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Just in case the world thinks that I've given up the blogging I thought I'd drop a very quick post to let you know what's happening.
For the past two weeks I've had a bit of a rush job on a work so have been working on parts of it at home. These things can get pretty all consuming hence the lack of activity on the blog. The good news is that it's finished and looking good. The bad news is that my PC is yet again in pieces around the office floor. I just cannot figure out what's making it so sick. I even tried my hidden ace of using a different hard drive just to get it started but it just wasn't playing.
It went blue on Friday and I spent most of Saturday pulling it apart and trying to cajole it into activity but to no avail. I would have went further today but I sacrificed the virtual world to go out amongst the real world and see some relatives. I can be really guilty of shutting myself off from the world once the caravan season ends. What that means is that, if you don't own a caravan, some relatives haven't seen me since the last time the trees were this bare and the nights this dark. It's a shame because every time I visit I think, I really enjoyed that, I should make the effort more often. I hardly even saw my brother in law (he's not really but I think of him as being) and he's one of the very few folk who might have some idea how to fix my pc. Here in Scotland there has even been pockets of snow and the temprature has been down close to zero. It could be a long cold winter if this keeps up.
Anyway I'm on the laptop and its late so I'm off to bed. I will update the world as soon as I either get the pc back up and running or give up the ghost and admit defeat. The money pit is empty so there's no option for a replacement PC so I'll be burning the midnight oil to get this one fixed. Plus after seven years or so of service I doubt a new one could ever live up to it (or down to its unreliability).
There's also rumours about iOS 4.2 around the corner and a new version of iTunes so there might be a wee iblog due soon too. Although itunes and all the software for updating my phone is on the broken PC so that may be a problem.
So I'll be blogging again very shortly. Wish me luck in the meantime T.
Well last Wednesday night I must have been one of the first to download the brand new Sn0wbreeze jailbreak. It was due for 2am but I had it on my PC the moment it came out about 1.10
But I didn't have it on my phone. My phone has worked very well since my screw up last week and as a result I've not been quite so desperate to screw it up again. Also I was away for the weekend so I didn't want to risk my phone not working. As a result I did not install the new jailbreak.
By the time I got home today the jailbreak has gone through another two incarnations. That means it wasn't right at the start. I've now downloaded the latest and am just trying it. I have my doubts but, I'm off tomorrow so if the worst happens I have a day to fix it.
I have an iPhone 3g. I'm attempting to break it with sn0wbreeze version 2.02. I've 'cooked' the ipsw and am now running a restore. I've already had one error and am now getting that sinking feeling again. This doesn't look hopeful. I followed the instructions at Redmond pie but I'm getting a 1604 error. I'm using Tiny umbrella to kick my device out of recovery as it seems to be locked at the moment.
Fortunately I don't appear to have done any damage but I've not upgraded either. I'm a bit surprised. I genuinely thought this would work. I'll try again but it looks like we may have to wait for greenpois0n after all.
Try 2. This time I made sure the phone was in recovery mode before selecting restore. This is achieved by holding the home and on/off buttons simultaneously till the screen goes blank (ignore the 'switch off message) then letting go of the on/off whilst continuing to hold the home button untiliTunes says that it recognises a phone i recovery mode. I then held down shift and clicked the 'restore' button in itunes and browsed to desktop and the new ipsw. I'm watching itunes just now but it ain't doing much.
Oops. This time it really doesn't look good. iTunes has just kicked the phone out and it wont switch on or anything. I unplugged then plugged back in and it said it recognised a phone in recovery mode so I browsed to the ipsw again. Fingers crossed... Nope. I've had error 1601 and now error 21 after running something called iReb. The good news is that when I come out of recovery mode using Tiny Umbrella my phone is undamaged. Just not upgraded. This is not the end of the world. To date: I can't use PWNAGE because I don't have a mac. The old version of Redsn0w (my preferred option) doesn't work and the new version is Mac only at the moment. Sn0wbreeze looks like working (it creates a new ipsw file) but wont restore to 4.1 so I'm still jailbroken on 4.02 with the 4.1 bootrom. The phone works better than ever but doesn't seem keen to upgrade to 4.1. Looks like I'm still waiting for greenpois0n.
Until I have a packaged jailbreak I'm going to just update this single post with news of progress. When the jailbreak arrives I'll do a proper new post.
I checked this morning before leaving for work and iTunes said that iOS 4.02 was the latest software. The same tonight about 5pm when I got home. At 7ish however it was available for download. iOS 4.1 has landed.
