Category: Technology

Tinker Yourself: iPhone settings and customizations

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Many of the things I have talked about with my tinkering so far have been inaccessible to people without specific interest or desire and at times specific tools or skills. One thing that is accessible to anyone who has an iPhone are settings that you can employ to activate features and customize your experience. This post will outline several features that you can use to make small tweaks to the experience of using an iPhone. 

 

Accessibility shortcut:

You can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility shortcut

Or search in the settings app: “Accessibility shortcut”

Settings Options for Accessibility Shortcut

Settings Options for Accessibility Shortcut

The accessibility shortcut is intended to toggle accessibility features at the click of a button, the accessibility shortcut can complete an action from the list below by triple clicking on the home button on iPhones with a home button or on the side button on iPhones without a home button.

I have the accessibility shortcut set to “Reduce White Point,” which is useful to darken my phone screen at night, making it less straining on my eyes, but there are many other options you can select to toggle with the Accessibility shortcut. 

 

Back Tap:

You can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap

Similar to the accessibility shortcut, “back tap” offers a variety of different actions which can be completed by tapping on the back of your phone (not a button) two or three times. Different actions can be assigned to two taps or three taps. Unlike the accessibility shortcut, however, you can complete a much greater assortment of actions, not limited to those chosen for accessibility. This includes Shortcuts created in the Shortcuts app (like the ones that open apps I used to customize my home screen)!

 

Back Tap Double Tap

Back Tap Double Tap

 

Back Tap Triple Tap - Shortcuts

Back Tap Triple Tap – Shortcuts

 

I configured this setting to open the control center with two taps and three taps to run a shortcut with three taps. Particularly on larger phones where the Control Center is somewhat inconveniently accessed by swiping down from the right corner, it is nice to be able to tap on the back, rather than adjust your grip to reach the top of the phone.

 

Control Center:

Control Center

Control Center

Speaking of the Control Center. You can add to the buttons at the bottom and access a wider array of options by long-pressing on buttons in Control Center. 

First, to change the buttons in Control Center, you can go through the menu by clicking: Settings > Control Center

This will show a menu of the controls you already have set and of controls you can add to the control center. Tap one of the controls you already have to remove it, and tap one that you don’t already have to add it. When you swipe to access Control Center, you will see the new, added options.

There is also a lot of hidden functionality for buttons in the Control Center accessed by long-pressing. For example, long-pressing on the audio button will bring up the album artwork and draggable bar for volume and song progress and long-pressing on the flashlight button lets you adjust the brightness of the flashlight. 

More advanced music player view

More advanced music player view

Flashlight brightness selection

Flashlight brightness selection

There are many ways to tinker without having to make physical changes to a device. I recommend taking advantage of those changes and tinker your devices to make them your own.

The Tinkering of My Mechanical Keyboard

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While tinkering often means dealing with things that are broken, another important element of tinkering is customizing things that work to impeccably fulfill your purpose. In some circumstances, the best way to make an individually customized device is to design it from your specifications from the outset. (The PC I built is an example of this kind of ground-up tinkering.) But there are many ready-made devices that provide great foundations you can modify to meet your personal expectations. Today, I will focus on an off-the-shelf mechanical keyboard that I tinkered with to make more my own.

Keychron K6 after tinkering (Spoiler alert!)

The Foundation:

I started with a keyboard called the Keychron K6, which has a 65% layout (meaning it has roughly 65% of the number of keys that a normal full-size keyboard would have). Notably missing is a keypad, and the function and media keys are hidden behind the number keys, accessed by pressing “fn1” and “fn2” keys respectively.

I chose this keyboard because it was already assembled with a USB-C connector and the option to connect with a wire or with up to 3 devices over bluetooth. It works with both macOS and Windows (which is good, because I do too) with control and command keys and media key support for both OSes. The keyboard was also relatively easy to modify with hot-swappable keyswitches.

I chose to buy this keyboard because it was a good foundation, but there were still some things I wanted to change to make it more useful and enjoyable to use.

