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Friday, August 21st, 2009iPhone JailBreak – Really Cat and Mouse?
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009I am very grateful to all those who contribute without compensation, many hours of work to provide us the ability to jailbreak our iPhones with the latest firmware/hardware. Without much consideration, I have defaulted to the idea that this is really a cat and mouse game where these good folks find vulnerabilities, then Apple plugs them up.
I know longer think this is the case. Let me esplain…
With the release of the new 3.0 software came numerous bugs. Knowing that Apple will be releasing 3.1 with fixes and features, the iPhone Dev Team was averse to releasing a jailbreak solution for fear that they would be handing the exploit to Apple on a silver platter leaving them stuck when it comes to jailbreaking future firmware releases.
Made sense to me…
This evening, I stumbled across the blog of George Hotz who was a part of the team who first unlocked the original iPhone (I believe he was 17 at the time). In somewhat of an arrogant fashion, George let the cat out of the bag and released purplerra1n. In doing this, the exploit(s) used to jailbreak the 3GS/3.0 firmware is now visible to Apple.
In his cockyness, he made me think on a couple of things:
- Software is never perfect, perhaps he is right in suggesting that there will always be an exploit. It might start requiring more work on the hack side but we should be able to continue to jailbreak.
- The exploit that enables the iPhone to be jailbroken has been out for some time now. Many Apple updates later, still not plugged.
Considering the latter, does Apple really want to *fix* our ability to jailbreak our phones?
Some reasons to plug the hole:
- Lost revenue from unauthorized apps?
- IP infringement?
- Prevent unauthorized carrier use (unlocking)?
- Other…
Some reasons to not plug the hole:
- How many more people are buying the iPhone because it can be hacked? Hacked or not, people
a. still have to buy an iPhone
b. still could provide revenue to an authorized carrier
c. still would purchase from iTunes and AppStore
- Free advertising (of the best kind – word of mouth)?
- Other revenue generating reasons…
The world may never know but from this camp, I am leaning towards the latter.
-boogybren
Annual running of the Apple lemmings
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Coming soon to an AT&T store near you, the running of the Apple lemmings. One thing that will be different this go around is that I will be part of the chaos. Yep, you heard right. I preordered my iPhone 3Gs today. I won’t lie, I am excited to see 1st hand what all the drama is about. I am not all that excited about joining the ranks of the fanboys, but I suppose that is the price you pay for something worth having.
Another bit of information that I thought was humorous is that the company tasked with taking all the online orders from Apple in the UK failed at keeping up:
http://www.macworld.com/article/134360/2008/07/o2iphone.html
Anyway, I promise that we will have a full review on the new iPhone 3Gs shortly after we get our grubby little hands on it.
~dub
When Geeks Become Nerds
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009Okay, okay. The Palm Pre is due out soon. You wouldn’t be a geek if you didn’t find the device interesting or somewhat cool. But there is a line where you cross over to nerd’dom.
Engadget has kindly showed us what happens when a nerd is tasked to take snapshots of the soon to be released Palm Pre. I mean really, how many angles can you get on a phone? (This is what it looks like in good light, this is what it looks like in dim light…) Maybe the guy was secretly promoting his desire to do hand modeling, I dunno.
Yes, there are iPhone geeks (my good friend dub affectionately refers to them as fanboys) as well as other types of nerds. This is simply a sampling of the Palm Pre…fanboys if you will.
-boogybren
How To Pump Up The Volume On Your iPhone Alerts
Monday, May 4th, 2009Those who know me know that I absolutely love my jailbroken iPhone. In fact, if I could it couldn’t be jailbroken, I wouldn’t own one. Fortunately, it looks as if version 3.o of the iPhone software is still jailbreakable (if that is such a word).
That aside…
One of the few complaints that I have had about the iPhone is that the volume of the alerts is extremely quiet. If I have my phone in it’s holster and I am just out and about in public, I cannot hear new email alerts or appointment reminders chime through. The bigger problem was that I would never remember to research out a fix for this dilemma, until now.
Well, that’s sort of a white lie. There is a tool that I researched some time ago that you can install via Cydia that allows you to modify a plist that manages the max volume setting for the iPhone. In my opinion, I didn’t notice a single difference after using it, so off it went.
The audio files that the iPhone uses are .caf (Core Audio File) files which are stored at /System/Library/Audio/UISounds on the phone’s filesystem. After a little research, I learned that these .caf files are really .aiff files with renamed extensions. At least they behave as such.
Armed with this information in hand, I was ready to nab my email alert audio file and make it a little louder.
Here is what you need:
- A jailbroken iPhone that’s on your wireless network
- WinSCP or a like tool that you can use to SCP or SFTP to your phone
- Audacity or a like tool that you can use to edit .aiff files
You can do this from a Windows box or a Mac. Today I will only outline a Windows method.