Before downloading 4.1 I copied 4.02 to a folder on my PC. When you download a new version iTunes auto deletes the old version. In the case of 4.01 and 4.02 you have needed to have a copy of the older version 4.0 in order to jailbreak (for those of us that could) or downgrade (for those that tried but couldn't). So I'll now keep copies of each version of iOS 4 until iOS 5 comes out.
Around 9 I read on Redmond Pie that a jailbreak has been tested and works. There's no date of release yet but I'd imagine it will be within the week. To be honest I think that Redsn0w would probably still work for my 3G and some of the older 3GS's but I don't want to try it.
The good news on the new jailbreak is that it's what's known as a hardware exploit. Not quite as easy to install as Spirit or Jailbreak me were but, because they've found a way round the hardware it should continue to work on all devices already produced or in production regardless of new launches like 4.2 coming in November. The result is that if you already own an iphone you should be able to continue jail breaking it until the hardware becomes so dated that it cant handle new software. That's why 3G owners were able to Jailbreak iOS 4.02 when no-one else could.
The bad news is that Apple will act quickly to alter the hardware and close this loop hole. When they do the owners of new phones and iPads will have to wait a while for the jail breakers to find another solution. For those that can afford the latest kit that's an issue because Apple upgrade and re-spec their kit regularly and most of it is pretty desirable.
One last bit of advice for tonight. It's entirely possible that by the time I wake up tomorrow the jailbreak will be out there. You can probably tell that I'm eager to upgrade. If like me your watching websites awaiting news then... try not to be the first. When the headline says Released, Tested and Working take a breath. Read the comments. Is it working? Are folk having problems or reporting crashes and conflicts? When I upgraded to 4.02 it worked OK but even basics like Installous weren't working and most of the Repos were missing so it was two days later before my phone was back to normal.
09/09/2010
It's widely reported that the new jailbreak has been tested and seems to work on iPhones, Ipads and iPod touches but still no news of a release date or even any decent speculation.
There's also been nothing to say that Redsn0w would work to allow 3g users to get ahead of the game. To be fair though I haven't really found anything from any 3g users to say whether it has speeded up their phones so maybe we're not missing too much.
I'll be posting my normal weekly blog over the weekend but will continue to update this post until some news comes up.
10/09/2010
Still no news although there is an unofficial jailbreak that is working for the 3GS (old Bootrom). Try the Redmond Pie link on this page for full instructions. Anyway in my search I found this clip. Who says there's an app for everything?
11/09/2010
Rumours are surfacing that, as suspected, the original Redsn0w 9.5b5 is working to jailbreak iphone 3g and, i believe iPod touch 2g. I'm reluctant to try it yet as users are reporting issues with the phone icon disappearing (quite essential to have a phone icon on a phone I would think) and also some wifi problems. Having said that, both the sites that I came across offering instructions on how to go about this jailbreak got it wrong and subsequently this may be the reason why it didn't work properly.
I've posted new instructions on both sites via the comments section and asked someone to post if they work. My idea is that one of the guys who has already lost their jaibreak would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying my method and, if it works, then I could try. The sites involved are: coveringweb.com and spiritjb.org
I also emailed admin at Redmond Pie to make them aware of this potential jailbreak because, in my experience, they will test it on their own phones before putting it out.
Update
Looks like covering web have taken their post down without any apology or explanation to those that they misled. Poor show I say.
16/09/2010
An answer to the continual question of 'when will there be an official Jailbreak for 4.1?' was posted by @pod2g today saying that the SHAtter exploit which uses a Jailbreak called greenpois0n (http://www.greenpois0n.com/) will go live tomorrow. It could be someone masquerading as a member of the Chronic dev-team or it could finally be time. We'll know tomorrow.
My 3g is just not reliable enough running 4.02. When it works it's good but there is just no rhyme or reason to whether it is going to work or not. If the Jailbreak comes out tomorrow I'll try it tomorrow. If not then I'll take a chance and run redsn0w on Saturday. If it works great but, if not, the sim is going to go back into my HTC touch diamond. It may be two years older and possibly lacks some of the bows and bells that iPhone has but, all of the functionality that it did have worked. Can't say that for the iphone. This bad boy could find itself in a drawer soon. Jobs insists that he's creating the perfect device and that is why he doesn't want it hacked. The problem is that most of us have older versions. Each time a new version of the iPhone comes out he forgets all about the millions stuck with the older kit. It's well documented that my issues aren't the result of my jailbreak. The 3g just doesn't work on os4.