The Changes:

The first change that I made was to the keyswitches. The original switches that came with the keyboard were Gateron Brown switches, which have a light tactile bump, meaning before the switch actuates, it gets harder to push. I replaced them with a smooth linear switch with equal (and smaller overall) resistance that I prefer, Gateron Yellows. To do this, I took off every keycap and every keyswitch from the board, then replaced each Brown keyswitch with a Yellow one. Except for one. 

Gateron Yellow switches and a 150g Black switch on the lighting adjustment key

There is one key on the Keychron K6 dedicated only to changing the RGB lighting effects behind each key. Unfortunately that key is right next to the backspace key, which I seem to press often and without great accuracy, accidentally changing my lighting mode while vigorously deleting text. To get back to my preferred lighting style, I had to press the lighting effects button repeatedly to cycle through about 20 different lighting options. So naturally, I took apart a different Black switch I had on hand and replaced the spring inside it with one that takes 150g of force–more than 3x the force for every other switch–to fully press down. That essentially eliminated my frequent mis-clicks on the lighting mode key, allowing me to conveniently edit my documents without disrupting my preferred keyboard lighting scheme. This is exactly the type of small and seemingly insignificant change that gets to the heart of tinkering. 

150g “Super” Black Switch

When all of the keyswitches were replaced, I also replaced the keycaps on all of the alphabet keys, arrow keys and escape keys with “pudding” keycaps. These have a different, more coarse texture that feels better to type with, and give a cool look to the backlight. I kept the original keycaps on some keys, notably the number keys, which also show the function number and media function (play, pause, volume and brightness up and down, etc.). It is useful to have a reminder of what each of the four different inputs the number keys give are. I think that what I ended up with looks nice, even if its appearance isn’t completely cohesive in every way. 

Multi-function Keys!

The last change was a “band-aid mod” which dampened the sound of the stabilizers on the longer keys by putting a band aid below where they come into contact with the PCB. This made the keytapping noise less distracting to both myself and my family… who aren’t always the most thrilled to hear me clacking away at a keyboard.     

Conclusion:

The changes I made may seem trivial, but to me, they elevated the keyboard from a nice tool to something that fits my preferences and needs and eliminated annoyances. This is important for a tool that I use as often as a keyboard. As small as each of the changes are, they add up to make this keyboard something much better for me that it was before. That is the power of tinkering–making something your own.

Follow up on iPhone Home Screen customization

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Last semester, I posted about the iPhone home screen customization made possible through Widgets and Shortcuts added in iOS 14. The building blocks were there, but the implementation was clunky and lacking in a lot of ways. Among the biggest problems was the lack of availability of widgets for popular apps and the need to open the Shortcuts app every time you want to open up an app using the custom icons. 

Shortly after making that post, I returned my home screen to its original icons and kept the widgets. It was just too clunky to have the Shortcuts app open every single time I opened an app (which of course, is a necessary and frequent action on a phone based on apps.) However, thanks to a small but significant change in Shortcuts, I have now happily returned to a home screen with custom app icons, Shortcuts, and widgets. 

 

Software Updates

In response to the popularity of custom icon creations, Apple changed the way Shortcuts work to open apps. Instead of opening the Shortcuts app as an intermediary between the icon and the app itself, the app is opened directly and a notification is shown across the top. Aside from making the process less visually busy (now using the same animation as opening an app), the notification style makes opening apps from a Shortcut faster.   


Home Screen Changes 

App Icons

I found and downloaded an icon pack of icons with simple images on dark backgrounds. It had icons already made specifically for most of the apps I want on my home screen, and I could fill in the gaps for other apps like Libby, Due, and PCalc with more generic or similar icons. The process of setting up the icons hasn’t changed (since my blog post)[Blog post link].

The one app on my homescreen that is still in its original form is the Messages app because I want to be able to see if I have any unread or unreplied-to texts. The inability to see badge app icons (the little red number at the corner) is now the biggest limitation to custom app icons, but not a dealbreaker for most apps where I don’t use or want them anyway.

Widgets

In addition to the app icons, I use both a Medium and a Small widget stack. My medium stack has a countdown widget to the end of the semester, a widget for my weather app, and a widget for the calendar app. My smaller widget stack has a widget for battery and the music app.