Step 1: Make Sure Your iPhone is on Your Wireless Network
Once you have your iPhone attached to your local wi-fi, you can grab the IP address by going to:
Settings > General > Network > Wi-Fi
Tap the blue button on the right of your network name and jot down your IP address. You will need it for the next step.
Step 2: Copy the Audio File to Your Local Computer
Open WinSCP and log into your iPhone.
- In the hostname field, input the IP address from step one.
- In the username field, input root (this has to be done as the root user).
- If you have not changed the root user’s password, the default is alpine. Otherwise input the password you changed it to.
- For file protocol, you can use either SCP or SFTP. If for some reason one doesn’t work, try the other one.
- Click login
- On the right pane, navigate to /System/Library/Audio/UISounds
Step 3: Copy the Audio File Locally
The filenames are pretty straight forward. I wanted to make my new email alert louder, so I selected new-mail.caf and copied it to my local desktop. Take a look around, you can modify a good number of phone alerts and sounds in here.
Step 4: Edit the Audio File
Once you have downloaded the file you want to make louder, you will need to temporaily rename the file extension from .caf to .aiff. After doing so, open Audacity then open the file.
If you hit the green play button, you can hear how loud the alert is by default. To the left of the waveform are some controls. Find the dial that is highlighted below:
You can use this to increase the volume of the audio file. Play around with it to find the right volume for you. Keep in mind as you increase the volume of your audio file, what sounds good loud on your local computer may be too loud for that little speaker on your phone. You don’t want it so loud that it’s going to blow up your phone’s speaker.
When you are done, select:
File > Export
Make sure that under Save As Type you select AIFF. Also make sure that you left the filename the same.
Once exported, close Audacity and change the file extension back to .caf.
Step 5: Copy the File Back to Your iPhone
Now that you have your newly modified file, you need to get it back to the phone. If you have disconnected from your iPhone via WinSCP, just follow the instructions on step 2 to get reconnected.
Before you copy your file back up, I would just recommend that you rename the original file on the phone for backup purposes (you just never know…). For me, I renamed new-mail.caf to new-mail.caf.orig so that I could designate that it was the original audio file.
On the left pane of WinSCP, find your newly modified audio file and on the right pane, make sure you are still in /System/Library/Audio/UISounds.
Copy the new file over to the phone and voila! You are done!
Using this same method, you could get creative and add your own unique alerts to your iPhone.
-boogybren
Tripping Over Dollars To Save Pennies?
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009I work for a large organization that has a good number of users with company paid mobile phones. Prior to this last month, most of our users were with Verizon, with some stragglers on AT&T and Sprint.
For whatever reason, my organization felt it was prudent to move all of our plans over to Sprint. I can speculate that it was because of the economy, but truthfully I am not sure why there was a sudden need to move. I do know that there will be *some* savings but again, I can only theorize from my perspective what these savings are. And from my theories, it’s not much. Especially when you consider what is lost.
In moving to Sprint, we had a choice of a few devices: Palm Treo Pro – HTC Touch – HTC Touch Pro
All of these devices run Windows Mobile. If you run a Microsoft Exchange server in your enterprise, then you can push email devices without the horrendous cost of client licensing.
It’s been a bit since I had to deal with purchasing software licenses but back in the day, if you had a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, you had to pay each year for each BlackBerry user that had email pushed to their devices via the BES. If you used a different intermediary server to serve up corportate email to the device (i.e. Good), then you could expect to pay just a one time license fee. So hands down, there are some cost savings here by losing the BlackBerry devices and going with WinMo.
Also as I understand it, our plan + data is a good portion less expensive than our previous carrier.
This all sounds like a good deal right? I guess it depends on your perspective.
My position requires me to be available 24×7 so needless to say, my phone is short of surgically attached to my hip. I coordinate the support of highly visible and sensitive apps. So when that phone rings, I need to be able to execute.
So imagine my dismay when I took my phone home the first day to find that it is teetering between 0 and 1 bars of signal. I live in a one of the larger cities in my state, is it unreasonable to expect better cellular signal?
I didn’t want this to taint my perception of Sprint and our new service. I truly desired to be removed from the situation emotionally as much as possible. The next day as I returned to my office…which happens to be at our state’s capitol, the signal improved to 1 to 2 bars.
The seed of frustration is officially planted.
I initiated dialogue with the Sprint Reps to see if I could roam onto Verizon if the Sprint signal was poor of which they validated that I could upon updating the PRL (whatever that is) on my phone. After attempting to update the PRL on my phone all day long, it never successfully received its instructions to roam.
