Posted by Jonathan Wise on Sep 19, 2007
…Is a hacked iPhone!
So, as promised, I ran the AppTap installer last night and unshackled my iPhone. The whole process was dead simple — so simple, in fact, that I think Apple might secretly not mind at all that its going on. It might be part of their strategy to let third parties experiment, without having to be responsible for the quality of those apps.
They needn’t worry too much, though. Most of the apps I found were excellent. Once you run AppTap, you get a new little icon on your home screen called Installer. From there you can download the community services package, and open up a world of new toys and gadgets for your phone.
SummerBoard adds much needed enhancements to the home screen, allowing you to set a backdrop picture, change the theme and scroll through more than one page of apps (you’ll need to do this once you see what’s out there). The installer offers pages and pages of programs — everything from a VNC client and the Apache web server, to an NES emulator that actually works really well. There’s also a Chat client (AIM only, unfortunately), a voice recorder, and a DDR clone called Tap Tap Revolution, that manages to capture most of the frantic action that is DDR.
I’m completely happy with my hack, and totally OK with waiting until the community adapts to the upcoming 1.1.1 firmware before I upgrade. The only thing I’m not happy about is a stupid mistake I made while copying NES ROMs over my network to be loaded onto the iPhone. I tossed them in my videos directory — needing just a temporary share to transfer them with — and then deleted them when I was done… Only I accidentally deleted some of the video folders at the same time. Lost about 120GB worth of TV shows, 100GB worth of our movie collection, and our home movies…
I immediately ran Data Rescue II, but it wasn’t able to recover a single file. Fortunately, my friend Jon Bates had just mirrored my movie collection, and most of the home movies are on DVD somewhere. The TV shows are all gone, but if it had to happen, the timing couldn’t be better. This summer we managed to watch all of Stargate SG-1 (yes, all 10 seasons), all of X-Files (except season 9, which I had started, but am not disappointed at all about losing) and all of Lost season 3. And new TV starts next week, so the hard drive will quickly fill back up with newly recorded shows. And anything we really miss… there’s always the torrents.
In conclusion, I am retarded, and my iPhone is not.
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Sep 18, 2007
I’ve had my iPhone for almost 3 months now, and I haven’t once tried to unlock, hack it, or install 3rd party applications on it. I’ve been patiently waiting for Apple to come out with their long-promised software update that would give me the missing features i want… Meanwhile I’ve been watching the community’s efforts, and their output is finally where it needs to be.
Check out this video (ignore the somewhat creepy iBrate part) to see how simple it is to download and install hundreds of applications on the iPhone. My patience has run thin, and I’ll be doing this when I get home tonite… Looking forward to playing Super Mario on my phone!
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Sep 06, 2007
So we have 320GB of data — movies, music, photos and calendar and address book info. We want to manage it on the computer in the bedroom, but we’ll primarily be consuming it (and acquiring it) from the computer connected to the TV.
I looked long and hard for ways to synchronize or share this volume of data, but when it came down to it, there’s no good solution for that. The best way to do it is to point both computers and their associated “database” and “library” folders to a location-agnostic hard drive (a NAS would be nice, but in my case its a FireWire drive shared over the network) using SymLinks.
Aside for some slowness on the computer in the bedroom (which can be forgiven because its a G4 connected over a wireless network — something I plan to remedy in our next apartment) both computers are blissfully unaware that they posses none of the data they think they do. We can import photos, create playlists, mark-up our calendars and rip then watch our movies in the bedroom, with the benefit of a full keyboard and mouse, and consume all of that content, and sync it with our iPhone and iPods, in the living room, with only a remote control.
In conclusion, I love SymLinks and should have learned how to make them earlier. Its even easier with this contextual menu item. (Note: SymLinks are not the same as aliases, which are nowhere near as cool)
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Sep 06, 2007
A new word, that means “When Apple screws you over.”
Its not new — they frequently do this kind of thing to early-adopters (see the iMac G4 - USB 1.1 models.) Its like your punishment for buying their stuff when they hype it. But this is about the lowest they’ve ever sunk.
I know I shouldn’t complain. I paid a premium to be an uber-geek for 2 months. While everyone else dealt with their regular, crappy phones and so-called “smart” phones, I was flying high with my iPhone. It seriously is the best portable device I’ve ever owned, and although I’m sore that none of the new functionality in the promised updates has made its way to my iPhone yet, and even though it has its little issues, its an amazing phone.
And now everyone can have one, because as of yesterday, my iPhone is worth a little more than half what I paid for it… Thanks a lot, Steve. Sure am glad I got in line for something that not even Apple thinks is worth what I paid for it.
Oh well, at least they got their R&D money back in a hurry, too bad they had to screw over their most loyal customers to do it.
Update: My favourite company did the right thing! $100 gift card at the Apple Store! Way to go, Apple! I’m now back in the drooling fan-boy camp!
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Aug 31, 2007
Our server-side I.T. infrastructure is finally back up to nearly where it should be. Mail is now working reliably, and IMAP access has been restored to all its organized goodness. Some of our mail clients aren’t Mail.app now, and its a little annoying that other programs don’t provide easy ways to re-point your special IMAP folders — Thunderbird requires you to edit a Javascript file.