As with anything not fully baked, there is some weirdness, and there are some side effects to having primarily non-original icons on my home screen. I mentioned before the inability to display badge app notifications. It’s also impossible to access the Haptic Touch (long press) shortcuts available on normal apps. There are also occasional bugs where at random, the notification will not show and the app will not respond to touch until it is quit and reopened with the notification from Shortcuts. Despite the downsides and the abnormal behavior, I really enjoy having a home screen that looks completely different from that of any of my friends or my family. And the ability to tinker and set things up the way I want is absolutely worth the inconveniences.

Mid-Semester Modifications

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A little over four years ago, I built myself a gaming PC for my birthday. My years-long dream of tinkering a computer of my own specifications into existence came true, and save for a frustrating issue with a stick of RAM, which occurred days out of warranty, the computer has served me well for its entire existence.

That being said, as any computer user can relate, a four year old computer does not always perform nearly as well as it did when it was new. 

My goal was to tinker with my computer by expanding the storage and overclocking my graphics card. I have never overclocked a component, so it was a new and interesting challenge. Expanding the storage is something I have much more experience with, and was a simple process of plugging in a few wires and mounting the parts. 

The best part of this endeavor: the process was entirely free. The HDD and SSD I installed were salvaged from an old desktop and laptop respectively—parts I had lying around. The overclocking was done with free software and only augmented components already installed in the computer.

 

Installing the drives

To install the two drives, a 250 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, I used the SATA power cable coming from my power supply, and attached two additional SATA data cables to my motherboard. The 1TB HDD, a 3.5 inch drive, fit into the second of two drive bays in the bottom of the computer, and the SSD fit on a side mounted slot in the back of the case.

 

Overclocking

Overclocking is the process of increasing the clock speed of a computer component beyond the originally designated speed. Measured as a frequency, usually in gHz, the “clock speed” represents the number of times in a second a computer can complete a task (called instructions per clock). While it may seem concerning to run a chip at higher than its rated clock speed, if you have sufficient cooling, it is completely safe to do so. 

I used a program called MSI Afterburner to overclock my GPU. While it normally has an intelligent automatic overclocking mode, I had an error message come up every time I tried the automatic mode, so I had to overclock manually. Manual overclocking is nothing short of trial and error. 

First, I set a custom fan curve, so that the fans of my GPU begin to ramp up more quickly at lower temperatures and keep the overall temperatures down. Then, I increased the maximum voltage. (I increased it to the maximum value, but the GPU will not permit higher voltage than it is rated by the manufacturer, but the voltage out of the box is lower than the peak voltage.) Then, I set a baseline overclock of +100 MHz to the core clock (the processing unit speed) and of +500 MHz to the memory clock (the RAM used by the GPU).

Quantitatively, in a synthetic benchmark, which is not always representative of real use, I had a performance increase of 8.6% without spending a dime. While that is impressive, what is more important to me is the qualitative experience of several games which I very much enjoy (like Forza Horizon 4) becoming considerably smoother. 

And with that, I could spend the rest of my break enjoying my computer even more than before.

Next-gen Game Consoles: Upgrading and Tinkering

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Sony’s Playstation 5 and the Microsoft Xbox Series X are due to be released in mid November 2020, and both companies have shown off many details of their computers in advance of the launch. The great news is: both consoles include company-sanctioned tinkering options! 

Sony’s PS5 Teardown:

With only the tools sitting next to him–three screwdrivers and a prying tool–this Sony employee completely disassembled the PS5. 

The disc drive, cooling fan, and storage are all easily accessible by taking off the side panel, and access to the remainder of components is gained by removing several shielding plates. While components like the CPU and RAM are not separately upgradeable, Sony does show how to access and remove the motherboard itself.

Though the disclaimer at the start of the video–”Don’t try this at home”– warns against trying what the Sony employee does in this video, the opportunity to tinker with the PS5 is available, and Sony itself has shown it can be done.

 

A PC you attach to your TV

The PS5 has more in common with a PC than not. While the Xbox Series X does not share as many physical similarities on the outside, inside, similarities abound.. 

Last week, I went through the anatomy of a computer. Both the PS5 and Series X consoles have each of the components I outlined in that post. They have GPUs, RAM, and storage attached to a motherboard. In fact, the processors for the PS5 and Xbox Series X are simply a newer version of the CPU that I have in my own custom-built PC. 

