So you’ve decided that the iPhone SDK was either too little, too late or both. And so you’re going to jailbreak again. Perhaps you’ve downloaded iNdependence and you’re going to give it a whirl. Well, if you’re like me the app will crash the instant it goes into recovery mode and won’t start properly while it’s attached to the system. So enjoy that restore in iTunes.

While you’re waiting for the phone to finish restoring you might poke around at other options. Maybe you’ll take a friends advice and try iPlus. After googling and digging around looking for the actual files and not just blog posts about how teh awesome it is. You’ll eventually find this download page. And you’ll download the whole package and give it a shot now that your iPhone has finished restoring to 1.1.4 and synching all your stuff.

You might freak when it says it’s just going to go ahead and jailbreak AND unlock your phone. Whoa whoa whoa… you’re already paying AT&T and people who unlock often get screwed with firmware updates. So you go back to the site and find the download that says it’s for jailbreaking ONLY.

Unzipping and looking at the jailbreak only it doesn’t seem much different but you give it a shot. Seems to go well. But… then it sits saying you’ve successfully completed the jailbreak and it’s rebooting. Only, it’s not. Just spinning away. You look at the message on the iphone screen and it says it can’t find the reboot script. Because it’s in the payload that’s not in the jailbreak only bundle. Doh!

So you force a reboot of the phone and yup, no jailbreak. By now of course you’ve found the guide that takes you through the install and you note the point that at which is says

“If you only want to jailbreak your iPhone (you have an AT&T account set up as an iPhone and you don’t want to unlock your iPhone), type ./iplus -j instead.”

So you go back into the first iPlus package you downloaded and you run iPlus with the -j option. Woot! It works! Right on.

But wait. No YouTube. I know, I know. Who cares. Well… you do because you paid for this thing and you want to use it all and then some. So you have SSH on there and Terminal and being a security minded individual you make sure to hop right into the shell and run passwd and get that default password (alpine) changed and fast.

Then you set about getting a few good apps installed. One of which is a handy tweak you found that will fix the YouTube problem. You exit the installer and reboot. WHOA.. wait.. where did all the bookmarklets on the spring board go? Why is it telling me how to move and delete icons from the spring board? Why is it rebooting?! And again? And again?! And… (You get the picture).

Well, crap. Is it a brick? No. Digging around you find that if you connect the phone to the computer and then fire it up holding the power button and the home button (not just the home button like you found earlier) that it’ll go into recovery mode and you can begin the tedious process of restoring your iphone through iTunes. Phew, your ass unpuckers.

While you’re waiting for the restore you go over what you did wrong. Perhaps that “fix” for YouTube wasn’t such a good deal after all. You vow to skip that this next go around and after getting some coffee and going to the bathroom you come back to find the restore finished. You launch iPlus again and go to put the kids down.

Coming back you’re ready to go. Drop to shell, passwd away the security problem. And you set about checking that everything is working. Hrmm well no.. the browser crashes. What gives? Well, maybe you need to reboot to kinda flush things out. Oohh ooh! Yup.. you’re in that loop again. Well, crap.

While you sit and wait for the restore (how many has that been?) you’re online with your friend who is currently running Mono on HIS jailbroken phone. And he suggests maybe ZiPhone. Hrmm okay.. why not? It’s not like you’re the type to learn your lesson. You grab it while your phone is still restoring and get ready for some command line fun. But.. it’s an .app. Okay ready to go… iPhone is restored. You run the app. You click jailbreak. And like that you’re done.

But now YouTube works… everything seems to work. You go into the installer app. Start to set things up, apparently the BSD subsystem isn’t installed by default. As it installs it warns you NOT TO CHANGE THE PASSWORD WITH PASSWD, because it’s borked and it will make your iphone reboot over and over and over…. GAH! That would’ve been nice to know! Wish someone would’ve blogged that, eh?

So, now all is good with the world. You install your apps. Though VTerm won’t install. But you can just grab that here. And you find a site that explains how to change the password if you need to and suggests installing Services so you can turn off SSH to save battery life and keep from tempting folks when you’re not using it.

Phew… well, that’s over. Good job! Now let’s see about Mono.

I haven’t been able to get a good answer to my question about loading data files onto the iphone for a new app. Not data files that are part of the app, mind you. But let’s say you’re working on a viewer of some sort for a particular file format - no I’m not going to mention which. How do you get those files on the iPhone?

I sent an email off to Erica Sadun. If anyone knew - out side of Apple’s secret cabal - it would be Erica. But even though I got a fast and polite response, it looks like there are no obvious methods other than to possibly hit a url and save the file to your storage space on the iPhone.

