Well as I write this I’m taking the plunge and installing iOS4 to my iPhone 3G and then Jailbreaking with redsn0w. A few hours ago this morning iOS4 was released to the general public for download via iTunes. A few hours later the iPhone Dev Team and Musclenerd updated ultrasn0w which will now unlock ALL basebands, and just about an hour or so ago, they released the final beta version of redsn0w. You can grab the latest version of redsn0w here: download redsn0w
The proper procedure for your iPhone 3G is basically this: !!!ONLY DO THIS ON iPhone 3G!!!! I am not responsible if you fuck up your phone! Use at your own risk and don’t attempt if you are a clueless moron.
-Restore to the official iOS4 firmware that iTunes downloaded today, be sure to click SHIFT+Restore from within itunes
-This will take about 15-20 minutes as the firmware is installed to your iPhone 3G
-Once the 4.0 Firmware has been restored, before you restore your iPhone settings from backups, launch redsn0w
-From within redsn0w choose the CURRENT iOS4 FINAL release firmware you just installed the file name should be iPhone1,2_4.0_8A293_Restore.ipsw
-redsn0w will then churn away at the firmware and do some validation, once it’s been validated click next
-You’ll then be prompted to turn off your iPhone. Make sure the iPhone is plugged into the computer before you power the device down. Hold the power button down until the power slider gives you the option to shut the phone down.
-Get ready, after the next step you’ll have to follow the instructions on the redsn0w screen FAST. Once the device is plugged into the computer and powered off, click next
-Follow the on screen instructions in redsn0w. You will have to hold the power button for 2 seconds, then both buttons for 10 seconds, then release the power button and hold only the home button for another 30 seconds or so.
-If you’ve followed the instructions correctly, redsn0w will show a progress bar. At that point it is safe to release the home button.
-Allow the process to continue and complete without pressing anything or disconnecting anything
-After a few minutes you’ll see the PWNAPPLE logo and “Flashing NOR” on your device…this is a good thing! Then installing Bundles…
-Then the device will reboot, and if you’ve chosen verbose startup in redsn0w you’ll see a linux-like boot sequence
-Congratz! You’ve now Jailbroken iOS4 on your iPhone 3G! Pretty easy huh?
-Your Cydia app icon will be a white icon, but run it once and allow it to pull down sources/updates and it should go to the normal Cydia app icon.
-You can now sync with iTunes and restore from your previous backups
Jailbreak iOS 4 for iPhone 3G Screenshots
That’s about it! I hope that this helps some folks who are looking at Jailbreaking their iPhone 3G with iOS4. Tons of thanks to the iPhone Dev Team for all their great work and efforts, and a big “fuck you” to all the people who bitch and moan about the pace of their work. Got a problem? Do it better yourself then.
Feel free to discuss in the comments below!
Top 24 Official and Jailbroken iPhone Apps
Lets face it. There are a lot of incredibly worthless and crappy Apps in the Apple AppStore. Sorting through all the garbage to find the truly useful Apps can be a huge pain in the ass, not to mention expensive. I’ve decided to put together my list of the best iPhone Apps. At the time of this writing I have a Jailbroken iPhone 3G. I will be getting the iPhone 4 next week when it is released. These Apps will still remain my top picks for some time to come. If you currently have a Jailbroken iPhone 3G or 3GS on the 3.x firmware, many of these Apps will be available to you. This is a mix of official Apps and Apps that require a Jailbroken iPhone. Please feel free to add your favorite Apps to the comments section so that others can try some great Apps on their iPhones.
LogMeIn Ignition – $29.99
The LogMeIn Ignition App gives you access to your Mac and Windows computers via a remote desktop-like interface. Even though this App is a bit pricey, it’s well worth it. I’ve been using LogMeIn for years and it’s never failed to save my ass in an emergency.
Pocket Informant – $12.99
Pocket Informant for iPhone is an advanced business-class calendaring App. It has the ability to sync with multiple Google Calendars and display free/busy time in an easy to view way. Hands down the best mobile calendaring App. I’ve been using Pocket Informant since the Windows Mobile days.
MyWi -$9.99 (for Jailbroken iPhone)
MyWi allows you to tether your iPhone to your laptop computer to use the 3G connection from your phone to access the internet. Another awesome feature is that MyWi will also allow you to create your own mobile hotspot on your phone and share the 3G connection wirelessly to several computers. If you were unfortunate enough to get on one of AT&T’s new limited 2GB/mo data plans, I suggest you stay away… far away.