17/09/2010
I thought we'd have a jailbreak today but it appears not. Chronic dev-team created this update which was accessed from their comments page but was a new blog item. (Love the work these guys do but they really are a bit guilty of high drama. What's wrong with a regular update on the regular blog page every Friday or whatever? Anyhow)
'Many people in the comments are asking for a progress update. Any kind of update that we could actually give would be too technical for anyone to understand anyway, not to mention potentially reveal the exploit. Just know that things are going swimmingly and we are working as hard as we can. Any demos, screenshots, or *cough* download links will be posted to this blog before anywhere else, so keep an eye out!' The blog can be found here Chronic-Dev.org Keep watching
For the second time in just a few weeks really I am putting up a quick blog to the jail breaking community for iPhones before my normal weekly blog. Apologies to those with no interest in the phone.
This week I did a stupid thing. Fortunately for me on this occasion I got away with it.
As I was reading on Redmond Pie that a new version of iPhone software was coming on to the market I was also being asked by iTunes if I wanted to downoad only or download and install. I selected download only but, as I did so, Redmond Pie confirmed that for iPhone 3g the original Redsn0w jailbreak would still work. Given that it worked so well when ios4.01 turned up hot on the heals of ios 4 I took them at their word.
Don't update
How many times in life do I need to be told, never buy the newest thing until you know that it works? Is that the first generation of a car that your driving? Does it have any problems that have been sorted out on newer models? Did you really pay £400 for that camera just before SLRs became the rage? Does windows mobile really beat iPhone?
I felt quite smug as the jailbreak was applied. I may have the old iPhone but mine would be up to date and jail broken. If the iPhone 4 brigade (who have waited months only to get a jailbreak and then have it shut down)think they are cool. Who's cool now with their 3g? The jailbreak worked. As I understand it it will work with 3g and below and iPod touch 2gs and below but for god sake check that info before you do it. The jailbreak did work but, because I was so far ahead of the game on this one Cydia etc weren't up to date. In other words I was jail broken but had very few of the real advantages. It's taken three days for everything to get caught up but now my phone is comfortably back to where it was.
The official line from all the jail breaking communities is hold your fire. ios4.02 Is simply an update that prevents nasty folk from hacking your iPhone using an exploit that was discovered by the jail breakers. The jail breakers needed a way to load software onto the phone and found one. In doing so it exposed the fact that there was a way that nasty people could do the same but for bad reasons. Given that iPhone hold bank details etc this was not good. Believe it or not the jailbreak community, realising the potential problem, had a fix out at the start of the week and have upgraded that to a proper patch for all phone variants before apple got to market with their solution.
So why did I update and why are so many people hopping from foot to foot waiting to hear when they can update? Simple, you can't fall behind with this stuff. Even as you read this there's software being created that will only work on ios4.02. Apple probably have a team working on a release for ios 4.03 whilst another team will be designing some major changes that will be called ios5. You need to be up to date.
Testers Required
To some extent it's really the jailbreak communities own fault. Apple should be paying these guys. The dev-team (jail breakers) are way ahead of apple in what they want their phones to do. The dev-team create apps that push the functionality of the phone to the limits. Sometimes they push beyond the limits and phones slow down or batteries drain too fast but none of us complain. If a development isn't what it should be delete it. IOS4 delivered folders. Jail breakers already had those. IOS 4 delivered multitasking. Jail broken phones had been doing that with varying success for at least a year. As before Jail broken phones had customisable lock screens and wallpaper. 3g and lower had already had video and camera zoom was taken for granted. All of these things had been available and were working with the jail breakers long before apple caught up. A suspicious person might think Apple monitored this activity with a keen eye to see what would be the popularity and impact on performance before packging them up into ios4.
A genius in the community known as Comex has pretty much launched a working flash application. IPhone has been stongly criticised for not having this and was even taken to court over an advert because of this. Apple was told to stop saying it's phones could access 'all of the internet, because without flash it could only access parts. You need it for a lot of movie and animation formats.
What Comex has launched is not yet perfect and he or she will probably work tirelessly until they get it perfect. Within 3-6 months of the the jail breakers launching Apple will probably package it and launch to the world. The jail breakers seem to be apples own research and development lab. And folk like me have no objection to being the lab rats. My 3g is almost equal to an iPhone 4 with the exception of memory. In terms of hardware it will fall behind but for the moment it's doing pretty well.