Now these game consoles have an additional similarity to PCs: upgradeability. While a fully custom-built PC still allows you to upgrade and replace every component, and the new consoles do not, the consoles allow very easy upgrades that consumers can do by themselves. The upgrades to these consoles center around storage. The previous generation consoles (the Xbox One and the PS4) allowed for storage expansion as well, but primarily as an external solution, connecting a hard drive with a USB port on the back of the devices.  

The Xbox series X allows for storage upgrades without disassembling the device at all; the slot for the SSD storage can be seen, from the outside, in the picture above. This is a push towards accessible tinkering. This shows one of the benefits of being able to design your own system, rather than piecing one together with off-the-shelf parts: better access to internal upgrades. As shown in the teardown video, the SSD on the PS5 can be upgraded relatively simply by sliding off plates that grant internal access to the storage. 

Now, neither of these are perfect solutions. Because the Xbox Series X uses a specially designed SSD, you can only use an SSD purchased from Microsoft to upgrade. And though the PS5 uses a standard sized SSD, you can only use SSDs “approved” by Sony, which also limits your options. Despite these limitations, I believe that the intentional inclusion of tinkerability in the next-generation consoles is a heartening development for gamers and tinkerers.

Show and Tell: The Anatomy of a Computer

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Whether you want to do some actual tinkering (building or repairing) or simply want to effectively compare device models, it is important to have at least a basic understanding of the parts of a computer and how they mesh together. While devices take different shapes and sizes, just about every piece of technology, including your laptop, phone, and even your TV will contain these components I describe below. This post will not be a deep dive into how each of these components work, but I hope to impart a baseline understanding of what they look like, how they function, and how they fit together.

It is important to note that the form factor (basic size and shape) of each computer has a significant impact on what each of the components look like. A desktop computer motherboard will look different from that of a laptop and that of a phone. 

 

“The Backbone”

First, the motherboard. The motherboard acts as a home for the various components of the computer. All of the components in the rest of the post connect in one way or another to the motherboard, but similar to a backbone or spine, it is neither useful nor functional without anything attached to it!

Motherboards come, literally, in all shapes and sizes; they are often custom made for individual laptop, phone, and tablet models, and desktop computers alone have upwards of a dozen different motherboard sizes. 

 

“The Brain” 

What I am calling the “brain” of the computer consists of several different and highly interconnected parts. Each of these parts are responsible for the main computation of the computer or the short-term or long-term storage of data.

CPU- the thinker

The CPU (central processing unit) is sometimes referred to as the “brain” of a computer by itself. The CPU is optimized to perform a wide variety of diverse tasks, from computations on Excel spreadsheets to performing artificial intelligence  logic in a video game.  

RAM – the short-term memory

RAM, short for Random Access Memory, sometimes referred to as simply “memory” is very fast, but volatile storage. “Volatile” means when the computer is powered off, all data stored only in RAM will be lost. RAM has a very fast connection to the CPU and is useful in storing data actively being used by programs. 

Storage –  the long-term memory

A long-term storage device can come either in the form of a spinning hard disk drive (HDD) or a fully digital solid state drive (SSD). Unlike RAM, this type of storage is nonvolatile and retains data even without power.

HDDs are typically less expensive, particularly at higher capacities, but are slower and prone to data loss from magnets and shock damage from drops. SSDs are usually more expensive, but much faster, more reliable, and smaller than HDDs.

GPU – the visual cortex

The graphics card, also called the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), is optimized to perform similar, repetitive computations, making it able to efficiently and quickly produce frames in a video game and complete repetitive tasks such as video rendering.

GPUs can be very powerful, ready to play games or quickly render graphically intensive videos, but this also makes them get very physically hot. They may require several large fans to keep them safely cool, such as the one in the bottom of the picture above. Within smaller desktops and laptops, the GPU will be much smaller (for small desktops it may look like the GPU at the top of the image above), due to the decreased capacity to cool the parts within a smaller chassis. 

 

“The Face”

For the typical desktop computer, the display is a separate monitor, a completely external component, which can be easily swapped out and upgraded. For a laptop or phone, however, the display is deeply connected to its functionality. 

