Category — Technology
I used Pwnage 2.0.1 on my 2g iPhone and now I love the Apps
Following on from my previous blog outlining the pain I went through getting my iPhone working after doing an update, I used the newly release Pwnage 2.0 hours after they released it…. And this was after I said I wouldn’t do it till a few more people had successfully used it - I figure that the 900 odd comments that appeared in that time saying how well it worked, and with my previous experience, I’d do it.
It went almost flawlessly… Got it wrong first time as I ticked a wrong box. Mine’s an American iPhone in Australia. 2nd time, it worked perfectly! Well done guys! Seriously, they’ve been working so hard to do these for free - I hope that UK company has been shut down now - and have done such an amazing job!
So, now I have it, I dived into the iTunes Apps Store. Bad idea… I now have the following installed on my phone:
- Facebook - Great little app, which gives you all the main features of Facebook, and works almost flawlessly.
- Last.fm - I’m a big fan of Last.FM and used the original App a fairbit (for reference it plays really well on an iPod Hifi).
- Phonesaber - Pointless but great fun.
- Remote - Apple’s free application for controlling your iTunes is a work of art really. Pair it with your iTunes, and it’s like browsing your iPod but it’s the collection on your computer.
- Shazam - I used this service in the UK regularly, and now it’s out on the iPhone. Hold it up to a speaker and it will tell you what the song is playing (most of the time).
- Crash Bandicoot 3D - The Bandicoot crashes onto the iPhone in an addictive little game where you control the character using the phones accelerometer to steer, and a
- iPint - this takes the biscuit for a waste of time, but somehow it’s amusing. Slide a beer down the bar, then your iPhone fills with beer which you then drink by tilting your phone.
- Sudoku Unlimited - I had a version of this on Nano and got quite quickly hooked. Reading the reviews this a down to earth version that lets you simply play Sodoku. What more could you want?
- TwitterMe - Yep, it lets you post tweets on Twitter
- Super Monkey Ball - Everyone saw this in the keynote speech, and it is as good as it looks - although it does take a little getting used to.
- Texas Hold ‘em - Apple’s take on the most popular card game is worth the price. It does exactly what you’d expect from a game of Hole ‘Em
- myLite - erm, it’s a torch that does torch type things. Yep, it turns your phone’s screen into a bright light.
- AIM - allows you to use American Online Messenger and .Mac/mobileMe messaging on your iPhone.
- Pinball RC - I love pinball. This is fun, but it’s a little chuggy at times. Good fun though.
- BrainChai - Brain Training similar to that on the Gameboy DS. Good fun!
In conclusion, the upgrade was a great thing! If you’re not afraid it might fail, then Pwn your iPhone now!
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Google]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://www.gregory-brine.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
July 21, 2008 No Comments
How I downgraded my bricked iphone from 2.0 to 1.1.4
I made a small mistake and jumped on the iPhone 2.0 firmware a little too quickly, forgetting that my 2G phone came from eBay and would need a little work to fix. Add to that, that my phone had the 04.04.05_G firmware - something I discovered later on was a real issue.
So, booting it into DFU mode, and downgrading my iTunes to 7.5, I just couldn’t restore it running in OS X. It was giving me permission errors on the phone. I followed every guide, and still nothing. So, I booted into Windows XP, thinking that Microsoft’s approach to security might work in my favour. It did!
With a flashed phone, I set about jailbreaking and activating it. No problems there - although I did find that sometime Pwnage failed a couple of time due to permissions and required another restore (I think I restored the phone something like 30 times over the weekend).
Next up came installing my freshly created install. No problem. Then loaded it up and watched bootneuter (error 5) appear repeatedly… Nooooo….
So, I tried Liberty+ and Ziphone (I since found out that the latter may have been a bad idea… Search for “Ziphoned”) Nothing would unlock it. Further searching, and I found that you need to delete the bootloaded on some iPhones. Did that, went through the steps (again, and again), always hit the same problem.
Further searching, and I found that potentially ziphone had done something to my phone - I actually don’t think it was this, and was the iPhone 2.0 firmware. But, that did lead me down the final path to success. There are modified version of that program that will remove the bootloader and downgrade it.
Tried that. Nooooo…. turns out my phone has a version that nothing removed. Version 04.04.05_G. Nothing removes it, till I found a link on a YouTube video to Kiphone. My heart raced as I watched it purge that evil bootloader and install a downgraded one.
After that, everything worked flawlessly and I now have a fully working 2G iPhone again. And, this worries me a little, but after 3 days of not having it, I realised even more how much I like it, and had missed it!
