I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4018

by suraj • 12 years ago

279 112 12 years ago

dannyrohit• 12 years ago

That's pretty nice, but in the US at least, the digitizer alone is almost always never replaced because it is a fairly dangerous maneuver. [1]

Also, if you have the tools (and I would recommend buying a small electronics tool set to everyone, because it's a lot cheaper and funner to fix stuff yourself than to pay someone to fix it), then you can buy a complete LCD + digitizer for $36 on Amazon. [2]

[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/111483/iPhone+5+cracked+g...

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Generic-Screen-Digitizer-Assembly-Repl...

sp332• 12 years ago

Not all phones are so stuck-together as the iPhone, though. I cracked the glass my Lumia 920 and I'm considering just replacing the digitizer. The replacement is $15 on Amazon compared to $45 for the screen.

drfritznunkie• 12 years ago

It's hard to understand Shenzhen if you've not been there. I just returned from the Dangerous Prototypes Hackercamp in Shenzhen, and quite frankly, I don't think there is anyway you can fully comprehend what they can do there if you haven't seen it with your own eyes. Such things as replacing the glass are completely routine and done with incredible speed and precision. They have tools and techniques there not found anywhere else.

I ran into Ian and Jin from Dangerous Prototypes at the SF Bay MakerFaire last weekend where they were demonstrating the BGA reballing techniques we learned at the Land Mobile Repair School in Shenzhen. Ian told me that earlier in the Faire, a couple of Intel engineers stopped by to tell him that what he was doing was wrong, incorrect and impossible (or some combination thereof). He ran them through the process and left them agog, not only that the process developed by the Chinese (about $50USD in tools and supplies) was comparable to a $XX,000 reballing machine, but that they'd never seen or heard of these techniques before. They were throwing away prototypes worth thousands of dollars instead of fixing the problem because they didn't have proper reballing machines/jigs.

It is well worth the trip to Shenzhen if only to see them disassemble a phone completely and refurb it faster than imaginable. Ian hopes to make HCS a regular event and I highly recommend it!

turnip1979• 12 years ago

For someone without the contacts, can you recommend a way to plug-in to the scene? This hackercamp sounds interesting .. any more on the way?

amolsarva• 12 years ago

I guess it takes skills @dannyrohit

I have tried to replace the set on an ipod touch in the past. Didn't succeed. Screwed up taking the face/body assembly apart.

wfjackson• 12 years ago

Video of the process for anyone curious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbZwypAINYE

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

Same deal here in Bolivia, you break something chances are someone somewhere in Los Cachis can fix it for you inexpensively.

For example my Kindle 1st gen charging port was no longer snapping the connector cable correctly - I took it in and for 20Bs ($3) they fixed a soldered part that had come loose with the ins-and-outs of the charging cable.

dewitt• 12 years ago

I wish I had more adventures like this one, but I've found one of the things that holds me back is the language barrier. I don't speak any of Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese (I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is), and I worry that not being able to communicate effectively rules out serendipitous moments like these.

For others here, did you learn Chinese (or Spanish, or Arabic, or Russian) to assist you in your travels? I've always found learning computer languages easy, but human languages frustratingly difficult for me (different muscles, I know).

icebraining• 12 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if bunnie does, given how brilliant he is

He is brilliant, but having Chinese parents probably helped :)

http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/history.html

ximeng• 12 years ago

Chinese will probably take a good couple of thousand hours to learn solid basics. A new programming language probably less than fifty.

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

Take a look at AJATT: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/All_Japanese_All_The_...

Although it was originally developed for Japanese, the basic concepts are not language-specific.

Frazzydee• 12 years ago

I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways.

You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.

I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.

I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.

In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.

Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.

omaranto• 12 years ago

    I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.

