buy a good case, you will almost certainly eventually end up with something that looks like this:

My Nexus 5 After a Fall

Depending on your smartphone, the difficulty of fixing the display after such a fall varies. In the case of the Nexus 5, unfortunately, the Gorilla Glass is bonded to the digitizer and LCD beneath, and while it's in theory possible to replace just the glass, in practice that can take hours and result in a less than ideal result. After researching the process of trying to repair just the broken glass, and finding a lengthy video documenting the process (which required more than a few specialized tools), I did the sensible thing and ordered a complete screen and case assembly.

Google AdSense: All Hail Our Digital Overlords

Welcome to the new, advertisement free blogs of yours truly. Apparently, I have violated Google's AdSense policy, and as such, my AdSense account has been disabled. The specific reason(s) for my account being disabled are not known, because such things are secret. Basically, "we could tell you but then we'd have to kill you." Seriously -- it's almost that bad! Check out the information:

"Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we're unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that might have been involved."

So you don't know why your account was deleted, other than that "something" happened that they deemed in violation of their policy. I have a guess as to what may have happened to me (people on my local IP clicking ads, including perhaps young children -- also potentially frequent refreshing of web pages from my home IP), but what's bothersome is this: if Google, at their sole discretion, deems any clicks or page hits to be invalid, they already remove those clicks and/or hits from your earnings. You don't get paid, you don't get warned, and they still shut down your AdSense account. How does anyone make money (other than Google, naturally) from AdSense!? (Other possibilities: me linking BTC and LTC at the bottom of each post may have been a violation, or perhaps any Amazon Affiliate links -- either could potentially be "cause for concern".)

What bothers me most is the timing of this. I've had an AdSense account for about seven months. During that time, I have not had any violations that I'm aware of (not that they'd tell me, I suppose), and I have basically been using my blog sites in the same way as far as I can tell. Right now, I have "potential earnings" but have not received any actual money as I have not met the minimum payment threshold of $100. Based on my traffic, I should have hit that $100 mark this month, but wouldn't you know it: I violated their policies and now any and all AdSense revenue is gone. Seems like a great way to get out of paying a blogger $100 while still keeping all of the revenue from the actual advertisers!

Nearly 50,000 page views, fought and scrapped for, have all been for naught, at least as far as advertising income goes. Obviously, I'm not doing this blogging for the direct advertising money (I'd be making something like $0.10 per hour I think, if I were to get that $100 AdSense payment). However, the principle of the matter is greatly frustrating. Lately I've been averaging around $20-$30 in revenue per month, which if nothing else is a nice little surprise when you actually get paid. ("Hey honey, let's go out to eat -- my treat!") Barring people actually donating via BTC/LTC, about all that I've gotten out of these blogs is a few nice comments and maybe $5 or so in Amazon Affiliate links. Woohoo! I'm rich! (LTC mining, incidentally, even at the current increased difficulty continues to generate more than $20 in income per day from my computers -- 30X more profitable than AdSense, and thankfully it can't be arbitrarily seized by Google.)

I can also look at my blog traffic (where I don't even include my own visits, as I have the potential to open the site on upwards of a dozen different PCs each day), and from that I can see that at least 75% of all traffic is 100% guaranteed to not be from me (i.e. the traffic comes from the wrong browser -- I never use Internet Explorer, Safari, Android, or iOS, and rarely use Firefox). Of course, the Blogger statistics are also a fair estimate, showing around 200-500 Pageviews every day (and at best only 2% or so would possibly come from me). And any and all YouTube traffic would have been valid -- I don't have time to visit YouTube and watch a video so that I can click on an advertisement, so I only go there when I'm uploading a new video. So most likely, of the blog traffic that actually earned revenue, all of it was legit (since the 2% that wasn't legit was already removed by Google -- I assume if a page hit or click came from my home IP, it didn't count, right?) But, their system has detected some violation, I don't know what exactly, and so I'm out of luck and Google keeps the $90 or whatever that I had almost earned.

Naturally, I have appealed the decision, and I even admit some clicks and refreshes came from my home IP address. (I view my own blogs, duh. So if there's a typo or comment, I'm going to reload a page several times, plus hitting the URL so that I can post it to Facebook. And on occasion, there's an advertisement that is either so bad or in rare instances potentially useful that I've clicked it.) We'll see how the appeal goes, and I'll be sure to report the result here, but I suspect this blog entry alone will be enough to ensure I don't get reinstated. I do love this part of the appeal FAQ: "Once we've reached a decision on your appeal, further appeals may not be considered, and you might not receive any further communication from us." So, they will come to a decision, it will be final, and most likely you'll never hear more from Google again. Nice, guys. Way to take your ball and go home.

Over the many years that I've been in the tech industry, I've heard people express concern about the success of Google -- and their size, data mining, etc. Most of the time someone says, "I wouldn't trust my data to Google..." you'll hear someone else jump to their defense. Well, actions like this in regards to AdSense are part of the reason people don't trust Google. They can do whatever they want, and it's your privilege to serve them. Blogger/Blogspot was one of their many acquisitions, along with DoubleClick and many other companies. People used to be afraid of the size of Microsoft or Intel; these days, I'd say Google and Apple are far scarier propositions!