Hrmm… not everyone is going to have access to hosting to get/post file from. This seems like a less than optimal solution, to me. And it certainly seems to lessen the value of my particular application if the user has to jump through hoops to get their files on the iphone and if they also have to put up files they might not want to share with everyone.

I wonder if you can get access to email attachments. I better alternative. I’ll look into it and see what I find.

Living Room Proposed Paint

This isn’t my picture or my idea. Found it on Flickr at Gorilla Sushi’s album. It looked too cool not to post though. Now i have to talk a certain some one into doing it.

A friend of mine got me into the SecureTheWeb 2006 contest after the entry deadline. Now I just have to come up with some amazing unique killer thing to do with a .Net programmable Smart Card.

Picked up a linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter for $6 at a thrift store today thinking there had to be some way to tie it in with an Asterisk server. Initial looking showed that the PAP2-NA could be easily setup. But not the simple PAP2, it seemed locked to Vonage. But, along came the following link: Instructions for Unlocking the PAP2. I’ll post a quote at the bottom of the page with the instructions as I’m not sure if that post will be up long since some people seem to think it violates the service agreement to unlock it. *shrug*

So this is the new project. Unlock it, when I get a new power supply for it: 5 V DC, 2.0A. Then get the Asterisk box setup and hook it all up. More info later on how well the “unlocking” goes.

(more…)

My father-in-law works at Music Center of the Northwest a non-profit music school for children of all ages. Being a non-profit their offices don’t get the technological upgrades of most companies. They just recently got network access and some newer computers. But, they’re still relying on one Access database file to hold all their operating information (Students, teachers, scheduling) and they have to sneaker net it around the office - though now I imagine they might copy it across the network. Maybe.

I’m chomping at the bit to get in there and design a database and client for them. I’ve also just had the thought that they might be able to use an Asterisk box as well since right now they’ve got to remember to turn on an old answering machine when ever they’re out of the office.

So we’ll see if I can get that setup for them. At the moment they’re buried in doing fund raising so they don’t have time to have me come in and take a look at what they need.

Also, if you’re in the Seattle area and are interested in music lessons for you or your kids (should you have them) get in touch with them. They’ve got good programs and teachers. Out toddler even went to a music together program they have. Now he ‘Rock’s Out’ to Nine Inch Nails with us in the car. =)

I don’t know what all is going to be needed or when I can do it.. but.. if you’ve got the non-profit bug like me feel free to drop me an email and I’ll see what we can do for them.

Apparently my geek taxes on this project are paid. I fired up the laptop to check that it’ll connect with our any nudging and all looks good. Woop. Now on to writing secuirty sinks for my remoting stuff at work.

Found a handy tutorial for setting up WPA quickly in Breezy.

I had most of this done already but I went over the steps again when I gave up on freeRadius. On my radius box I kept getting the error message that rlm_eap_tls.so couldn’t be found. And sure enough.. I couldn’t find it. Hrmm Oh well. I gave up. But now I’ve got WPA going.

And while you’re setting up WPA. Here’s a good passkey gen.

I just picked up the Atheros based Airlink AWLC4030 so I can use WPA and enable freeRadius - and of course use G rather than b for the speed boost. Another benefit was going to be running netapplet so I can easily take a look at APs - my current card wouldn’t run iwscan.

So once I got everything setup I installed netapplet and found that I would loose connection every few seconds and then it would come back up. At first I thought it might be a problem with the network monitor not registering properly or some such nonesense. But a quick download of the latest Short Attention Gamer podcast showed that it really was stopping every few seconds. Then I worried it was the card itself. It is, after all a 14.95 card.

But I turned off netapplet and everything was fine. So off to good I went and I came back with this thread.

Looks like the madwifi drivers for the Atheros chipset have issues running iwscan without dropping the connection for a brief amount of time.

I did try installing wifi-radar and that worked better because it only runs the scan when you open the applet to view the local APs. But then it did not appear to be correctly reporting the speed of the APs. They kept showing up as b.

Oh well. No big worries. If you’re having this problem I guess we just have to wait and see if madwifi can take care of it in upcoming releases.

I want to change the planet scripts to pull ads out of feeds. Namely, Hackaday is popping google ads in the feed. I don’t know what the common view on this is but I personally find it kind of lame. I don’t know why, I just get a vibe.

I guess that raises the moral question of whether or not someone should alter syndicated content. I’d like to keep Hackaday in planet-rev but I don’t want to turn into his marketing tool. And I don’t know if this violates the rule that you can’t have no more than 3 adsense ads on a page. Do they mean in total or just mine?

What do you think?

Anywho, I’m going to do it. Sounds fun.