Commonsense indicates the difficulty of learning a language doesn't depend solely on the language in question, but on how similar it is to languages you already know. An extreme example is that if you already speak Mandarin, learning Mandarin is a no-op. As a less extreme example, I'm sure that learning Mandarin is easier for a Cantonese speaker than for someone who only knows English and French.

bemmu• 12 years ago

Just go. I just went to Shenzen last month. I don't speak a word of Chinese. It really helps that you can go to Hong Kong (where you can get by with English) first and cross the border by train/car. If you change your mind, it's easy to come back.

Crossed the border, got a SIM card with a data plan. Browsed wikitravel, showed taxi driver the characters for where I wanted to go. Then just take another taxi ride to a hotel from google maps, reception spoke English. Rest of the trip went similarly. Had no problems.

gcb0• 12 years ago

Years ago some non-Chinese speaking friends come back with lots of cheap pen drives from know brand with the case boasting lots of gigabytes. Upon close inspection they only had 256mb flash chip and a firmware that reported 999Tb... They just created the partition the size the case said. Of course those were the least worse scam they feel to. As in other cases (cellphones, batteries, etc) they got even Less than a 256mb pen drive out in the end.

gbog2• 12 years ago

Yes, just go. But you should add that the traveler must be ready to let things go, when traveling in deep China without knowing Chinese. And to be confident. Then serendipity will not be just another trendy word.

ddoolin• 12 years ago

I knew about a few hours worth of Korean before I spent the next 2 years there. Granted, a few hours of Korean can be very useful since there's a limited alphabet, like English, and just knowing how to read the words is hugely helpful, even if you don't know what they mean. This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters.

I did start Korean classes a few days into my trip (first time was study abroad) which set the stage for later. But I didn't know it going in, no.

krisgee• 12 years ago

This is because a lot of time they're just English loan words in disguise in Korean characters.

I was practising my Hangul by reading the signs between Seoul and where I was staying out the bus window. The very first sign I read fully was "Noodle House", it was vaguely disappointing.

armada651• 12 years ago

I just spent a six-month internship in Japan without speaking the language. People there are very polite and helpful. They will take as much time as necessary to understand what you want to say.

And while you're there you'll automatically learn some of the greetings and words in the local language. Try to apply what you've learned and they'll be delighted to see you try to speak the language.

If you ever get the chance to see the world, don't let something like a language barrier hold you back. Just go.

petemc_• 12 years ago

I wouldn't let that set you back. All you need is a sense of adventure mixed with equal amounts of common sense and money. I got round SK/Japan with a few basic words that I made sure to learn to at least try to be polite.

jon2512chua7• 12 years ago

Well bunnie is Singaporean, and most if not all Singaporeans can speak Mandarin (not a linguist but Chinese is more of the language, and Mandarin the dialect, albeit the "official" dialect for the language).

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china").

Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect.

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20

cerberusss• 12 years ago

With Lonely Planet's Mandarin Phrase Book, you can get by.

Retr0spectrum• 12 years ago

When I repair phones, I always replace the digitizer and the LCD, firstly because it is too difficult to separate them, but secondly because buying the LCD+Digitizer as one unit isn't that much more expensive than buying the digitizer on its own.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

The shop is apparently in the business of refurbishing the units. That should be helping keep your prices low...

x0n• 12 years ago

I did this myself for my Nokia Lumia 920. Same fault - the glass cracked but the digitizer and display were fine. Hair dryer, tweezers and a ton of patience. It took me four hours though, but it was a complete success.

If you're planning on doing this yourself, don't be tempted to buy an unbranded replacement - they may be fakes or poor quality reproductions (not gorilla glass, digitizer inaccurate, etc.) - My phone was a developer device but I replaced the screen with an AT&T branded one. The branded screens are usually genuine.

subway2• 12 years ago

Simply obtaining branded hardware can be difficult -- I recently had to replace the full assembly on my Nexus 4, and in the process had 2 orders out of Shenzhen seized by customs, while a 3rd out of HK successfully shipped. This was all due to an LG logo that was only visible on the back of the part.

anoncow• 12 years ago

Why were they seized?

readme2• 12 years ago

It sounds like you actually pried the glass off the digitizer. Is this the case? I've not tried this kind of repair yet, but I have a spare iphone here to attempt it on.