 

Knowing the anatomy of a computer is requisite to being able to tinker with it. A pre-built desktop computer is often more modular than you might think, with the capacity to add storage, upgrade RAM and GPU, and even, if you’re feeling adventurous, replace the CPU as well. It is also possible to purchase parts of a computer separately to build a computer for yourself as a more gratifying and cost-effective option to an off-the-shelf computer. It is harder to upgrade devices like laptops and phones where many of these components are soldered into larger, non-user-upgradeable pieces, but there are still opportunities to perform repairs and upgrades on components like batteries and broken screens.

 

There’s No Place Like Home (Screens)

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So far, I have only discussed tinkering related to physical things in the real world–tangible tinkering. While humans have engaged in tangible tinkering since they first used tools, the advent of computers opened a whole new world of digital tinkering.

Much of that digital tinkering, however, has (especially in recent decades) been limited and squashed by platform vendors. This makes sense. As computing platforms reached mainstream adoption, their designs changed to be more accessible and usable by anyone. With larger platforms, security from malware also became a legitimate concern. So, computers were locked down. Hack-y tinkering jobs to make a computer feel like one’s own moved from more difficult to impossible.

My goal today is not to argue the merits of locking down a computer system or leaving it open to tinkering and customization, nor do I want to argue about the relative openness of platforms or who added a feature first. Rather, I want to highlight one recent example of a shift away from locked down, conservative platform designs and how you can take advantage of this shift to do some tinkering to make your home screen your own. The only tool you need for this tinkering project is your own iPhone. 

In its latest operating system update, iOS 14, Apple greatly expanded the ability for users to customize their home screens. Now you can make your home screen look and function exactly the way you want it to. This hinges on two new-to-iOS 14 features and one feature with new use.

First, a few definitions:

App Library – The App Library is a place to store apps outside of the confines of the home screen. No longer do all apps require a “physical” place on the home screen; they can all stay in sorted folders in the App Library. The App Library is accessed by swiping left one more time after your last home screen.

Widgets – Though they have existed for years on Android, iOS has finally added widgets with iOS 14. Widgets can be seen as condensed versions of apps that always appear on the home screen–even if the app itself is not open! They come in sizes of 2×2 apps, 2×4 apps, and 4×4 apps. Any app can create widgets, and many of them offer different possibilities to customize those widgets.

Shortcuts App – Introduced in iOS 12, the shortcuts app allows you to automate many system functions on an iOS device.

Some tips to make your home screen your own:
  1. Clean the unnecessary apps from your home screen. Any app you do not need immediate access to might not deserve a place on the home screen. Remember, the app library is still easily accessible, and widgets take the place of anywhere from 4 to 16 apps. The right number of apps to have on the home screen will change from person to person, but if you can limit your home screen to one or two not-completely-filled home screens you will be well set up to add widgets and customize. 
  2. Create shortcuts and add them to your home screen  If you want to further customize the look of your home screen, you can create individual shortcuts each designed to open one of the apps on your home screen. You can then add the Shortcut to your home screen and change the shortcut icon to any photo, effectively creating a custom app icon. I created a few Shortcuts in a Windows 95 theme. 
  3. Add widgets. See what widgets you already have from your apps*, look into widget creation apps in the App Store, and decide which widgets deserve a place on your freshly cleaned home screen. Widgetsmith(link) is an immensely popular app that allows you to create and customize time, weather, astronomy, health, and reminder widgets with different colors, fonts, and styles. An app like Widgetsmith is helpful for an aesthetically themed home screen, while other app based widgets may present useful information.

*Press and hold on any part of the home screen to enter “jiggle mode.” On one of the top corners of your screen will be a “+” sign in a box. Click on it to reveal the widget menu.   

Final thoughts:

Is any of this…practical? Not necessarily. There is certainly the possibility to adorn your home screen with useful information previously hidden inside apps, but none of this needs to be practical. It can just create the phone aesthetic you want, and it can even just be fun. But more importantly, your iPhone does not belong to Apple. Your Android phone does not belong to Google or Samsung or Huawei. Your phone belongs to you, and you should be able to make it your own.

 

For more information: 

Marques Brownlee has a  helpful video on homescreen customization.

For a more in-depth look at Shortcuts, this video is a great start.