Making an iPhone do things an iPhone doesn’t want to do

 Apple, Geek  1 Response »
Apr 282010
 

I’ve had my iPhone for around 21 months now. Even though I consider myself to be fairly technical the idea of jailbreaking it never really occurred to me. For anyone who’s not familiar with the concept it basically means hacking something (usually a phone or games console) that is locked down by the manufacture and installing unauthorised software. It sounds more complicated than it is. iPhone jailbreaking is so mature now that all you have to do is download a small program and press a button.

Up until now I didn’t really see the point. The Apple Reality Distortion Field™ was doing a fine job of persuading me that I already had everything I could ever need. This all changed after I bought my Macbook Pro. Now I had a laptop with a decent battery that I could take out to the park, pub or some other whimsical place and tap away doing work or writing a blog. The only thing holding me back was a lack of internet. I could of course go the legitimate route and add tethering (the term for sharing one’s phone internet with a computer) to my iPhone contract. This costs an extra £10 a month for 3GB or £30 a month for 10GB. This is on top of the £20 a month I already pay (o2 SIMplicity). As I already pay for unlimited internet and I only really want it for the odd bit of surfing I think I’m fairly justified in seeking another way of performing this task.

Jailbreaking was really simple. I used Redsn0w on my iPhone 3G running 3.1.3. The process took about 5 minutes in total. Once rebooted Cydia (a kind of unauthorised App Store) appears on your home screen. Through this you can start downloading. I decided on an application called MyWi as it enables the native tethering ability of the iPhone. Once enabled it’s just a case of connecting to the laptop via USB or Bluetooth and then mobile internet is yours! Of course you need to pay close attention to your usage. Torrenting every series of Lost will alert your phone company to your dubious deeds.

As I had already taken that first step into the unknown I decided to fiddle with some  of the other things on offer. One useful app I found was 3G Unrestricter. This basically tricks iTunes or the App Store into thinking you are running off of WiFi and allows you to download files larger than 20MB. It sounds very simple but there have been many times where I’ve wanted to download a podcast whilst away from WiFi and couldn’t due to the limit.

Another part of jailbreaking that I’ve completely missed out on is multitasking. The iPhone can only run one thing at a time. Certain Apple apps like iPod, phone and Mail can all run in the background but third party apps cannot. There are several ways to enable this once the phone has been jailbroken. I decided on ProSwitcher. It not only allows you to run apps in the background but it gives you a swanky interface with which to swap between running apps. I haven’t used it long enough to test any drop in battery life but I’ll keep an eye on it over the next few days.

Features like multitasking will be officially supported in the next iPhone OS release 4.0 in June/July but for lifting the, sometimes over-controlling and frankly silly, restrictions Apple places on the iPhone jailbreaking really is the only way to go. These restrictions aren’t really a problem for the vast majority of people but for heavy users they can sometimes be a hinderance and a reason to switch over to another mobile OS like Google’s Android. The only problem is I am now reliant on others to crack each OS upgrade before I can install it. I am also planning on getting the iPhone 4/HD on release day so I’ll have to forego all the extras until the new OS is cracked. Oh well… I’m sure the shiny newness will entertain me for a bit.

Who I’ll Be Voting For and Why

 Personal, Views  No Responses »
Apr 252010
 

I don’t usually bother with writing about politics as my views tend to lean towards the wooly liberal side of things so everything I would say will have been said hundreds of times before by people much more intelligent and articulate than me. For the 7 years I have been able to vote I have also been seen to be throw away my vote on a party with no hope of really gaining any meaningful power in parliament.

Over the past couple of weeks things seem to have changed somewhat. Instead of backing the lame horse destined to receive a shotgun blast to the face I am backing a party with a real chance of actually gaining some pretty decent seats. I still think it’s doubtful that old Nick Clegg will become Prime Minister after the election (I’m sure most people that say they are voting Lib Dem will chicken out on the day) but there is a chance, no matter how small, and it’s a novel feeling for me.

So why am I voting for the Lib Dems on May 6th?