VLM• 12 years ago

One interesting aspect of replacement is the difference between a good rework job and a bad rework job is typically environmental sealing. Does the case still snap perfectly tightly, with sealant/gaskets, if any, around the borders etc?

This is useful advice not just for people doing it themselves, but to evaluate a shops ability to do rework. If its a busy shop catch a guy leaving with a replacement and ask to see some completed work.

There is an analogy with programming where a mere "it compiled" is not exactly the pinnacle of all possible compliments.

qwerta• 12 years ago

This is the power of recycling and repair — instead of paying $120 for a screen and throwing away what is largely a functional piece of electronics, I just had to pay for the cost of just replacing the broken glass itself.

Some level of replace-ability should be enforced by law. There should be universal interchangeable types of batteries. Board self-test should be available and so on.

jzwinck2• 12 years ago

I presume you would advocate this new law in hopes that it would drive up the feasibility of repairs, therefore lowering costs to consumers. But it won't do that: it will increase costs (and reduce revenues) to manufacturers who will happily pass those costs on to consumers, and the only people who will come out ahead will be the lawyers.

Also, you do not want a phone made by the government.

rayiner• 12 years ago

That's not how engineering works. There are good designs that can't be achieved while making things replaceable. For example, the reason screen glass often isn't replaceable is because it's optically bonded to the underlying LCD, which improves sharpness, reduces glare, and reduces parallax when using a pen. The reason batteries usually can't be replaced is that it saves space and weight to use naked Li-Poly battery packs molded to the available space. Making say a back case removal reduces structural rigidity and reduces space available for a battery. That's engineering--making trade-offs between features people may not care about in favor of features they care more about.

stephengillie• 12 years ago

Most phone batteries are electrically compatible, just not physically compatible. I have used Droid phone batteries to power HTC phones by holding the battery in place against the contacts, even though it didn't fit into the phone at all.

On the engineering side, we should push for standards, and for components which operate the same at higher and lower volatges (2.0v, 2.2v, 3.0v, 3.5v, 5.0v, etc) where possible.

collyw3• 12 years ago

Sure in some cases engineering is the reason, but then some manufacturers put pentalobe screws on their phones to make things as difficult as possible for the consumer to look inside the products that they paid for.

pekk• 12 years ago

Most people could stand slightly thicker phones. We are dumping huge amounts of toxic stuff because phones are designed for planned obsolescence. If there were pressure to use replaceable or upgradeable parts then we would see thinner phones with these traits, but without that pressure we are going to get more planned obsolescence. That's engineering too.

pjc50• 12 years ago

This amounts to a legal ban on innovation that doesn't fit the current template. It also increases costs.

(The EU charger standard is a good example: it works very well at eliminating the stupid proliferation of chargers which end up in landfill or WEEE, but not everyone is happy with micro-USB and arguably it's now the weak point in many phones which causes them to break early)

ricardonunez• 12 years ago

I didn't have the same luck with a nexus 7 couple of months ago. It fell from a small night table and the screen shattered (the digitizer still works). I did the same process as the post explained and I got a replacement in Amazon ($60 and $6 for the tape), but for some reason it didn't work. The broken screen used to work, but now I only hear noise when I turn it on, but no image. I think I made a mistake when I was removing the graphic ribbon, who knows. Now I feel like I don't want to put more money and time into it. It's great a company like that recycle everything, just separating the digitizer takes a lot of work.

Intermernet2• 12 years ago

The hairdryer as heat-gun method was first shown to me by an incredibly gifted Electrical Engineer (from China) who used this method to fix dry joints on PCBs (including consumer mainboards).

It was astounding the first time I saw a dead MB revived with nothing more than a bathroom accessory!

linker3000• 12 years ago

In reverse, I have used a heat shrink heat gun to make an awesome toasted cheese sandwich on a lonely night shift.