Anyway, for those in the same position, 2 links for you:
Modified Ziphone to remove older bootloader:
Modified Ziphone for bootloader removal
iclarified’s tutorial on using kiphone to remove firmware version 04.04.05_G:
Remove and downgrade iPhone 04.04.05_G with kiphone
July 15, 2008 2 Comments
My concerns about Web Developer’s skill sets since asp.NET came to be
OK, so a slightly long winded title, but I have to express a concern of mine. Recently I’ve been trying to hire web developers for my team to build web site, but I’m hitting a continual brick wall… Most of them actually don’t know how to build a web site!
These people know .NET, which is obviously a good thing, but they don’t seem to have any awareness of the other elements of the website. If it’s not in .NET code, and if it’s not a built in .NET control, then why should they need to know it? That’s the way it comes across to me.
When I started learning web development, I tool the approach of learning HTML mark-up first, then moving to server-side code in the form of Coldfusion. It seemed logical to do it that way, as ultimately what the end user sees is HTML. When CSS came along, I jumped on that bandwagon, and loved it. It helped me breath new life into my code. Then I changed from Coldfusion to Classic ASP and Microsoft SQL. All this enabled me to take a Photoshop file and deliver a complete website with a database driven back-end - incidentally built using the CMS systems I have developed over the years.
Recently, I started learning .NET and I’ve realised what a lazy language it is. Everything about it is geared to not really needing to think about anything! Everything is done for you, to the extent where you just need to start typing and Intellisense kicks in and tells you what you probably meant - and most of the time it’s right. I think that should be a good thing as it gives you more time to focus on the HTML, CSS and JavaScript side of things, delivering a great looking, functional website which validates if possible.
This also gives you more time to ensure the other elements of the site are more polished and included, perhaps affording you time to improve your RSS feed to include the most up to date information. Looking at a new technique such as integrating the Open Search for people’s toolbar or including microformats. Carrying out those last checks such as ensuring the Google Analytics and sitemap code is included and working.
However, that’s not how it works now. Apparently, people that know .NET are exempt from knowing anything outside of .NET when it comes to building a website, which to my mind makes them an Application Developer, not a web developer. Recently, we had an intern in who said he was good at html and CSS, but when you say that’s good and can he turn this PSD into a site, he says know, that’s someone else’s job as if he’s more important than that because he knows .NET.
Why has this happened? It’s a single language, so why do these people place so much value on this one skill over the other, in my opinion more important, elements of the site? I think it’s the banks. Think about it. Banks have recently built massive systems and brought everything online over a period, paying people lots of money for that period and then letting them all go once that task was completed, flooding the market with people who thought they understood the web. It’s a shame, but it affects smaller companies the most ultimately.
Add to that that they don’t seem to understand the idea of a good user experience, and are happy if what they build works. They don’t care if it works well, and don’t even seem to notice if something doesn’t work as well as it could. If a page is slow, doesn’t matter, it loads. If a page is hard to use, doesn’t matter as it works doesn’t it? I find that a strange attitude.
We’ve been talking internally, and are hopeful that a change is afoot and that the days of the true web developer will return again. The developers I place highest value on can be given a PSD and produce an entire website, optimised and including all the elements that make a website great! And I really hope that hope comes true.
May 17, 2008 1 Comment
Top 5 Wordpress plugins to get you started
I’m relatively new to using Wordpress to completely manage my site, but I have found a few plugins of particular use in getting my site to a point where I feel it is really usable and enjoyable for everyone that visits. In this blog, you’ll find the 5 I’ve found most useful to help me do that. I have more but they’re for a different purpose and a different blog.
Flexi Pages Widget
If like me you’re using Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) to manage other pages about you, then you’ll quickly come to realise the standard side menu doesn’t work so well because it shows everything all the time. The plug in gives you a large degree of customisation, allowing you to make your menu behave like the one on my site, with everything collapsed until you go into that section.
NextGEN Gallery
I love taking photos, and have explored a few options in this area. There’s several that integrate with services such as flickr, and one that works off you Facebook account. But none of them were quite what I was after. The NextGEN gallery allows you to manage galleries within your site’s folders rather than using a 3rd party. I find this approach more appealing as it means my site is almost completely self contained.
Redirection
The site you’re looking at used to be www.gregorybrine.com. That had a lot of links, and folders within it, each with a pagerank and some valuable traffic. You can do a simple URL re-pointing, but you risk loosing this traffic. Instead, you should do a 301 redirect for all key URLs on your site. This plugin has allowed me to control all traffic to the new www.gregory-brine.com URL, as well as some some of my original URLs that were valuable but of no use in the current site such as my old Personal Blog and Travel Around the World URL - thanks to Cheb for pointing me to this one.
WordPress.com Stats
It’s always good to know how much traffic your blog is getting, and this tool allows you to get some basic information back about who’s reading what on your site, and where they are coming from.
Google XML Sitemaps
You’ve gone to all the effort of writing fresh content for your site, and the pinging service within Wordpress goes a long way to spreading the word, but a Google sitemap takes it one step further, which is especially useful for those using the CMS features of Wordpress.