SpaceRodent

I have been an iPhone user since February when I got the 8GB 3G model. I love it. I call it my tricorder. It has everything a geek on the go needs. I have about nine screens of applications and games.

A lot of my friends also have iPhones and most of theirs are jail broken and run the Cydia app store. I thought maybe I was missing out so I decided to take the plunge and jail break my phone.

There is a lot of documentation out there and I was a little nervous about doing it. I wanted to be sure I had the latest and most up-to-date information.

A Google query here and there revealed two primary methods. Every time I searched for “iphone unlock” ads for automaticiphoneunlocker.com were shown. Its looked good. I pay $29.99 and download a piece of software that does all the work for me.

Well there is a sucker born every minute and it was my time to be the sucker.

I paid the $29.99 and instead of getting a piece of software that does it automatically I got instructions and multiple downloads that pretty much mimicked everything else out there. Now the instructions were so detailed even a noob could follow them but still it was not automatic.

I had to follow this complicated 20 plus step process that involved wiping my phone and deleting everything on it. (I had backups so I wasn’t worried).

The whole process took about 30 minutes quite a bit longer than the five minutes the ad promised.

Okay so my phone was now unlocked and I had this Cydia app store icon – now what? Well that was the end of the instructions. At this point I had to do more googling and reading up on Cydia to see what exactly I could do with it.

In a nutshell its Debian apt-get with a nice front end similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu.

Okay what to install? Well more googling revealed something called winterboard which is a theme manager. From there I installed some different themes and a category application.

All of a sudden it was 1997 again and I was playing with Enlightenment (an awesome window manager for X). For its time there was nothing cooler. Gnome and KDE were babies and if you wanted something “cool” you ran it.

I was back in that mindset. What looks cool. Oh a neat clock. New icons! Look at that awesome wallpaper.

After about an hour playing with the themes and Cydia I realized that one of the reasons I love Apple computers and the iPhone so much is it just works (and it looks good in its own right too).

I have long since given up making my desktop and windows look “cool”. I am firmly in the function over form camp now.

I don’t want to tweak my phone endlessly. I don’t want to worry about upgrades breaking everything. I didn’t want to be cool; I just wanted an iPhone.

So I un-unlocked my phone.

Well I did it. I quit Facebook today. Some of reasons are trite and some are well reasoned.

Let me first say that I like all my friends and love to hang out with them in the real world. Being connected to them on Facebook wasn’t really real to me. I didn’t feel any closer to them. I didn’t feel like I didn’t need to see them because we are connected on Facebook.

I also didn’t really care what they were doing. Don’t get me wrong I like my friends and am glad I have them but I don’t really want to know the minutia of their lives. When I finally do see them or talk to them there is nothing to say because I know everything!

From my perspective most folks were more interested in playing Mafia Wars and other games like it, taking quizzes or promoting their latest cause.

Things I am interested in:

• Marriages
• Divorces
• New Babies
• New Jobs
• New addresses, phone numbers and email addresses

Other than the list above; I just don’t care. Facebook did give me the above information but lost in a sea of crap.

Some of you might call me a hypocrite because I have a blog and I can accept that however I blog for myself; not caring if anyone else reads it. I think of my blog as a journal or diary. Something to look back on in the future and reflect.

Finally I am not saying Facebook is bad for everyone – just bad for me.

I upgraded my Windows Vista Ultimate game system to Windows 7 Ultimate this weekend. Overall the system feels faster and I like the new taskbar. I really like the “snaps” feature that allows you easily tile two windows together.

What I didn’t like was they took away the Aurora screen saver – it was my favorite of any platform. Luckily I found it online.

My CPU doesn’t support hardware virtulization so I can’t run XP mode; oh well.

The upgrade took about four hours.

I have a Brother laser printer and it recently quit working. I tried everything I could but it just would not print. It was also just a week outside the one year warranty so I thought I was screwed.

I avoided calling tech. support because I have never had luck with it. I am a Linux System Administrator and self-confessed geek. I can certainly fix my own stuff! (XBOX 360 RROD not withstanding).

Well I am working from home today and finally decided to call and go through the process. I had too because I was considering buying another printer and wanted to make sure I explored all my options.

So I call and was talking to a human at Brother in about three minutes after telling the computer what model I had.

The nice lady had me turn off my firewall and print out the general settings. She asked me about one line on the sheet and I told her what it said. She then instructed me to the printer and changed that one setting.

All of a sudden my printer came to life spitting out test documents I had been throwing at it for the last hour.

Turns out somehow my printer got set to only listen to print requests on the parallel port and ignore the others. She just had me set it back to AUTO and all was well.

Total call time: seven minutes.

So not only am I relieved that my printer is working and I don’t have to buy another one but I am really happy I had such a great tech. support experience with Brother; makes me glad I chose them.

So sometimes the old dog can learn new tricks and sometimes tech. support can come through.

Tech Support: 1, Me: 0.

So today I removed some 50 Facebook friends and deleted my Twitter account. Feels good to reclaim my social graph. Honestly I only want to be connected to people I really care about and not people who are more of acquaintances. I will keep all my Linked in contacts because that is a perfect service for business type relationships.

This is the second time I have said good-bye to gametap on this blog. Gametap has decided to ditch the fat, rich, desktop client with a web one and in the process went from a service that I loved to one I can’t stand anymore. I spent the better part of this morning trying to play a game and finally had to use google to end up in a obscure gametap forum to find the the solution; after that I was done.

Why would any company take a working, well received, product and shit all over it? I am not entirely sure. My guess is they didn’t want to pay developers anymore. The site is now also covered in ads – even if you have a gold subscription! They are also now competing with Direct2Drive and the other johnny-come-lately game download services.

Good-bye Gametap – it was a good run while it lasted.

Well on Saturday we watched Storm of the Century, last night we watched The Shining and tonight we’re watching The Stand. I think tomorrow we will watch It. I have never read any of his books but love the movies and mini-series they are based on.

I love Oz, its one of my favorite shows of all time. In season four though it got weird. In the episode called Conversions Luke Perry stars as a Christian pastor and in one scene casts demons out of a fellow prisoner. Very strange. Then in the episode Revenge Is Sweet they test a drug that ages you based on how long your sentence is.

I was reading reddit today and was reading an article about a guy who lost his laptop. One of the programs he used was CrashPlan. I looked into it and really liked what I saw so I bought two licenses (because I didn’t want to see ads) and have setup my home mac and my wife’s mac.

I am also looking at their business solution + server to backup laptops at work. They have a 30 day trial so I will be playing with that on Monday.

One of the problems with laptop backups that the Apple crowd fixed was only backing up when your on the network via Time Machine. As far as I know (and I have looked) here isn’t Time Machine type solution for Windows until now with CrashPlan.

The other think I like is the ability to back up to other computers on the network and friends systems outside your local network.

CrashPlan can also backup to the cloud to their protected data center.

Well we finally found a web designer! Now hopefully he can get the job done before the Emerald City Comicon.