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

Sounds like quite a feat considering hair dryer wont produce more than 50-60'C and solder needs >180'C to even start thinking about melting.

Hair dryer in Bunnies case was used to heat up the GLUE between glass and screen.

noonespecial3• 12 years ago

Just partially block the air intakes. It'll get hot fast. Just be careful it doesn't start to melt inside.

Intermernet2• 12 years ago

You're almost certainly right, I've not had success with it myself, and I originally thought the same, but I've heard anecdotal evidence from others that it's worked for them, and there are a few mentions of it online, including a video at http://www.anandtech.com/show/6840/hardware-tricks-can-you-f... , but I've also found mentions that the likely cause of the hair dryer trick is old capacitors being temporarily "revived" by the heat (http://www.instructables.com/id/Fix-a-dead-power-supply-usin...). It seems like something is being at least temporarily repaired by the heat, but it's probably not anything to do with solder.

userbinator2• 12 years ago

Shenzhen, and particularly the Huaqiangbei area, is a great place to be if you're into electronics in general. Components are cheap and plentiful, and so are component-level repair shops. "Fixed while you wait (and watch)" is the norm, and some of the more popular shops have lineups of people waiting with their tablets/laptops/desktops/etc. in need of repair. A friend had his laptop's chipset reballed there (the nVidia one that was famous for failing early.) Very different experience than in the West.

Bunnie has been there before:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=283

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

A friend had his laptop's chipset reballed there

Sounds like he got scammed. Reballing only is a temporary few months at the most fix. Its not the pcb-bga contact that fails, its the silicon-bga package that has the problem. Reballing heats up whole chip and by accident reseals broken solder joints directly under the silicon. Those joints will crack again because NVIDIA used bad glue that gets plastic under heat stress.

The only way to fix bad Nvidia GPU is to replace it with a brand new one from the fixed batch with new glue formula.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjmBv6nvUOM

bobbles• 12 years ago

Scammed unless he knows this and just wanted the machine fixed to at least recover everything

userbinator2• 12 years ago

Worked well enough, he didn't mention any problems and I heard he'd sold the laptop over a year later. The reball was ridiculously cheap too.

rsync• 12 years ago

I've been to Shenzhen (and specifically, the mobile phone markets) a few times.

Two impressions stuck with me...

First, I don't trust anything I buy anymore. If you buy a mobile phone on ebay, or if you buy one on amazon and it isn't fulfilled directly by the manufacturer, I don't think you can have any assurance that it is truly a brand new, factory produced device. I saw stall after stall after stall of women with long spools of holographic tape and "genuine nokia" stickers by the thousands who were brazenly re-wrapping and resealing both batteries and "new" devices. Bunnie speaks of the value of his spare parts, but the box and the manual would probably have been of equal value.

Second, I was surprised by the near total absence of anything truly interesting ... I spent 2.5 days looking for any tools or devices related to osmocom/openBTS/openBSC ... sim cloning, sim tracing, IMSI catching ... development kits or test hardware... and I saw not even a trace of this. I was also keeping my eyes open for any kind of console modding / console hacking and didn't see any of this either. I'm sure you could get your xbox chipped there, but beyond that ...

I'll be back soon ... I'd love to be proven wrong that there's nothing bleeding edge being hacked together around the phone-marts...

jzwinck2• 12 years ago

There's a cultural quirk buried in the article, when the technician uses his or her "very long thumbnail (in lieu of a spudger/guitar pick)."

Some Chinese men grow one fingernail quite long as a sign that they do not toil in the fields (else the nail would be broken)[1]. It has been for some time a symbol of high status. Yet here we see a long fingernail employed specifically to aid manual labor.

I now wonder if there are budget repair guys walking around Shenzhen appearing to show off their socioeconomic status but actually just hoping their nails don't break because it would make splitting open broken phones less convenient.