Jailbreaking also gives users applications that neither apple or the phone providers want you to have. I may not be able to use Frash on my 3g but one thing that I do use is MY3G. A fantastic little piece of software that can only be used on a jailbroken phone. What it does is makes your phone believe it has a wifi connection when it actually only has 3g. As a result your phone will attempt to do things like stream live tv when normally it would say that this could only be done through wifi. It doesn't actually increase the 3g signal but sometimes the signal is strong enough and the phone is just refusing because of data capacities.
DIY
Don't update Given that I got my phone in May and have now jail broken it for about the fourth time I'm getting a bit pissed off. It's not difficult to jailbreak but jail breaking and then reapplying all your settings takes time and is annoying. For this reason I'm thinking about researching my own jailbreak. At the moment I'm not too sure what that means but I'm planning to find out. I'm not a programmer so I'm not talking about creating a jailbreak like the guys do with new functions and everything. I'm thinking much more simple. Is there a quick, button click, way of upgrading your phone and keeping all the programs and settings that you got from your jailbreak? A way of being on the newest version but maintaining functionality until the real geniuses at the dev-team work their magic.
The dev-team solution would always be better but this would offer a fix that would give them the breathing space to do their stuff. I know people would use that. Can I figure out how to do it? At the moment certainly not. If I do do it will anyone be interested? Maybe. Problem is I'll then need folk to test it as well because I'm stuck with my 3g till 2012.
So what's on my iPhone and why is it any better than any other phone?
Unlike most phones you have to do a bit of prep before your iPhone arrives. Why? Well it doesn't work without itunes. It's that simple. No iTunes no iPhone. As a windows user I had never had any need for iTunes. I therefor installed the minimum that I could and said 'no' to any prompts that asked if I wanted it to be a default player etc. I then set up an iStore account. I had no plans to purchase anything but never the less had to set up an account and supply bank details. iTunes then created a complete copy of all my music files (lucky I wasn't short of memory because it didn't ask, or warn me that this would happen). It wanted to copy all the pictures from my PC as well. And all the movies. I stopped it and limited what files it could access. Less attention to detail here could have caused all sorts of PC conflicts and problems.
The next thing I wanted to do before the phone arrived was sort out some satnav software. My last two phones had this and I strongly recommend it. Now, previously, I had acquired this software without paying. With Iphone I'd heard this might not work. A quick Internet search however explained to me that, I could have the software but, I would have to 'jailbreak' my phone first. Further searches told me that jail breaking would invalidate the warranty and that the phone would crash constantly. That and the fact that every software upgrade would undo the jailbreak. Hardly worthwhile then?
My new phone was jail broken within 12 hours of arrival. By 13 hours it had satnav and it worked. By 24 hours all that worked was the satnav and I'd lost my phone provider, wifi, etc. Maybe jail breaking didn't work. Restored the phone to default. Tried again. Hey presto! Almost two months now and no issues. Satnav works a treat.
Since my previous phones did SatNav I'm not going to rave about that although the rotating screen and large display are fantastic. Also my download is a later version than I had previously.
Apps:
Well being a true Scot I went for a look at some free stuff first. Two of my most used apps came from this initial start. Metro.co.uk a daily free British newspaper and STV news, a Scottish Television news application. Metro can also do a download if you're struggling for Internet. STV has all the headlines and provided you get 3g coverage can show bulletins at the same time.
My next fave is actually a website so you need to favorite it with safari. iphone.tvcatchup.com For users in the UK this should be essential. Basically all the digitalfree view channels live. What's more it actually manages to stream live TV with almost no Internet signal. The only time it's let me down so far has been the world cup. Not sure if it's the broadband signal or if the site gets over subscribed but otherwise it's excellent.
Then comes Stanza. An e-book reader with loads of free books. As a gadget lover I've always wondered if the Sony or amazon book readers were anything more than a gimmick. When I saw that this was free I thought I'd try it to see how it worked. Bloody hell! The sepia background, font, font size and spacing actually make it, not only possible but, pleasant to read on the small screen. Within the software there are links to download books direct to the phone or you can download them to your PC and use something like Box net to load them to your iPhone.
Box.net This I discovered because of Stanza above but it's important in it's own right. It's one of the ever popular 'cloud' services that let you save files from your PC to a web space, and download them to your phone or another PC from that space. Added to the mix it can read word, excel and pdf files on your iPhone.
AppBox Pro. Dubiously enough the only application I have paid for yet you can get it free. I discovered that some of the so called free apps come with loads of advertising so decided that 50 pence was a worthwhile investment to avoid the ads. This is just a collection of useful gizmo's that use the iPhone interface. Some like the day calculator, and unit converter are just a spreadsheet function created for you, others use updates when your phone is in wifi to get up to date info such as currencies. It's got a ruler, a spirit level, a torch (turns your screen bright white), it even has translation software. Available free or for the 50p premium without ads.
