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.

My Favorite Machintosh Applications. In no particular order.

• Witch

  The task switcher that should have come with OSX.
  
  http://www.manytricks.com/witch/

• Path Finder

  Norton Commander for the modern age.
  
  http://www.cocoatech.com/

• Transmit/Candybar/Coda/Unison

  File transfer (FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3), Icon management, Web development, News reader.
  
  http://www.panic.com/

• Adium

  Multiple IM provider.
  
  http://adium.im/

• OmniGraffle Professional

  Visio done right.
  
  http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

• Yojimbo

  Data management. Passwords, Notes, URLs – all at your finger tips.
  
  http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

• MacPorts

  Source based package managment system for OSX. Bringing a huge variety of UNIX/LINUX applications to the Mac.
  
  http://www.macports.org/

• Versions

  A beautiful Subversion client.
  
  http://versionsapp.com/

• VoodooPad Pro

  Personal Wiki with the ability to share on the network.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/voodoopadpro.html

• Acorn

  Photoshop-lite.
  
  http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

• Scrivener

  Great note taking and thought organization. Virtual index cards.
  
  http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

• Snak

  IRC Client.
  
  http://www.snak.com/

• Marsedit

  Blog posting. I wrote this post in it.
  
  http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/

• Disco

  Simple, fun CD burning.
  
  http://www.discoapp.com/

Today marked the third time I attempted to use the Facebook iPhone app to comment on someone else’s status only to have it fail due to an error and loose my comment.

Golden rule: Don’t lose data!

So I deleted it today. Not worth putting energy into it only to see it flushed. At the very least it should keep the comment around in some sort of draft state so it can be dealt with later but to just lose it is ridiculous.

I am very close to closing my Facebook account anyway since I get no value out of it at all. Zero.

I uninstalled the Safari 4.0 beta today because I just couldn’t stand two things:

1. Beach balls all the time!

2. Copy and paste just stop working all the time!

I didn’t find it faster than 3.x at all. The copy and paste stops working and you have to restart the browser.

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.