[1] http://www.vagabondjourney.com/why-chinese-men-grow-long-fin...

misframer• 12 years ago

Interesting how a long fingernail can also imply cocaine usage.

evincarofautumn• 12 years ago

It’s funny how many different connotations can be conveyed by something as simple as fingernails. The cocaine pinky, false nails in pornography, some varieties of massage, as a status symbol, and classical/flamenco guitar playing come to mind.

skywhopper• 12 years ago

Or perhaps the author is a guitar or banjo picker.

gooble_flop• 12 years ago

In some SE Asian countries having a long nail is used to clean yourself after going to the toilet.

lcnmrn• 12 years ago

Can you replace the iPhone LCD screen with an OLED display?

nobodyshere• 12 years ago

Technically yes, there's nothing stopping you from that. However you have to find a suitable display assembly of the same size and with the same connector.

darkstar999• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm just grumpy since I haven't had coffee yet this morning, but why is this worthy of being #1 on HN? Author got a part replaced on his phone. Wow.

gdubs2• 12 years ago

Here's why I find it interesting. We live in a world (in the west) where our gadgets are a big part of our lives, and yet we're pretty helpless when anything goes wrong with them. We use these pocket-sized supercomputers for the most mundane tasks, and compared to the rest of the world, we live a life of leisure.

This piece is interesting because it's a nice short story that gives a great sense of place. To me, it feels like Blade Runner. There's a society of people that can repair a $500 smartphone like it was reattaching rubber to a boot. They possess advanced repair skills, but belong to a class that would be doing menial labor here in America.

judk3• 12 years ago

They are doing menial labor in China as well (being paid nearly nothing),

And most of us here can't reattach rubber to a boot either.

rasz_pl5• 12 years ago

In case you are wondering most of them (probably >90%) dont know how those gadgets work either. They are taught procedures (there are whole repair technicians schools in China), not operation theory.

For example they can diagnose which part on a laptop motherboard is broken by observing current draw/time when booting and looking up answer in the notes (notes made by real engineer or guessed/bruteforced by another tinkerer). This way unqualified worker can tell you in under 30 second what needs to be replaced on a phone/tablet/laptop PCB. Its like a human powered repair database lookup machine, they are all working from the script. You could say they are all Indian DELL phone support line :)

Im not saying its bad, its just how it works.

noonespecial3• 12 years ago

I just try to keep in mind that eventually the Morlocks end up eating the Eloi.

icegreentea• 12 years ago

This post hints at one of the great advantages of being close to suppliers. When you're that close to the supply source, you gain all sorts of advantages like:

a) You can typically find the person actually building the damn thing, and ask about it.

b) You can probably get your hands on a large set of cheap, defective parts to play around with.

c) You can get your hands on the actual parts really cheap.

b and c together vastly reduces the cost of experimentation, and more importantly, reduces the cost of screwing up.

This is some of what you lose when you become just the end node of the supply chain. This is the type of 'magic' that some people speak about when they talk about when 'America (or insert your choice of western democratic country) built things'.

judk3• 12 years ago

This is also a hardware metaphor for the concept of "open source" software.

raldi• 12 years ago

Does anyone here get anything useful to happen by dialing ∗#0∗# on an iPhone? I just get the message "Error performing request: Unknown Error"

eli• 12 years ago

I don't have an iphone handy, but I bet if you google "iPhone USSD" you'll get some pointers.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

FTA:

I had originally assumed that the glass on the digitizer is inseparable from the OLED, but apparently those clever folks in Hua Qiang Bei have figured out an efficient method...

There is a large amount of skill involved. I saw a designer take apart a smartphone to use the digitizer in a "looks like works like" prototype. Getting the glue off and otherwise dissembling a smartphone screen without breaking anything is not easy! It's not meant to be repairable. And this guy is a wizard at building prototypes.

stonogo• 12 years ago

There's no better place than any oversaturated labor market to get cheap labor! How uplifting.

