My first iFixit guide

Sony CDP-CE375 Belt Replacement

Sony's CDP-CE375 is a great 5-disc CD changer. But over time, its two belts (loading belt for opening the drawer and rotary belt rotating the disc-tray) can stretch, preventing the device from operating properly.

This guide shows how to replace both belts.

I'm very proud of this. Both for repairing my CD player and for writing what I think is a very good guide for others to follow.

ElectroBoom: Violent iPhone Repair

This is NOT how you should try to repair the camera on your iPhone:

I just replaced Jen's iPhone battery

Jen's iPhone, which is approaching two years old, has lost its ability to hold a charge. The battery would lose 20% of its power per hour, just sitting in standby. So I went on-line to buy a new battery and installed it last night. The process was much simpler than I had expected, although you must be able to manipulate some extremely tiny screws in the process.

The instructions I followed are available here.

I bought a battery and matching toolkit (two small screwdrivers, plastic pry-tool and two tiny Phillips-head screws to replace Apple's annoying pentalobe screws,) from iFixit for $30. It took about 10 minutes (not counting the time to sync and backup the phone) to complete this repair. Far better than sending it to Apple, who would charge $80 and hold on to the phone for a week.

All of our battery problems appear to have gone away, thanks to this relatively simple fix.

Repairing a Rock Band guitar's tilt sensor

Last week, I decided to play Rock Band. If you don't know anything about this game, you might just want to stop reading now. If you have played the game, you are probably aware that in order for a guitar/bass player to activate the "overdrive" feature, he must either tilt the guitar into a vertical orientation or press its start button. Although some players disagree, I find that it is far easier to tilt the guitar than to press the button.

Well, since the last time I played, the tilt sensor in the guitar broke. No matter how much I tilted the guitar, the overdrive mode would not activate.