The Sprint reps jumped in and said that I need an Air Rave for my house. An Air Rave is a wireless device that I plug into my home internet connection. It gives me full signal when I am home and then pipes all my calls through the device through the cloud to Sprint’s network. Cool idea, but what happens when I leave my home? Poor signal resumes. Not to mention that my data still goes directly to the towers. So much for email.
Gently sharing my frustrations further, the Sprint reps wanted me to try a different phone, the HTC Touch Pro. One of the reps asserts that he is in my neighborhood 2-3 times per week and has never had a problem with his signal. I wasn’t fond of the phone but was willing to try it out.
After taking it home, I learned a few things:
1. I still had poor signal.
2. Incoming calls weren’t ringing through to me (at any location).
3. The battery life on this device was awful.
A day or so later, I learned that my device likes to lock up on me from time to time and I never know that it does unless I try to make an outgoing call or fidget with it otherwise.
Adding more insult to injury, the Sprint rep asked me not to discuss my problems with others as not to conjure up phantom issues with those whom I share my story with.
To my relief, I learned that my peers (which consequently have similar needs as I do), were seeing the same issues.
So the biggest question I have is: How much did we really save?
If I continued with Sprint, there is no way that I could provide the level of service to my “customers” that is required. Because of the nature of the applications that I support, it could even put me in a situation that could embarrass my organization to the world given the right circumstances.
How do you quantify the worth of properly servicing your customer?
My role is to add value to the customers I deal with. Because my customer is at risk of losing value, I would be very irresponsible if I didn’t take action. The next time I am in the office again, I will relenquish all of my Sprint devices and use my own phone until something can be worked out.
It will be interesting to see what unfolds with the corporation’s mobile service provider as time rolls on.
- boogybren
Decisions, Decisions
Thursday, March 19th, 2009I am shortly losing a company sponsored cellular device, and at first I was quite happy about it. Being a “Techie Guy” gets a little old for all of us at some point I would wager, and the thought of not getting any email, texts, or phone calls was quite alluring. But now that I have had a few days to stew about it, I am not so sure I want to be off the grid so to speak. I questioned my wonderful wifey whether she had any strong opinions to help me in my decision, and she made the comment of, “well, you haven’t ever not had one have you?” Good or bad, that statement is the truth. Cell phones have become nigh on required in this day and age whether we like it or not. A lot like internet access at home. I can’t imagine going back to dial-up, or worse…. no access.
But, I digress. The real purpose of this post is to ask you who pay for your own mobile devices, is it worth the monthly bill? I know I want to get basic cell capability, but do I want to go all out and get an iPhone or a BlackBerry type device? I love that with these hopped up devices I can do just about anything I could ever want to and more, but does it add to your technology angst at the end of the day?
Any thoughts in the form of comments will be appreciated as I make this possibly life changing decision. ;)
~dub
Public Service Announcement
Monday, February 2nd, 2009The views expressed in this blog post are not necessarily those of the Geeks in Denial website, or its governors, trustees, officers, employees, and agents.
Geeks in Denial assumes no responsibility for claims arising from actions of visitors based on blog content.
Any questions related to driving while distracted are best directed to professionals rather than to geeksindenial.com.
Hi All,
As I was returning home from the ‘ol gym tonight, I had a few harrowing experiences. The Gold’s Gym that I choose to visit is approximately 5 miles away. In the time it took me to drive home I was afraid for my life no less than 3 times. Now I realize that this is not an unusual occurrence in Utah county, but there is one thing about it that has me particularly concerned this evening. Each of the drivers in these 3 situations were not in absolute control of their vehicle due to apparent texting or e-mailing on there cellular device. Believe you me, I am not one to shy away from using these wonderfully convenient means of communication but it seems to me that we are using them at a far larger price than we imagine. As the usage of cell phones, smart phones and the like increase, I believe that the chances for accidents will also increase. Unfortunately we have already seen too many horrible accidents that were likely caused by driving distracted with these devices. (If you don’t believe me just Google it, I was amazed at how many I hadn’t heard about.)
So I suppose this post is a plea to anyone who reads it, to please stop using your cellular device of choice to type while you are driving. I must admit that at one time was guilty of this practice as well, but have since decided it is not worth the risk. Do yourself, your loved ones, and all of us a favor by paying attention to the road and hopefully it will catch on and prevent tragedy.
~dub
Got JailBreak? – Must Have Apps For Your JailBroken iPhone
Friday, January 30th, 2009If you have an iPhone and it’s not jailbroken, you are missing out on a wealth of applications that simply enhance your iPhone experience. Simply put, I would not own my iPhone if I couldn’t jailbreak it!
instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone: windows – mac
Here is a list of must-have applications that you can only get after you have jailbroken your phone. The list is focused on applications that benefit most people and not just the power user. (more…)