JumpCrisscross2• 12 years ago

Contrast this with my recent experience at the 14th Street and Fifth Avenue Apple Stores in New York.

Two weeks ago my Mac stopped booting. Made an appointment at the 14th Street Apple Store. Arrived 15 minutes early. Discovered there was a line to check in. That put you into a second line, the line to be seen by a "Genius". Forty-five minutes after my appointment time, I'm seen by someone with no intimate knowledge of my device. Laptop is checked in overnight.

Two days later, I receive my "fixed" Mac. SSD replaced, problem still there. Take it to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store at 4AM. This time I'm seen within 30 minutes of my appointment. "Genius" asks me to call phone support. Phone support insists Genius can solve the problem, asks to speak with Genius–nobody at store can find him. Thirty minutes later, phone support tells Genius what to do. Genius disappears into a back room, emerges 20 minutes later with the right tool. No clear answer as to what went wrong provided.

I am willing to pay for fast, smart solutions. Sometimes the brainpower is not available, and I accept that. Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York.

objclxt• 12 years ago

Curious that I feel that brainpower would have been more amply available in the streets of Shenzhen than New York

...although perhaps not at 4AM, which is when you went? Not to play down the fact you had a pretty rough time of it, but the fact you could find someone to fix is at 4AM is to me an achievement in and of itself.

JumpCrisscross2• 12 years ago

Valid hypothesis. Curiously, I have had better service then than during the crowded afternoons and evenings.

While my Mac was acting up, my iPhone also had issues. The first replacement I got had a logic board issue (continuous blue screen reboots). The evening Genius dismissed me after a restart. The 8AM Genius actually ran diagnostics.

GuiA• 12 years ago

4am!? Are stores in NYC open 24 hours a day?

bunnie• 12 years ago

xobs and I have a game we like to play when we live in Shenzhen for extended periods -- it's called "let's buy a soldering iron at 2AM". We'll hack until some stupid late hour and then get hungry, and go out to find street food and "something else", e.g. soldering iron, spare parts, phones, power adapters, etc. in the street markets of Shenzhen. So far, we have not been disappointed. That city simply does not sleep.

This is in part because the EU and US is awake during Shenzhen's nighttime, and if people waited until the morning to fill all the orders coming their way, they'd have to spend all day catching up.

thisisauserid• 12 years ago

You mean Ninth Avenue?

gbog2• 12 years ago

Not curious at all. In Shenzhen and many parts of east Asia many young guys are really find of computers and hardware, and they are fighting hard for their daily bowl of rice.

Wogef• 12 years ago

Actually I have a guy here in Shenzhen, also at Hua Qiang Bei who does board level repairs (with guarantee)on Macs for a fraction of what it costs to have the local Apple place swap out the whole thing. Shenzhen really is a Maker paradise.

pling• 12 years ago

The three times I've broken phone screens it's always the OLED/LCD display that popped and the digitizer just sat there and grinned at me having protected sod all. I've replaced them all myself and it's been pretty easy on all devices and very cheap. The OLED/LCD displays all came from ebay.

readme2• 12 years ago

I've got the iFixit repair kit. So far I've used it to repair a kindle hdx, a samsung android device, and an iphone 5c. Basically I just wait until a friend breaks their device and fix it for free. I got a free kindle fire HD out of the deal anyway. I don't ask for money since it's usually friends. I've also used it to replace the battery in my lenovo p500 which does not have a removable battery i.e. you must crack it open.

pyb• 12 years ago

I don't fully get Bunnie's point. I got my 3gs' screen replaced for £30 here in the UK (over the post though)

jakejake• 12 years ago

I was curious about the diagnostic code mentioned * # 0 * #

I tried it and the phone did seem to go into some diagnostic mode and showed "please wait" for about 5 seconds, then just stopped with "Unknown Error" Sad.

I Broke My Phone’s Screen, and It Was Awesome

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