A quick run-down of what we’re running these days, for the interested geeks out there.
Apache + mySQL 5 are hosting the websites www.jonandnic.com, and services.jonandnic.com, the latter providing additional services (hence the domain name) for our own use.
WordPress 2.2.2 continues to run www.jonandnic.com.
IIS + SQL Server is running old.jonandnic.com, and will continue to do so until the box its running on dies of old age.
Some unnamed IMAP extension is running our mail. It works pretty good but makes a special folder called “mbox” that my iPhone refuses to ignore, and you cannot delete (without destroying all your mail). All other mail clients ignore it by default, so I guess this isn’t that unusual. I wish there were more configuration I could do, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Google Apps remains the back-up MX for mail sent to jonandnic.com
RoundCube makes a decent webmail client, once you find the main.inc.php file and edit it to your liking.
mod_dav, the WebDAV extension for Apache, will provide our Calendar hosting. With PHP iCalendar providing web access.
Our personal e-mail addresses remain the same, and I promise your mail won’t get lost if you write us now! The best part is, now that our hosting is off-site, mail and the website are not affected by local power/Internet outages (which our little town seems to have plenty of.) It also means moving days are a lot less stressful.
Our client machines are evenly split between Macs and PCs, with the former running Mail.app + iCal, while the latter will be using Thunderbird + Sunbird. There’s a little work to be done yet on this side of things — our home media network also suffered a little with all these changes, but I expect to have our digital communications and entertainment utopia back up and running within a couple weeks.
Update: I don’t yet have a solution for sharing Address Book data across 4 computers and an iPhone. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m using Address Book.app’s vCard format…
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Aug 31, 2007
[Large Television Network] has announced that they won’t be selling their shows on iTunes any more. This comes fairly hot on the heels of Universal Music announcing that they’ll only be marketing their music “at will” on the iTunes Music Store, which leaves them free to pull all, or any portion, of their music from the store at any time.
Let me explain why these are stupid moves: About 10 years ago, a little program called Napster came out. Suddenly college students all over the world could get music the way they wanted to — electronically, ready to be loaded onto our recently invented MP3 players (OK, I went with MiniDisc, but same difference). Like the mix tape of a decade gone by, this was seen as a major threat to the media industry, and they set about on a campaign to crush piracy by suing 12-year olds, and little old ladies who don’t even own computers.
Then Apple came along, and offered the media industry a way to embrace this new technology and satisfy their customers by providing their media in a medium we actually wanted, while still making money. After much cajoling and convincing, the cumbersome giants, which are the media companies, slowly began to understand that “the Internets” could be used to grow their business, and one-by-one, they started to sell their music through the iTunes Music Store.
Then they got greedy.
Somehow they believe that if they remove the option of legally acquiring digital media, then we’ll all flock back to the stores to buy Compact Discs and DVDs in droves. Unable to admit that they are too stupid and too dated an industry to champion their own successful digital distribution system, and unwilling to share their massive profits with a company that offers such a system, Big Media has decided it would be in their best interests to drive us all back into piracy.
Here’s a hint, big guys: if you don’t offer us a legal way to get your content, their are plenty of Swedish hackers that would be happy to provide your content to the rest of the world for free (well, free except for a few raunchy banner ads).
And here’s a hint to all the large organizations who are frightened that individual consumer’s can now communicate with each other, and share information, and yes, even data: you can’t stop the Internet. You can try to portion it off, sue its citizens into submission, limit how we use what we buy, or keep your content to yourself, delivered only through archaic physical mediums, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to face reality — the new reality:
In this generation, ideas, art and even thought itself flow unstoppably through the ether(net). The power belongs to the user now — not to you. Join the digital party, or get trampled on as you become extinct like the dinosaurs you are.
Update: Apple has now decided to pre-emptively drop NBC. Turns out they were asking for double the money for their shows, and Apple refused to be extorted.
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Aug 29, 2007
I’ve long maintained that I’m not much of a gamer. I do own practically every vintage console system made since the early 90s, but for their nostalgic and collectible value — I honestly rarely play them. My favorite games are Red Alert II, Unreal Tournament (the first one) and Commandos (possibly the subject of a whole other post) — all well over 5 years old. I borrowed a Wii right after they came out, to test it out, but don’t own one. And I’m borrowing an XBox 360 right now (thanks Little Jon), mostly to have another HD device to hook up to my TV. But I rarely spend any time or money on games.
However, since I have a 360, and since BioShock just came out, I had to try it. I do keep tabs on the technology world, and it was hard to miss the hype. Virtually every gaming magazine gave it a 10/10, proclaiming it the best game ever made. How could I not try it out?
FPS is not my favourite genre. The perspective gives me a headache, and I can’t play for very long. The only FPS (if you can call it that, because it bent a lot of game types) I’ve ever played through was Shenmue on the Dreamcast. Usually I play a level or two to get a feel for the graphics and gameplay, and that’s enough to satisfy my curiosity. BioShock hasn’t panned out that way. The game is so engrossing that the only reason I put it down tonite was that the XBox froze up and lost about 20 minutes of progress and I was too ticked off to play back through.
