[Rant] I really don't need a mobile charger

Few weeks ago, I bought a Lightning cable for my iPhone 5S. At first I was in a dilemma whether to buy just the cable or buy a mobile charger. I could use the cable to charge the phone at work. The chances of me needing a mobile charger was slim. The iPhone 5S's battery is very good (compared to my iPhone 4S) and with a full charge I could survive a day easily. The issue would be me forgetting to charge the phone the night before. Very seldom we go out on a long trip (like once in a year). 

Today something unexpected happened. I had plugged in my phone to charge in the morning because we were planning to out. But for some weird reason, it didn't get charged even though the phone was detected by Windows and I could even browse the camera roll from explorer. But the phone never got charged. 

I only found out about this "situation" about 15 minutes before the time we were planning to leave home. There wasn't much time to even charge it with the wall charger but I had to do that. The phone was only carrying 5% charge!!! But as always my wife took her sweet time to get dressed and I managed to charge the battery to 32%. But that's not enough for me. We will be mainly shopping so that means the phone will have a big role to play!!!

Before shopping, we were planning to go to a Sri Lankan restaurant in Naka-Meguro. Then it came to me that if I took the tablet with me,

I could charge the phone from the tablet while we were having lunch. It's bad manners to use the phone at the dining table anyways.

So I took the tablet (luckily it had like 90% charge left) and the Lightning cable (the original one, because the one I bought is at the office) with me and did exactly what I was planning to do. I only managed to charge it up to like 35% from like 18%. I managed to drain the battery from 32% ti 18% while on the way to the restaurant. I browsed a bit, used Google Maps from Musashi Kosugi station and wrote part of this post on the phone. 

Yes I know 35% battery is not much. And I probably won't be able to survive with just that most of the times. But it was better than nothing. However, since I took the backpack with me, I was able to charge the phone while I was using the phone. The tablet inside the backpack and the cable coming out of the backpack to charge the phone. The cable was long enough. And it was not getting in the way either. I could even charge the phone while the phone was in my pocket. It's just great. It is same as using a mobile charger actually. Just a bit bigger. I stopped charging when I got to 40% charge and I was able to do just fine with that much remaining battery life.

If I had an iPad I wouldn't be able to do this. That is not to say that I'm totally happy with my tablet though. Atom CPU and the eMMC storage solution suck big time!

By the way, I fixed the charging issue by uninstalling iTunes and uninstalling the Apple Mobile Device driver from Device Manager and then reinstalling iTunes.

Go the "A disk read error occurred" error at Windows startup!!!

As usual, I turned on my PC today when I woke up. Went to the kitchen and came back to the PC to find out that the PC hasn't booted into Windows yet. In fact, it was halted at the boot loader saying that it cannot find the boot loader.

I hit the reset button but there was no change. So I went into the BIOS and checked what's up with the boot drives. For some reason, the boot drive was changed to my Toshiba data drive from my usual Samsung SSD drive. I set it back to my SSD and the I got the following screen.

I panicked. This SSD is a new drive and it only has TLC flash. This is the first of its kind so naturally there should be unforeseen issues. I thought this was one of it. The mind runs too fast. I was already thinking about how I'm gonna RMA the drive and how I'm gonna use the PC without the SSD. I thought I would have o install Windows onto the data drive and etc. etc. Then I snapped out of that thought and came back to the real world.

I don't have to think about RMAing anything just yet. There are so many things that I can do before getting there. First I checked if there was a loose connection between the SSD and the motherboard. Didn't appear to be so, but I unplugged and replugged the cable. That allowed me to load the Windows boot screen but even after a minute, Widows didn't fully boot into the desktop. I knew something was up. It should have booted within 10 seconds. I was still scared.

I had a spare SATA cable lying around. So I replaced the old one with this one and guess what happened? Everything was back to normal. Phew! Why do all these cables go kaput?

Note: 

Because of the problems with the SATA cable, the SSD had not been detected the first time thus BIOS had automatically changed the default boot drive from the SSD to the next drive in the order of the SATA port.

Oh bummer! The iPhone 4S USB cable is damaged.

The day before yesterday I found out that the USB cable of my iPhone 4S (which I never unplug from the PC) was damaged near the 30 pin connector end. It must be due to bending, but it wasn't bent as much as the iPhone 3GS cable used to. And it is still working fine. Apple's quality must be going down.

I wonder if they will replace the cable if I take it to the Apple Store. I mean, I have Apple Care+ too. But it is working fine at the moment. But I won't contact them until it stops working. Besides, I have my wife's cable for the time being.

 
Note: I wonder if ZAGG has a replacement cable that is protected by their InvisibleShield, just like the ZAGG SmartBuds that I am using.