Before I go into specific policies I think it’s fair to say that the left wing, liberal voters really have no other choice. You could vote Green but that really is a wasted vote. I don’t really have to explain why I would never vote Conservative. Even if you ignore their awful, sub-human leader their policies on the military, immigration, taxation and almost everything else fly in the face of my own beliefs. Sadly this is also the case with Labour on the majority of subjects. Since 11/9 (the correct date format for 9/11) we have seen Labour erode our own personal rights and freedoms, take us in to two wars and become the pawn of large corporations lobbying for their own self interests. This is not a government I can support even if it is to block the Tories. This just leaves us with the Lib Dems.

I wont go into too much depth here as I don’t really want another 1000 word post and after too long I’ll only end up highlighting my own ignorance on many subjects.

Firstly I am ecstatic to hear a party talk seriously about nuclear disarmament. In this world of suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices I don’t see nukes as a viable deterrent. Why is someone going to be worried about retaliation when they don’t care about their own life. But ‘we aren’t talking about that kind of threat’ I here you say. Well I believe the threat of nuclear attack from Iran or North Korea is hugely exaggerated and anyway, North Korea has bigger (and closer) enemies than us. Even if these countries did want to nuke us they don’t have the modern missile technology we and the US possess. These nukes are large things. Too big to fit on a relatively primitive missile so the chance of it not being shot down on the fairly long journey to us is remote. So… I don’t really think Trident is a valuable investment for our country. Especially when other areas need those billions much more urgently.

I am also very supportive of the Lib Dems plan to raise the tax allowance. This will of course benefit me but that isn’t the main reason I like this idea. A lot of people earn less than you think. In my time working as a television, post production runner I was earning minimum wage. I was also living in London having to pay tube travel and extortionate food and booze prices. It isn’t just the TV industry that has entry level staff in this situation. Most creative industries rely on paying their runners/assistants pitiful wages. Usually these are really intelligent and educated people having to scrape by. I know a lot of other people that work really hard for little money so this would be a great help for almost everyone I know as well as some of the country’s most needy people.

Finally the Lib Dems are the only party that at least partially opposed the Digital Economy Bill. Nick Clegg has promised to repeal the bill is they gain power. I’m not sure how much of a publicity stunt this is but if they go through with it it can only be a good thing. This isn’t because I want to illegally download hundreds of MP3s. I don’t. In fact I only thing I torrent these days is television and that’s only when I can’t get a hold of it through legitimate means such as iPlayer or 4od – Dexter tends to be shown almost a year later on British TV. I’m more opposed to the infamous ‘three strikes’ clause and the part which means we could see Youtube, and in fact almost every web 2.0 site, blocked due to hosting or having the intention to host copy righted material.

So these are just a few reasons why I’ll be voting for the Liberal Democrats on May 6th. I really hope everyone reading this will also be voting and thinking seriously about who to vote for.

Macbook Pro

 Apple, Geek  No Responses »
Apr 202010
 

After an annoying few days of calling the Milton Keynes Apple store every morning and even going in and getting right up to the point of ordering it and being told actually they have just sold out I finally have my shiny new Macbook Pro. They were only updated last week so this is basically the best time to buy.

I am upgrading from a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with a 2.16GHz processor with 3GB RAM. I wanted to get the 13″ Macbook Pro as I think they are the perfect size… not to mention the 15″ is starts at around £1500. I opted for the low end model (2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 250HDD) because i really can’t see myself noticing the 160MHz jump in clock speed between the low and high end model and if I want a larger hard drive then I’ll pay the £50 and install it myself. As I am currently doing my Open University course I managed to snag myself a 15% discount.

So what do I think?

As you can imagine I was pretty excited when I opened up the box and was greeted with Apple’s trademark fancy packaging. I never fail to be impressed when I buy a new Apple product. It sometimes feels like Apple put more care and attention into their boxes than most tech companies put into their products.

The laptop itself is stunning. For anyone unfamiliar with the Macbook Pros then I recommend having a quick look at the Apple site. Upon turning on the machine you realise how good the screen is. This was one of the major upgrades when the aluminium Macbook gained its Pro moniker back in the summer of 2009. The aluminium Macbook’s screen was really quite awful with washed out colours and terrible viewing angles. This certainly cannot be said for the 13″ Macbook Pro. If anything the screen has made me more enthusiastic about the upcoming iPad as I find it comfortable to read on for long periods – dispelling all fears that the iPad’s backlit screen would make reading eBooks impossible.