Shozu – $5.99
Shozu allows you to upload photos and post status updates to dozens of social networks, blogs, and FTP sites. You can post photos with geotags to Flickr, update your status and post photos to Facebook, read your Twitter stream and post updates to multiple accounts and much more. I can simultaneously upload a photo to Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and my private FTP in one upload.
Meebo – Free
Meebo is the best IM web client around. If you’ve never tried Meebo on the web, I highly suggest you do. Meebo for the iPhone adds push IM notifications, so you can stay signed into all of your IM networks while on the move. It functions much better than any of the other paid iPhone IM Apps. It’s smart enough to push IMs to your phone when not logged in via the web, and then will switch to web delivery when you log into the web site. Meebo supports multi-protocol IM’ing including all of the major players with the exception of Skype.
OrbLive – $9.99
Orb is truly a Slingbox killer and worth every penny of the $9.99 App price. With Orb installed on your PC or Mac at home you can stream all of your videos, mp3s and photos to your iPhone. If you have a TV Tuner in that PC you can stream live TV broadcasts to your iPhone as well. It’s an amazing App, and even if you don’t want to use it on your iPhone the main Orb server is free and all of your media is accessible via your web browser.
Qik Live – Free
Using Qik you can record and stream live video from your iPhone to Qik.com. Once you’ve shot the video you can share it with other social networks including one click uploading to Youtube.
Air Mouse Pro -$1.99
Air Mouse allows acts as a wireless keyboard and mouse for your computer. I use Air Mouse Pro to control my Media Center PC / Home Theater PC.
aLight – $.99
I know there are a million flashlight Apps for the iPhone. I happen to like this one, and for how much I use it, I find that it’s worth the $.99.
LockInfo – $4.99 after 14-day Free Trial (for Jailbroken iPhone)
LockInfo is a lockscreen heads-up-display. It shows you all if your important information right on the lock screen including Emails, Calendar, Weather, Missed Calls, SMS, Notifications, Twitter stream and more. I am really dreading the iPhone 4 not being jailbroken and not having this functionality.
Universal Search – $2.99 (For Jailbroken iPhone)
Universal Search is a plugin for the iPhone Spotlight search feature. Instead of just being able to search the local data on your phone, with Universal Search you can search over 20 different websites from your home screen.
iNet – $4.99
Every IT guru with an iPhone needs this App. This App give you the ability to perform a network discovery scan, ping hosts on your network, browse Bonjour hosts, portscan, get detailed device info, wake on lan, sleep on lan (macs only), the ability to email scan results and much more.
Other notable Apps:
I’ll list a few other Apps that I use on a regular basis. Some of these will be more common favorites that everybody already may know about, others may not.
AT&T iPhone 4 Upgrade: How to Check if You Are Eligible For Discounted Pricing
Like many people I was excited this week when I found out about all the new features of the upcoming iPhone 4 to be released by Apple on June 24th. And I wondered of course if I was eligible for “new every 2″ pricing from AT&T. See, like the sucker I am I purchased the iPhone 3G about 2.5 months before the iPhone 3GS was released. (Just like I got my first MacBook Pro less than 7 days before the new ones were released a couple weeks back…) I digress, I’m sure many folks are also wondering if you can get the new iPhone 4 at cheaper than full price through AT&T. As I was trying to find the answer to that question, I stumbled upon a trick to find the answer via your phone.
Simply dial: *639# on your iPhone handset. You will receive a message from AT&T about your ability to upgrade or not. This is the only place I got the answer I wanted… logging into my account at attwireless.com did not tell me if I could indeed upgrade or not. Hopefully once the iPhone 4 pre-release ordering begins on June 14th, I’ll still be able to order the 16GB iPhone 4 at $199. Damn, I hope so.
I recently started using Windows 7 (as a Parallels Virtual Machine on my new MacBook Pro) and wanted to move my iTunes database (including my Library and Settings) from my old XP laptop to Windows 7 so I can sync my iPhone and not lose any of my information. Regardless of my less than standard setup, this article will explain how to move your iTunes from Windows XP to Windows 7, while preserving all of your media and settings, including iPhone information.
Overall this process is relatively simple. I would highly suggest having an external USB Hard Drive to perform the transfer with. If you do not have an external USB Hard Drive, you can certainly transfer the files over the network if you are capable of doing such.
