I'm afraid not, sadly. My nice shiny new iPhone 4 will be jailbreak free. Completely and utterly. To the point that I'm doing a full restore and not restoring my backup, as it contains some preferences and whatnot left over from the jailbreak of my previous 3G. The only thing that's being copied over is the record of my 6,200 SMS messages that I've built up over the course of 3 years, and I'm doing that by plucking out the file from one of my old backups and then dropping it into a new backup and restoring from that.
It sounds long-winded, and it is, but I want this new iPhone to be completely untouched by the taint of jailbreaking. It just isn't worth the hassle any more. All the flaws that used to require a jailbreak seem to have been fixed by Apple nowadays. MMS, Copy/Paste, multitasking. It's all covered. Even the notification thing isn't major any more since fast app switching means you can reply to a text and be back playing angry birds in 2 seconds.
Quick summary: After 3 years of iPhone ownership the reasons to jailbreak have been reducing gradually. At this point I don't believe the benefits outweigh the hassles of avoiding updates, software glitches, extra fiddling and having to restore if I ever have a problem with the phone.
Update: Copying the SMS record from my old backup to the new one didn't work, it seems there's some kind of checksumming done on the backup as a whole entity rather than the individual components. On the plus side though I have noticed a massive improvement in battery life. I'm getting through a full day with ~60% left consistently. Which is nice.
So I decided to fire up Defcon for the first time in ages today. The DRM decided that I didn't want to play it. Amongst the things they suggest you try to fix this are: Delete your authkey file, disable your firewall, verify the cache integrity, delete and reinstall the game. All things that your average user could do, obviously.
Even more annoying is that on the same screen as this error there is a message from the devs stating that the authentication problems are fixed. I've got a better idea, stop fucking about reinventing the wheel, use the DRM that's available to all steam games and let me blow up the world god damn it!
Update: It seems to be working now, days after the urge to play has gone. Seems to highlight the problem with DRM quite well. Why is an additional piece of software deciding when I can play a game that I've paid for? Surely that should be my choice!
There's a new iPhone coming, and it probably won't be jailbroken straight away. That means that if I want to get a new fancy iPhone, and not my current old slow iPhone with a plastic back that will end up with cracks in it within 12 months (I'm on my second) then I'll need to make do without a jailbreak for a month or so.
So it got me to thinking: Can I survive with a regular locked down iPhone, and what would I miss if I had to go without the wonders of Cydia?
SBsettings: This is the first thing that came to my mind. SBsettings lets me toggle my Wifi, 3G, Bluetooth and Tethering on or off without having to open the settings app. Just swipe the status bar and tap. Job done. It means I can just switch on Wifi when I need it instead of it draining my battery all the time. I think I'll miss it the most out of all the modifications.
Installous: 'What about all my free apps?' I thought. Then I checked, and I don't actually have any cracked apps installed at all. None. Every single app that deserved a permanent space on my home screen also deserved my money. So that's not really an issue then, especially since more games have free lite versions these days anyway.
YourTube: This adds an extra tab to the YouTube app that let's you download YouTube videos and play them back when you're without 3G. It's nice to have, but nothing on YouTube is really essential so I'll just go ahead and move on to the next one.
Notifier: Adds little icons to the status bar at the top when you have new emails, texts and missed calls, or when you switch your phone to silent. Great for being able to quickly check your phone, especially if there's more than one update. It's becoming less useful these days though since I'm just as likely to have a notification from Meebo, Facebook, Tweetie or We Rule, noe of which have pretty little icons.
QuickReply: Possibly my favourite extension so far. When you get a text it adds a Reply button to the notification. Tap it and it brings up an overlay so you can reply without leaving your current app. Never again will I curse people for talking to me when I'm trying to kill pigs with birds. Except now I will again, because it'll be gone come Saturday.
5 Icon Dock: The dock on my iPhone has 5 icons. I know what you're thinking: 4 is the maximum! Not with this hack though. It means I can have Phone, Mail, Messages, Meebo and Tweetie all on my dock at once. It's marvellous. I'll miss it, but I can live with having to find Tweetie on the first page.
...
And this would be where I was expecting to continue listing all the different jailbreak apps I've got on my phone. Apps like Winterboard and the various emulators. But I don't have them. Winterboard seemed to crash my iPhone far too much to make it worthwhile, and games that aren't designed for the iPhone control terribly when shoehorned onto the touch interface, so I'd never really bothered with emulators.
I guess I won't miss it that much after all, except for my less than official tethering, but again, I've only used it twice, and ocne was to show off that I could. The other time was to test it was working.
This was originally going to be a post about my favourite jailbreak apps, and I suppose it still is, there's just less of them. If you prefer you can change the title to '7 deadly apps that Apple don't want you to have' or something fancy like that.
I've been thinking about this for a while, and finally decided that Tumblr just isn't what I need.
Don't get me wrong, the concept of Tumblr is brilliant. Different post types depending on what it is you want to post, each styled differently, and all easily postable. Sadly, whenever I got the urge to write a post, I saw the 'Link' option, added a couple of sentences to the description and boom, I've blogged, let's have a smoke break.
It made blogging so easy that I never actually blogged, strange as it sounds. I just fooled myself into thinking I was blogging.