I used my Time Machine back up and Migration Assistant to completely replicate my iMac including applications and users. This made switching incredibly easy. After the relatively short wait (about an hour for 150GBs) I rebooted and was greeted with my iMac’s desktop just the way I left it. The one issue I ran into was with my iPhone. For some reason iTunes wouldn’t recognise it. After placing the iPhone it recovery mode iTunes would attempt to restore but fail half way leaving me with a bricked iPhone. I managed to revive it by plugging it into an old Windows machine and restoring it. After the restore iTunes on the Macbook Pro found it straight away. All very odd. This was a minor hiccup in what was a fairly painless switch over.

I’ve now been using the laptop for a few days and the main thing that has impressed me is the huge multitouch trackpad. I don’t think I will ever be able to use another laptop again after being spoilt by this amazing piece of technology. Imagine using an iPhone to control a desktop computer. I know two finger scrolling has been around for years but these new computers have gained ‘Inertial Scrolling’. Basically this means that when you swipe down with two fingers the page will continue on as if under its own momentum. If you’ve ever scrolled with an iPhone you’ll know what I mean. It sounds like a small improvement but it goes a long way and makes navigating long web pages a delight. Also gestures like swiping four fingers down to invoke Expose will now be impossible to live without.

Apple have been touting the 10 hour battery life. Honestly I haven’t got anywhere near that. I have 33% battery left at the moment and its guessing that equates to 2 hours. To be fair I’ve never owned a new laptop with a decent battery so 30 minutes is a novelty to me. The battery is built in on these laptops so there is no option to swap when the juice runs out. Hopefully this won’t be an issue. I can’t really think of many times when I’m without a plug socket for 6 hours.

Due to Apple’s decision to use Core 2 Duo chips in the 13″ this new laptop doesn’t feel a huge amount faster than my iMac. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as there were very few times that I felt the iMac was lagging behind. It’ll be interesting to see how much faster the Macbook is at encoding a DVD to h264. This seems to be the heaviest task I throw at my computers nowadays. The rest of the specs are fairly standard. 4GB of RAM is nice and roomy. According to iStat I’m using about 1.25GBs with Safari, iTunes, my RSS reader and iCal open. The 250GB hard disk is sufficient now that I have offloaded my video collection to the media server. If I do start to fill it up upgrading is cheap and easy. If I don’t fill it then maybe an SSD will be a nice upgrade when they come down in price.

The graphics chip is an Nvidia 320M. This is an integrated card (shares the main RAM). Integrated graphics have come a long way since they first showed up in cheap laptops. The Nvidia ones can actually run games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty (obviously on medium settings). This is good news but not a major concern of mine. I use my XBox for gaming. I doubt anyone buys a Mac with the intention of playing hardcore games on it.

So this is my first impression of the new 13″ Macbook Pro. I’ve only had it for few days so I’m sure there are still many things to discover and get excited about. One thing I’m looking forward to is using the new Mini displayport (that can now output audio) to connect to my TV with HDMI and watching iPlayer HD or Lovefilm’s watch online.

It’s a lovely piece of technology. The main thing Macs do above other computers is make ‘just doing stuff’ fun. I’m enjoying just sitting here typing out over 1000 words on this beautiful backlit keyboard whilst periodically swiping my fingers across the trackpad to check my RSS feeds and e-mail. I know they are expensive and some people couldn’t really care less about fancy computers but for me using anything else just feels inferior.

Building a Media Server – Installation of Hard Disks and Powering On

 Geek, Media Server  1 Response »
Apr 172010
 

My first terabyte hard drive arrived the other day. Excitedly I installed it in my server but I was quickly disappointed when it wasn’t recognised in Ubuntu’s disk utility. I tried swapping SATA ports on the motherboard and quickly discovered that the second SATA port is broken… bugger.

So I went on to Amazon and ordered a PCI 4 port SATA card that was Linux compatible. I was going to buy it at some point anyway but I was hoping I could hold off for a while and use my external hard drive for the media back up disk. Due to my impatience I decided to take up Amazon’s offer of a free month of Amazon Prime (free one day delivery). All went well and I collected the card from the depot the next day.