First you will need to backup/copy the following folders from your XP computer to your external hard drive:
a. C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes
b. C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes
c. C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
Once you have copied these folders from your XP machine to your external drive, connect the drive to your Windows 7 system. Be sure to have iTunes installed on your Windows 7 system.
Copy the folders from above, to the following directories on your Windows 7 computer:
a. Copy the folder in a. above and paste to C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes
b. Copy the folder in b. above and paste to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\iTunes
c. Copy the folder in c. above and paste to C:\Users\username\Music\iTunes
Once you’ve completed the above steps, launch iTunes on your Windows 7 computer and make sure that your Library and other settings are intact. If everything looks good, you can then connect your iPod or iPhone to sync to your new Windows 7 system.
Good luck!
After updating WordPress and redesigning thew0rd.com this weekend I started to get an error message similar to the one below on the WordPress Admin Dashboard:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1966080 bytes) in /home/user/public_html/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 5353
I was able to solve this error by editing the wp-config.php file and adding the following line:
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
What this effectively does is increase the amount of memory that WordPress can use on your web server. You can alternately modify the php.ini file to increase the memory limit, but many web hosts do not allow users to change these parameters. I hope this tip helps people having the same or similar errors on their WordPress 2.9.2 sites.
Spiceworks 4.6 just released
Spiceworks, my favorite tool for managing IT networks, has released a new version. Spiceworks scans your entire network and audits the devices in you infrastructure. Not only does Spiceworks create a comprehensive IT inventory, but it also monitors the health of vital systems. It can alert you when certain conditions are met, errors are found, systems run out of hard disk space, printer ink is low, and much more.
Another cool feature is to have Spiceworks scan multiple sites, and report back to a central collector. This is great for me, as the company I work for, is an outsourced IT Helpdesk for several medium sized businesses. We’ve deployed Spiceworks at all of our clients with more than 10 PCs. This allows our business to be proactive in our approach to IT instead of reactive.
Don’t even get me started on how good Spiceworks has been for License Management.
Spiceworks 4.6 brings a host of new features include:
- View and Kill Processes Remotely
- Ability to discover virtualized servers on VMware (vSphere & ESX/ESXi), showing all the virtual machine data and configuration details
- Better Helpdesk ticket management
- Network mapping improvements
- See network alerts and notifications in your Spiceworks Toolbar
- And more…
If you have never tried Spiceworks, you should. It is free, and after you use it, you will be converted. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s FREE (As in BEER)? I used to work for a software company that developed one of the premier Enterprise IT Discovery platforms, and believe me, Spiceworks can do a lot more than even some multimillion dollar Enterprise platforms. That was always the “dirty little secret”. Anyways, check it out, you’ll love it.
Keurig B60 Special Edition Review
Some of you may not know, but I drink a lot of coffee. And when I say a lot, I mean like around 100 fl oz per day. I’m also a bit of a coffee-snob, meaning that I won’t drink any old swill you get at Dunkin’ Doughnuts (umm yuck!). So even a large (venti) black coffee at Starbucks costs over $2, and a couple coffees per day (even with free refills) adds up fast.
The recession and a new job have forced me to re-work my budget. So I decided to make coffee at work, but I’m the only one in the office who drinks coffee. So if I were to brew a whole pot, it would go to waste, and I’d be spending about $14/week on beans. So I decided to get the Keurig B60 Special Edition Gourmet Single-Cup Home-Brewing System
I’m not going to use the K-Cups that most people have to buy for the Keurig. Instead, I’m going to grind my own coffee and use the My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter
Now for the review of the machine. I’ve been using it for almost a week at this point. Overall I am pleased with the quality of coffee it brews. The trial K-Cups that came with the brewer were pretty bad, not anywhere near up to my standards. However using my own coffee with the reusable filter makes a pretty good cup of java. You need to grind the coffee about as fine as you can (think espresso grind) in order to get good extraction and a dark cup. Be sure to tamp the grounds down lightly into the filter too. The coffee it brews is akin to a French Press, this is because the reusable filter is metal, and not paper. This lets all the flavorful coffee oils flow into your cup. Great for taste, but can do a number on your stomach, so be careful.
As for care and maintenance of the machine, it’s pretty easy. The only major pain is cleaning the reusable filter, but for the money savings, I don’t mind it. All in all I would suggest this machine to anyone who wants fresh coffee often, where brewing an entire pot isn’t economical. So work out the math, and if it makes cents (har har), get one!
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