Lauren Goode takes you on a detailed walk through your options. Two stand out. The first is to have an iCracked tech come to you:

I went to iCracked’s website last Tuesday and requested a tech. Within seconds I had a text message from a repair tech. We chatted on the phone, during which time he gave me an estimate. We scheduled an appointment.

On Thursday he showed up at my door with his toolkit. The repairs should take under an hour and average around $99, according to the company. It took my iTech around 25 minutes to fix the iPhone 5S, which was great. But it cost $213, including components, labor and tax.

Afterwards, I tested it to make sure it was working properly. So far, it’s been working as it should.

Another option is to fix the screen yourself using an iFixit repair kit.

I purchased an iPhone 5 repair kit for around $165, including tax and shipping, from iFixit’s website. Within a couple days my kit arrived in the mail. It included a new iPhone 5 screen, a suction cup, two tiny screwdrivers, a plastic pry tool and a magnetized project board with a dry-erase marker – a good idea, since the screws you’re working with are speck-sized.

Then I went to iFixit’s iPhone 5 online repair guide. This is published by the techs at iFixit, but also offers helpful comments and suggestions from other users. The company just put out its iPhone 5S repair guide today, but there’s a reason why I opted to test the DIY kit on a broken iPhone 5 and not my iPhone 5S: I was concerned I might damage the cable that runs under the TouchID fingerprint sensor and disable it.

Disassembling the phone was the easy part (see video below). I was a little bit surprised when I got to the end of those steps, popped the new display in the phone and the iFixit guide told me to just reverse what I had done. Um, okay.

Aside from handling really, really tiny screws, the dicey part was reconnecting the earpiece speaker and camera sensor. I was positive those weren’t going to work once I reassembled the thing. Miraculously, they worked.

It took me an hour and ten minutes to replace the screen myself.

Personally, I would go the iFixIt route. I love taking things apart and putting them back together. Sometimes, the things even work again after I am done with them. Heh.

Good article, Lauren. I learned a lot.

Very interesting piece (behind free reg-wall) on Google’s slow move into sports broadcasting, an area traditionally dominated by the major networks and satellite/cable conglomerates.

YouTube has aggressively chased content over the last several years, and may have created the infrastructure to expand it to historic levels. YouTube has already inked a deal with the NBA D-League to air more than 90% of games, and is predicted to bid for MLS soccer rights in 2014.

Imagine watching the Olympics on YouTube, NetFlix, Hulu, or on some network that isn’t even born yet.

Kirk McElhearn walks through the process of sharing files between two AirDrop capable iOS devices. My instinct is to email any files I want to share. I asked Kirk when he would use AirDrop instead of email. His response:

That’s what I used to do. AirDrop is faster for photos or PDFs. It’s just one step less. And if files are too large such as very big PDFs, they might not fit through email. For photo: AirDrop: Tap, tap, tap, done. By email: tap, type address, send, check mail on other device, wait, tap to save, etc.

I found this writeup fascinating and I’m glad to know how this works.

Finally, why can’t you share files between OS X and iOS? This is surprising, since they both have AirDrop. I’d often like to move photos from my iPhone to my Mac more easily than by syncing. And I’d occasionally like to send PDFs to my iPad to read without having to sync or send them by email.

Agreed.

To help combat the rising tide of spam, some users have turned to disposable email addresses that can be easily destroyed or deactivated once abused by a spammer. These accounts usually forward mail to a permanent email address without exposing said address to unwanted parties. This saves users from the hassles associated with changing a permanent email address, such as remembering and notifying important contacts.

As it stands, the disposable email system is cumbersome, says Apple, and may require obtaining accounts from sources other than their primary provider. The generated account names are usually easily recognizable and are sometimes not accepted by certain automated online services that block bots.

Apple proposes an automated system that in some embodiments automatically creates and handles a temporary email address, associating it with a permanent non-disposable address. If and when a disposable account is misused, the user can dump it and move on to a new one without ditching their permanent address.