On the bright side, I won't worry about trying to generate any other revenue through advertising. I suppose there's a chance my AdSense appeal will be heard and those will start showing up again, but it doesn't seem likely. Big Brother was watching, and I got the one strike you're out ruling. Don't bother to try signing up again, as they'll notice that at some point (probably right before you get your first $100 check) -- and if you're related to me, that might be enough for Google to question your account as well!

As for me, I continue to write on the Internet, here and elsewhere. This sort of stuff is nothing new, and as one of the largest and most successful businesses around, Google knows how it's done. One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; Google will soon buy out any remaining competition. And I for one welcome our new digital overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground spambot search optimization networks.

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W
LTC: LXpEZcNJtikd263z7Ha3vrdYDcLU7hiKWv

Please, DON'T Share!

My Facebook feed gets an all-too-regular feature: "Please share this to everyone you know, you might save one's life." Really? Are we talking about "save you from something that's really likely to happen", or is this more "please forward my spam"? 99.99% of the time, it's the latter. I wish more of my friends, family, and Facebook acquaintances would take just a few seconds to search Snopes -- or Google -- for details before sharing such "important" information. Here's one for you, though, including an awesome picture (note that all typos have been preserved -- FYI, bad grammar and spelling is another sign that something might not be entirely factual):

A couple lost their 25 year old son in a fire at home on June 4th. The son who had graduated with MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison two weeks earlier had come home for a while. He had lunch with his dad at home and decided to go back to clean up his hostel room. His father told him to wait, to meet his mother, before he went back for a few days. He decided to take a nap while waiting for his mom to come back home from work. Some time later their neighbors called 911 when they saw black smoke coming out of the house.

Unfortunately, the 25 years old died in the three year old house. It took several days of investigation to find out the cause of the fire. It was determined that the fire was caused by the laptop resting on the bed. When the laptop was on the bed cooling fan did not get the air to cool the computer and that is what caused the fire. He did not even wake up to get out of the bed because he died of breathing in carbon monoxide.

The reason I am writing this to all of you is that I have seen many of us using the laptop while in bed. Let us all decide and make it a practice not to do that. The risk is real. Let us make it a rule not to use the laptop on bed with blankets and pillows around. Please educate as many people as you can.

While a fire in the house is no joke, the likelihood of it being cause by an overheating laptop is dubious. Yes, it could happen, but hopefully we all have enough common sense to not try to suffocate our electronics. ever been to a data center with the massive AC units? That's all in the interest of keeping the servers running cool. If you're dumb enough to put a laptop on a pillow running full tilt and have it set to not go to sleep or hibernate, well, good luck with that. I doubt it will catch fire, but there's a good chance it will crash or perhaps even kill off some of the electronics and make it unusable. (Technical note: I haven't heard of a CPU or GPU catching fire since about 2003 or so, as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and others have all implemented thermal protection.)

The above image looks to me like someone was frustrated with a Dell laptop and took an acetylene torch to it rather than a laptop that caught fire on its own. (It definitely didn't go through a house fire, as the rest of the plastic would also be melted.) It's possible that the battery on that particular model was near the front and caught fire, though -- it's just attached to a message with a story that may or may not have been caused by a laptop.

Anyway, I mentioned Snopes before, so let me show you how it's done. Go to www.Snopes.com and pick out some prominent key words that are likely to only show up in a few places. For this particular incident, how about the school name and the event (University Wisconsin Madison Fire). Boom! Ten seconds and we've found this page. Now, this one is marked "undetermined" because it's possible that the laptop did cause a fire, but as Snopes points out, a bad battery or faulty wiring is the most likely culprit -- not a blocked vent caused by putting a laptop on your pillow. The latter might end up ruining your laptop, and in some extreme cases it's possible (though unlikely) that your battery might explode.

If you happen to not like Snopes, there are plenty of other places to search. Try Google, for example, and we get a bunch of other hoax and urban legend sites basically reiterating what I and Snopes have said. Maybe this is a bad example, but we can drum up any number of other options -- I just used this one since I happen to work with laptops on a daily basis (and have yet to have any catch fire, despite plenty of torture testing).

The key takeaway is this: if something asks you to repost and share to everyone, please take a second to think about why you would want to pass it along. Chances are, it has already been shared plenty, and even more likely is that it's mostly fabricated information, perhaps with a kernel of truth but a bunch of cruft getting in the way. Sharing half-truths only makes you look uninformed at best, or completely stupid at worst. And no one wants to look stupid, right?

(For the record: this laptop scare showed up more than once on my Facebook feed in the not so distant past. Considering that the event described happened over two years ago -- and the actual cause still wasn't listed as the laptop last it was updated -- I chose it as my target for this rant. The fact is, this is one of the least annoying spams going around; many are far worse. And let's not even get into the whole "please repost this to your FB page so that I'll know I'm loved" angsty posts.)

BTC: 1JSrAuxPUhD2rS6yYLiPPT6X8fvz7c7k1W