First of all, the graphics are a whole new level. I’m not big on graphics — there’s lots of boring games with beautiful graphics — but these are something else. The game is truly scary, because it feels so real.
And this is one game where the graphics truly serve the game play. There’s so much richness to it — you don’t have just weapons and ammo to manage. You have genetic modifications, called plasmids, you can collect and use very creatively to eliminate your enemies. You have money, Adam and Eve, each of which allow you to obtain additional resources. And you make morality decisions as you play that determine what kind of character you become, and even how the game unfolds (I only harvested one Little Sister, out of curiosity — I’m rescuing the rest!)
Finally, the story-line is really interesting. The game rarely leaves you stranded or grinding or wandering. Its not “on rails” and it doesn’t drag you through, but it doesn’t frustrate you either. It really is like playing through a really fascinating, really scary movie.
If you have a 360, you need to pick up this game — at least to rent. I doubt I’ll be able to finish it, but with my new-found free time, its been a lot of fun to play. Definitely an M for Mature though…
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Aug 24, 2007
Recent changes in our lives have dictated changes in our technology infrastructure. Last year I decided I had outgrown the part of my life where I should have a webserver in the bedroom to tinker with, so I moved it to a new location with a proper network infrastructure that I led the development of. I built the best system I knew how, by building up and around the technology I’d put into place for our family, and expanding those principles and leveraging those systems for a larger organization. I’m proud of what I built, but now I’m leaving that part of my life and need to leave that work behind as well. So unfortunately, the webserver that started it all — and that a half-dozen of us, or so, are using, will be orphaned.
I have been very busy over the past couple evenings, moving jonandnic.com and the associated technology and tools, such as e-mail, to a new managed host. I’m trying out a company called WestHost for a few months, because their rates are good, their tech support is very accommodating of my weird requests, and the service will allow us to (eventually) move over our other users.
If you’ve sent us an e-mail in the past couple days, I’ve recently become aware that it probably wasn’t working. It is now, but it might still be flaky for the next week or so. If you’ve come to the website and found it down… well, I can’t promise that won’t happen again either. Those of you who are depending on us for hosting — especially for e-mail — once I figure out how to move ourselves safely, I’ll be ready to move you over as well.
If you live in Asia, I’ll take care of everything for you, and send you updated instructions for accessing your mail. If you live in the States… I’ll help, but you’re going to need to move yourselves somewhere else.
Its been fun providing free hosting and learning through that experience, but all good things must come to an end. I’m quite familiar with HostRocket, and would generally recommend them as a provider for e-mail and WordPress blogs.
I’m not sure what will happen to the archives of jonandnic.com. It looks as if they’ll have to be pulled offline for now. Its been a tremendously frustrating week, moving our online lives (which, for me, is a pretty significant part of my whole life) into a new infrastructure, but in the end, it will be worth it to have our resources managed by someone who is not dependent on our location or the state of our lives.
Posted by Jonathan Wise on Aug 03, 2007
I feel a little dirty, after giving Vista a less-than-condescending review, so in penance, I’m going to brag on another computer for a moment.
In our home office (which doubles as our bedroom) we have a sleek, virtually silent computer. It’s connected to a very sharp, 18″LCD monitor, an incredibly useful HP Printer/Scanner/Copier, and a diminutive but powerful little stereo.
It connects to the Mac Mini in our home theater over the wireless network, and plays our library of DVDs and downloaded TV content, which we can control in bed with a little remote control.
It receives and sorts our e-mail, automatically flagging and categorizing different mail right on the server (over IMAP, since the iPhone can’t do any of those advanced features), and syncs with our shared Address Book and Calendars.
Did I mention that it’s 7 years old?
Our office/secondary-media/e-mail-and-chat Mac is a relatively ancient G4 Cube, running at 450Mhz with a slightly pumped up 768MB of RAM, and a new-ish 80GB hard drive. It’s no Mac mini, but we run MPlayer instead of FrontRow, and I picked up a KeySpan remote for $20 on eBay, and its as capable as a much newer machine. It’s running the latest version of OS X, and does so without complaint or lag.
It has a few limitations, and unfortunately was an early model, so has the weaker of the two video cards that the Cube were configured with, and only two USB ports can be annoying. But both problems are easily solved with less than $50 and a visit to eBay. I wouldn’t try running FinalCut on her, but she runs PhotoShop CS without delay.
The thing is on 24/7. When awake you can hear the hard drive spinning, and nothing else. When its asleep, its completely silent. It has no fans, and the whole computer floats elegantly in a glass enclosure that still looks futuristic, despite its age. I had initially picked it up for bragging rights, with the intention of pushing it as far as I could, and then selling it on eBay as a collectors item — I paid less than $200 for it, and figured I could upgrade it with spare parts and make a little money. But I kept pushing it, and it kept outperforming my expectations. It worked its way into useful life as the sexiest, coolest and oldest computer in our array of devices, and even though its “obsolete” it gives the Craptop running Vista a run for its money.