Yell.com. Just the yellow pages website but laid out in a way that suits the iPhone. Combine this with Google Earth/google maps and you've got a pretty powerful tool that will find your GPS location, find businesses near that location and even phone any of the numbers it finds with one touch rather than having to copy them down. It's actually like the adverts for the Iphone promise.
Wordweb and wikipanion provide an on/offline dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia and, importantly for me, use UK spelling.
The trainline.com is another online service that's been optimized to work well with iPhone. When you switch it on it can use your GPS location to find the nearest train station or you can manually enter details of the journey that you want to make.
I'm also using something called Fliq Notes. A nice straightforward software for keeping and categorising notes.
Nightstand is an alarm clock function which you probably don't need but which uses the HTCflip clock that my last phone had. It's free so why not.
Cinema Times (UK). The wife loves this and it works very well. For some reason they also do cinema times England, Wales, Scotland but just download the UK version. Set your fave cinema and it will get the latest listings from the net. Cool
I also have stopwatch and that mad program that can name any song, Shazam, as well as a version of spider solitaire. With the exception of the satnav and the 50p I paid for the premium version of AppBox all of the above were free.
In addition to this I have over 500 music files and forty or so photos. That and some paid for apps that I wont mention because I haven't paid for them. Try apptrakr.org if you want to know more.
A lot of these apps work using the Internet and/or the GPS. It's fair to say though that they download when the Internet is available but will still work when it isn't. The dictionary, book reader, newspaper etc can all work perfectly without a connection.
My old HTC touch could have done almost all of the above. It just didn't. The programs weren't in your face or as easy to access so you didn't find them. I believe that android is working to reverse this trend but, until then, it's an apple a day for me.
For the international readers, 'Adam and Eve it' is what's known as Cockney rhyming slang for 'Believe it', i.e. 'Would you believe it-I've taken the Apple'. Phew glad that's out of the way. Here in the UK we have some funny customs that seem normal till you try to explain them.
Anyway what the hell am I on about? Well I'm not on about smoking because I don't do that now. What I am on about is mobile phones. Yep some folk are quite happy with phones that can make phone calls and possibly send and receive texts. Add on a camera and it's enough to make some folk faint.
Me!!! Well I always wanted more. I bought a PC when they were expensive and no-one could understand what you would do with it. I had a calculator in Primary school. That was long enough ago that most of the other kids parents didn't have one and hadn't seen one. Lucky this isn't a dating site because I don't think I'm really selling myself here. The point is I always wanted gadgets. I didn't necessarily know what they did or why but I wanted them. When I was watching space 1999 I wasn't enthralled by the whole 'other worldliness of it all'. I wanted to know what the machine with all the lights and dials did. I would have bought a toaster if it had a graphic equaliser or decent digital display. So when it came to phones I always had the cutting edge one.
I fell for the ultra mobiles hook line and sinker. I even stuck with it and learned how to text using a stylus and a version of my own hand writing. Even the true geeks gave up on that but I didn't. BUT, I never got the whole Apple vibe. My samsung MP3 player had a 20gb hard drive before your computer had a 20gb hard drive. What's more I could download what I wanted and not be stuck with Itunes. My computer could sync with anything and if I wanted software (not from shops if you know what I mean) I only had to persevere and I'd get it. I once boasted that 'the only legal piece of software on my pc was the software I used to download illegal software'.
But now I've given in. My HTC was a damned fine phone in millions of ways and I actually wanted it to be better than an I phone. I wanted windows mobile to out do apple. The phone was capable of it. I even think windows might have won but then android and symbian make the non Ipod market to diluted so developers can't concentrate on one thing. So now I have an apple Iphone.
If you get one, be prepared. This doesn't work straight out of the box. You NEED to have Itunes on your PC and an Istore account (with your bank details loaded) or you can't even switch it on (you could but there'd be no point). Remind yourself how to 'Pair' your wifi with your broadband because you'll want to do that. Figure out how to copy all your contacts because you need a new Sim card. Make sure you have a free usb port on your pc because they don't like extension cables or external USB ports. I took a morning off to wait for the delivery. Then I ended up getting it from the depot the night before. It took all that night and my morning off to get the damn thing up to speed.
That said...It's pretty bloody good once you get it figured out. Oh and there are some naughty people who've cracked a way of installing stuff without going through Itunes. I could grow to like this.
I wonder if there's an app that could stop you smoking?
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