Saturday, August 01, 2009

Getting back to this blog...


So I haven't blogged in some time. I thought my latest geek adventure would be a good excuse to start up again.

I jail broke my iphone 3Gs this week (here's how) . Wow, what an amazing difference it makes after you do this. It allows you to do a bunch of stuff, but there are some very useful ones for me. I give credit to this website for getting me to do this and following this guy's directions - http://thebigboss.org/why-jailbreak-iphone/

My favorites (a subset of bigboss's list) -

#1 Winterboard - allows you to make theme changes to your phone. I tried a bunch and settled on, 'Framed Black'. Cool. I also found a cool Mayan Civilization theme which is nice. I was even able to get a video background going (the video is of my original iphone - also jailbroken - taken with the 3Gs).





























#2. SBSettings. This is awesome. It's a pain to go back and forth from the 'settings' application if you ever want to turn off your wifi, bluetooth, or 3g. SBSettings makes it super easy as it just drops down with a diagonal swipe from the top left of the screen towards the center. This is great if you have ever wanted to turn off the phone/edge functionality of your phone but keep the wifi on (as far as I know the only way to do this is to turn the phone off and turn it back on and NOT enable the SIM - a total pain). Why would you do this? At home my phone sits in a radio dock and always has that awful interference from the AT&T network. If you want to listen to Pandora it makes it almost unusable. This fixes that completely.


#3 SMS Quickreply. This is a timesaver. If someone sends you a text message you can now answer it without leaving the app you're currently using. You don't appreciate how irritating that is until you get to try one of the apps for this. I went with 'BiteSMS'.

#4 Cydia. This is the way to get third party applications onto the phone. For all the great apps not blessed by Apple....

#5 Music Controls. One of my favorites. This allows Pandora or Lastfm to run in the background the same way your ipod does. Start your favorite station playing, press the home button to leave the app and it continues to play! Go check your email, browse Safari, whatever. Double click the home button to bring the controls up just like the iPhones already does for the iPod. This is worth the price of admission alone!

Anyway, I'm excited. I was nervous to do the jailbreaking but it was a piece of cake. I'll never go back. The whole reason I did this was in response to Apple pulling the Google Voice applications from the App Store. I'm going to start using Google Voice before too long and I won't have Apple or AT&T tell me what I can or can't do. Yep, that's right, I'm sticking it to the Man!
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About the King....Papa.

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I'm Dave. I spend lots of time investigating all kinds of technology developments. I'm just here to share my findings.