Tumblr also seemed to focus too much on the presentation. There are some gorgeous Tumblr themes. So gorgeous, in fact, that I spent more time playing around with the theming API than I ever did posting. Compared to now, where I've got a pretty basic look-at-all-the-words theme that I've thrown together in an evening, and you can hopefully see the focus is on the content, not the packaging.
I came across this article that seems to sum up the form vs function argument pretty well, but I think he gets the conclusion wrong. He says Tumblr is beating Posterous because it's better designed, and I suppose he's right, but that's also why I didn't like it. It was so close to being good, but it just had a bit too much twitter and bit too little blog. You can create a post by clicking one button. Tumblr will detect what kind of page your on and create a new post that matches, so video for youtube, photo for flickr, etc.
I don't think creativity is something we should be simplifying, and that's my problem with Tumblr. I don't like the emphasis on reblogging (which is basically just posting someone else's content with an 'I agree!' or 'Me too!' attached) instead of creating new and interesting things to read or look at.
I wanted to get away from the complications of a full Wordpress style blogging system, but Tumblr just went to far in the other direction. Posterous seem to have got it just right, which is why I'll hopefully have that yellow tab in the top right for quite some time.
So... I went and bought a man-bag. I spent years of my life ridiculing the kinds of people that buy man-bags, and now I've got one. I haven't bought it to keep my hair products in though, it just happens to be the perfect size for my laptop, which meant I obviously had to spend several hours deliberating over what gadgets make the man-bag cut. Here's the final line-up...
Laptop: Obviously, I've got my laptop in here. A 12.1" beast from Samsung. It can run Civ and output HDMI to my TV, so it fills all the necessary boxes. It can also do code and other stuff, but Civ is the main priority.
Camera: Just a little point-and-shoot Finepix, but it does the job marvellously. Never seem to have it with me when I need it, so into the bag it goes, ready to take amusing pictures of cats at a moments notice.
DS Lite: I just can't get enough of Phoenix Wright. I must be able to play it, regardless of time or place. I also have an overwhelming urge to catch 'em all.
iPhone Cable: The iPhone's battery is... well, it's not great. If I had to rely on it working for over 24 hours without a charge due to some life or death situation then I'd probably be dead. This makes the battery all better again.
USB Cable: Bog standard USB to mini-USB cable, but with 2 USB plugs for high power devices. You never know when you'll need to plug in something. Shame it doesn't work with my camera and it's odd connection.
External HDD: It's my main workhorse for transferring files about. If I remembered to back up my data I'd do it on this, but since I don't it's mostly full of disc images and software installers.
Bluetooth Mouse: Tiny little thing, like a real mouse. Runs off 2 AAA batteries, unlike a real mouse.
Sharpie: Sometimes you just need to write things on other things in a non-removable way.
12-in-1 Screwdriver: Covers most of the small driver bases, including an extensive collection torx drivers for disassembling gadgets.
USB Dongles: Nobody else ever has these when you need to quickly copy a file, connect a bluetooth device, or toast a bagel. I've got 2 out of 3 covered.
So, now for the real reason behind this post, the part where I ask you, the reader, the general public, what you carry round with your laptops. Any essentials you think I missed, anything you thing is just bogging me down?
I've been trying to whip my iTunes library into shape for months now, and finally decided I needed to break down the job into manageable chunks. Using smart playlists I did just that and here’s how.
Missing Info: First things first I needed to sort out any tracks that were missing key info from their tags. My idea of key info is Title, Artist, Album or Album Artist. Genre is always lost on me, but if you like it then include that too.
Shorties: Songs shorter than 1 minute are crappy interludes or silent tracks 90% of the time. Have it only apply to unrated songs so you don’t include short songs you DO like.
No Rating: This is the bread and butter of my organisation. It’s simply any unrated track, chosen at random, up to a maximum of 100. I turned off live updating to prevent the song stopping as soon as you rate it. Remember: 1 star means delete!
To Delete: Following on from the ratings above, this just takes everything rated 1 star and pops it all in one place, ready to be purged from your library forever.
Any others you’d include in a selection of playlists for organising a music library?
I've been playing around with various different blog platforms over the past week or so to find the one that works best for me.
I used Sweetcron for a while, and even went so far as to build my own theme for it. Then I decided I didn't like it, for a lot of the same reasons the Sweetcron creator doesn't like it. Here's my own reasoning.
Sweetcron is great in a 'fire-and-forget' kind of way. You hand it a bunch of feeds from various websites, like Flickr and Delicious, and it makes them into a nice little blog-like stream of all your activity.
This is where sweetcron started to fall down for me. I normally use Instapaper to queue up stuff to read and then binge on it over the course of an hour or so. This meant that a lot of links and shared RSS items would show up at once.
I had the same problem with Flickr, each photo got its own item, so a new set would fill up the first 4 or 5 pages of the stream.
I use different tags on different services, so even though sweetcron pulled them all into one big bag o' tags, they still weren't much use.
All of this meant that I started to worry everytime I added something to any of the sites that sweetcron fed from. I figured that if I was going to worry that much every time I posted something then I might as well use a separate blog (or tumblog in this case) and just post to it when I wanted to.
So there we have it. By solving my problems with blogging, Sweetcron proved that I didn't need it at all, that all I was doing is using Flickr, Delicious, Twitter and others as a sort of cross-domain tumblog. So I switched to Tumblr. It's fun, simple, quick, easy to theme, and it has an iPhone app.
Update: Well, I'm never happy, since I've now left Tumblr at the altar for Posterous.
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