I do this exact thing — create a series of temporary email addresses whose sole purpose is to draw spam away from my main email accounts. This sounds like a good solution.

Former Apple interface designer Bas Ording tells how text selection made its way into the iPhone interface.

Ording — who left Apple last year after 15 years with the company — worked on multiple versions of the iPhone from the first generation model onwards. Other than the text selection patent, his main contributions included the look and feel of the iPhone’s pre-iOS 7 virtual keyboard, and the device’s scrolling functionality — including the recognizable “bounce” effect seen when you reach the bottom of a page.

Good read.

In response to Apple’s release last week of their Supplier Responsibility report, Greenpeace posted this comment:

“Apple’s increased transparency about its suppliers is becoming a hallmark of Tim Cook’s leadership at the company. Apple has flexed its muscles in the past to push suppliers to remove hazardous substances from products and provide more renewable energy for data centers, and it is proving the same model can work to reduce the use of conflict minerals. Samsung and other consumer electronics companies should follow Apple’s example and map its suppliers, so the industry can exert its collective influence to build devices that are better for people and the planet.”

[Via Peter Cohen]

Wall Street Journal:

Starbucks isn’t an Olympic sponsor and is therefore forbidden to have an official presence here. But after Mr. Glinton, a journalist for NPR, trailed the mystery cup for several hundred feet, its owner told him that he was out of luck. It came from the”Office,” she said – the Olympic broadcasting center where NBC has its own secret Starbucks.

The best line of the piece had to be from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sports columnist Dejan Kovacevic who carries around an empty Starbucks cup and pours other coffee into it. He said, “It’s a status symbol,” he explains. “It shows I’m not some kind of lowlife.”

If you believe that, you’re still some kind of lowlife.

Many thanks to MacPaw for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. If you’re looking for some more disk space or just want a cleaner Mac, MacPaw has a fresh utility that you should check out; it’s called CleanMyMac 2.

CleanMyMac 2 helps you clean out unwanted apps, data, and gigabytes of junk on your Mac. It’s a powerful cleaning app that’s beautifully designed to make cleaning and organizing your Mac as simple as can be. With CleanMyMac 2, you can manage widgets and extensions, fix broken apps, drastically reduce your iPhoto Library, and clean out old, neglected files that waste disk space.

And, thanks to its Safety Database, you can rest easy knowing that CleanMyMac 2 is 100% safe to use. The Safety Database is a gigantic collection of rules and exceptions for cleaning up and uninstalling nearly anything on your Mac! It has over 5 years of data and is updated regularly. With CleanMyMac 2 and its Safety Database, your Mac is in good hands.

So, why put off getting yourself a faster, cleaner Mac? Download CleanMyMac 2 right now to see how easy cleaning your Mac can be!

I’m a huge fan of Olympic hockey. The rink size and rule changes make the game more exciting, allow for better skating and passing. I also think the scoring is better, with 3 points for a regulation win, 2 points for an OT win, and 1 point for an OT loss.

Opinion aside, I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand the rules for moving from round to round. The linked site lays all that out nicely.

From the SlickLogin site:

We started SlickLogin because security measures had become overly complicated and annoying.

Our friends thought we were insane, but we knew we could do better. So we set out to improve security while still making it simple for people to log in.

Today we’re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way. Google was the first company to offer 2-step verification to everyone, for free – and they’re working on some great ideas that will make the internet safer for everyone. We couldn`t be more excited to join their efforts.

From the linked article:

The idea behind SlickLogin was, at the very least, quite novel: to verify a user’s identity and log them in, a website would play a uniquely generated, nearly-silent sound through your computer’s speakers. An app running on your phone would pick up the sound, analyze it, and send the signal back to the site’s server confirming that you are who you say you are — or, at least, someone who has that person’s phone.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I struggle with the details. If Apple does not change their mechanics (and why would they?), a user would have to take their phone out of their pocket, fire it up, and take some action to get the phone to listen to the sound played by the web site. That sounds like a non-starter to me.