So today I installed the SATA card and plugged in the 1TB hard disk which was recognised straight away. Hurrah! All i had to do then was add a couple of folders to my Netatalk (open source implementation of the Apple Filing Protocol or AFP) config file and up popped the server on my Finder side bar.

Now what’s the best thing about creating this kind of network? Naming all the computers of course! I decided to name everything after towns in Final Fantasy VII. The server is obviously called ‘Midgar’ after the main city. I haven’t yet decided between Wutai or Junon for the Macbook Pro. If I ever buy myself a computer for the living room I’ll call that ‘Gold Saucer’.

The rest of the day was spent copying hundreds of gigabytes of videos and music over to the server. I connected everything up with ethernet to take advantage of the increased speed over wireless but it still took hours. Everything is copied now though so I just need to sort out the back up of the media drive and start testing out Time Machine (Mac back up utility) with the network share. Time Machine isn’t designed to work over network by default so it could all go horribly wrong. If it does there is always Carbon Copy Cloner.

And for people that like to look at cables here is ‘Midgar’ derobed…

Building a Media Server – Pressing on!

 Apple, Geek, Media Server  No Responses »
Apr 132010
 

Today Apple finally released the updated Macbook Pros. I was a bit miffed that the 13″ models are stuck with the already outdated Core 2 Duos as opposed to the shiny new Core i5s or i7s. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue for me as I am using my higher education discount to get 15% off which means if I decide to sell in a years time I will make the vast majority of what I paid back to put towards the new model.

So anyway, this means I need to push forward with my server plans as my iMac will have to be sold once the laptop is bought. To start off I have bought the first of three 1TB hard disks. I decided on the Western Digital WD10EARS due to its slow spin speed (5200rpm) which I’m hoping will lead to increased reliability (speed will not be an issue due to the 100Mb network bottleneck).

I already have a 500GB external which will donate its hard disk for storage. The 1TB will work as main media storage and back up for the Macbook. The 500 GB will back up the first drives media storage but not the Macbook back ups… this means everything will be in two places and therefore fairly safe. Hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade the 500 to a terabyte before space becomes an issue. The 500 will then relegated to back up storage for the Macbook.

So that’s the plan so far. I’m going to call the Milton Keynes Apple Store tomorrow and find out when to expect stock of the new Macbooks and I’ll hopefully have one before the weekend.

Expect me to post here with my impressions and unboxing photos… *such a nerd*

Strada Milton Keynes

 Food, Restaurants  1 Response »
Apr 062010
 

The Hub in Milton Keynes is an odd place. Central Milton Keynes never really got the whole restaurant thing. There were a few chain Italian places, one really nice Malysian place and a whole load of horrible family restaurants. That was meant to change with the opening of The Hub. Here were some up proper restaurants in a swanky location that should impress even people not from MK that are actually used to decent eating. Of course they are still all chain restaurants but at least we’re trying.

The location is nice and it makes a change to the frankly quite frightening Theatre District. I imagine on a summer’s night it looks quite trendy with everyone sitting out in the central court yard.

Last Friday we decided to try out Strada. We had a table booked but were still asked to wait at the bar whilst one was found. We were only there five minutes but I always feel awkward just waiting around holding my coat (there was a hanger but it was accompanied by a sign proclaiming Strada’s lack of responsibility if my coat was stolen).

Once we sat down the service was fairly average. No one asked if the food was OK or anything which was annoying as Jordan wanted to mention the unripe avocado in her salad.

The food was alright. My gnocci starter served with a cheese sauce had bit of a skin which made me think it’d been sitting out but at least it tasted OK.

My chilli and broccoli pasta was really tasty. I really hate over cooked broccoli so I was happy when I was greeted with a satisfying crunch.

The main issue I had with the place was price. Now I’m not saying it’s an expensive place at all but I just feel that it was a little overpriced. This may be because I used to live in Brighton where we had a small chain of Italian restaurants that provided really tasty, authentic food for very little money. I don’t know… I’ve eaten some really good Italian food so maybe I’m picky.