And if Google goes it alone, building SlickLogin support into the OS, they’ll still have a hard sell getting web sites to adopt a system that is unavailable to half the phones in the world.

Still, this technology is compelling. It’ll be interesting to see Google’s next move here.

A little slanted, perhaps, but still a very interesting read. Interesting take on the timing of Tim Cook’s hiring in 1998. No argument that Apple has been better in the Tim Cook era.

The Atlantic:

Recently I watched the four-episode original BBC House of Cards series from 1990. It’s on Netflix too, and, seriously, if you are interested in either politics or satire, this is not to be missed.

As a Canadian, I usually love the British originals of American shows better but the comparisons between both of these very good adaptations of the book is interesting.

Phys.org:

Ten questions about physical and biological science were on the quiz, and the average score—6.5 correct—was barely a passing grade.

Just 74 percent of respondents knew that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

One in three respondents said science should get more funding from the government.

Apparently, so should science education.

Bored Panda

There are many biological theories behind why women live longer than men, but we’re sure that behavior like that in these pictures isn’t helping.

There’s an amazing amount of The Stupid going on here.

As the music industry races toward a future of digital streams and smartphone apps, its latest crisis centers on a regulatory plan that has been in place since “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was a hit.

Since 1941, Ascap and BMI, the two giant licensing organizations that dominate music publishing, have been governed by consent decrees with the Justice Department. These agreements were made to guarantee fair royalty rates for songwriters and for the radio stations, television networks and even restaurants and retail shops that play their music.

But with the industry struggling to make money from digital music, this system has come under attack. The streaming service Pandora is squaring off against Ascap in a closely watched trial over royalty payments. Big music publishers like Sony/ATV and Universal are calling on the government to overhaul the system, and technology companies are accusing the publishers of trying to skirt federal rules meant to protect them.

The outcome could reshape the finances of a large part of the industry.

Another potential game changer for an already disrupted market.

The installation of 65 iBeacons at Dodger Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego’s Petco Park, home of the Padres, will be followed by similar work at more than a dozen and a half other MLB stadiums, the league said. The plan is to have more than 20 ballparks in total equipped with the technology by Opening Day in late March. The Padres host the Dodgers on Opening Night on March 30.

I’m really looking forward to giving these iBeacons a try.

These games have hidden unused pieces of text, never intended to be seen during gameplay, because developers have voices too. These include things like programmer shout-outs, messages aimed at hackers trawling through the game data, and the furious ranting of overworked, underpaid coders doing crunch-time.

This is a pretty good list. 423 games. How many of these do you remember?

This theremin was implemented using the Web Audio API. Tried to play the Star Trek theme. I think I won’t quit my day job.

A lot of fun!

The Stop Bad Patents web site is a resource to learn about patent trolls and patent abuse. Worth a look.

The Hemingway app is what Word could be if it had a more informative, tunable interface. You type in some text, and you get feedback on things like run-on sentences, word misuse, much more. The interface allows you to turn on and off checks for hard to read sentences, adverb overuse, passive voice misuse, and more.

This is the tip of the iceberg as to what might be done with an interface like this. Helpful to professional writers, but could be an incredible boon to writing students. I would love to see technology like this built into Safari.

UPDATE: Reader Jim “The Beard” Dalrymple pointed me to this post which runs Hemingway’s actual writing through the Hemingway app. Pretty funny.

Ben Thompson nailed this one.

Globally, cousin marriages are still going strong, with an estimated 10% of all marriages in the world being between cousins, and has high as 50% in some regions of the world.

I had no idea!

Khoi Vinh, the former Design Director at NYTimes.com, posted two new logos he’s been working on. I always find it interesting to see what people like Khoi come up with.

The analyst’s comments about docking stations etc. are asinine and Rene Ritchie agrees. The future of computing is going to be about us, and not as much about the device we carry. The device to make this all work could be as small as a pin, but more powerful than anything on the market today. Rene sums it up nicely in the last sentence.