Jailbreak!
My current overall iPhone theme
Hi, Kids.
Sorry for being so scarce lately… Microblogs have taken over, so if you haven’t been following me on Jaiku, FriendFeed, or Twitter, you’re missing out…
Anyway, I finally was able to upgrade my iPhone (3G) to 2.2 without losing my jailbreak functionality. PwnageTool to the rescue! And luckily, despite the warning that the new unibody Macbooks have some issues with DFU mode, the jailbreak went off without a hitch, and as far as I can tell, all major functionality from AppStore apps to making and receiving calls works as expected.
This is a screenshot of what my phone looks like now. I love being able to skin my home screens. This is the iGlassSol theme available from the Cydia installer. Yesterday a buddy of mine on Twitter asked what my favorite jailbreak apps are, and today I answered the question on Jaiku (in my “good morning” thread):
http://jezlyn.jaiku.com/presence/49685283
Since I know a lot of you will not click on the link above, I will reproduce the relevant text here:
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Winterboard – skinning app. There are tons of themes out there! Currently I’m using iGlassSol as my theme, and Tokidoki Lockscreen. I’ll post screenshots on Flickr. 
(Editor’s note: I was using the Tokidoki lock screen before I realized I could add weather info to the lockscreen, so I’m using that now. Screenshot can be seen in my Flickr stream.)
CallMe – creates an icon for a contact on the home screen for one-touch dialing.
QuickGold – a Quicksilver-like app launcher. Pretty nice if you have a ton of apps installed.
PdaNet – tethering app. Not free anymore, but it said it would revert to a free version after the 14-day trial is up. Not sure what the limitations are.
OpenSSH – for easy SSH access to your iPhone’s file system. There are 3rd-party audio/video players that will play songs that you SFTP into a directory like /private/var/media or whatever.
Notifier – adds taskbar icons for stuff like unread mail, missed calls, SMSes, etc.
Backgrounder – app to allow 3rd-party apps run in the background. Recommended for AppStore apps, not jailbroken ones. If a jailbroken app can run in the background, it’d be coded up to do so (like a scrobbling app). It doesn’t always work that well, but I like having it around, in case I’m streaming music or listening to a sound generator app like aSleep or Easy Relax and want to check my e-mail or surf something up without disrupting the audio.
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I also use Scrobble so that my listened-to tracks on my iPhone get sent off to last.fm, but the app is buggy in that it sends duplicate “scrobbles” to last.fm, requiring me to periodically prune my track list. I realized that there is another app called Scrobbled which, IIRC, is actually the scrobbling portion of the MobileScrobbler, the last.fm app that used to be available for jailbroken phones, but is now obsolete with the official last.fm app available in the AppStore. However, Scrobbled doesn’t seem to be working with 2.2 firmware, as I found out today, so I switched back to Scrobble.
So that’s what last night’s project was. It’s very cool to have 2.2 firmware functionality, but the podcast downloading feature is rather disappointing. The 10MB podcast size limit is ridiculous. Just about all of my podcasts are over 10MB (video and audio), so there aren’t many that I can just download on the fly via 3G or EDGE. I’ll have to play around with the new features in the 2.2 firmware to really figure out what can be done.
Yeah, Wargames!
So excited! Tonight we are going to see Wargames (the original 80′s movie, Ladies and Gents) on the big screen. I love this movie. It’s one of the movies that influenced my love of computers and technology, even though I was already leaning that way. We’d seen some commercials before a couple of the movies we saw recently about Fathom Events showing Wargames in theatres for one day, supposedly in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the movie. I think it’s more to pimp the straight-to-DVD release of the 2008 sequel to Wargames. I am really not that interested in the sequel at all; I can’t imagine that they could’ve done a good job with it. I am grateful that they’re re-showing Wargames on the big screen anyway. I never got to see it in the theatre. By the time I’d seen it, it was on HBO. Of course, with many movies that I saw on HBO, I watched it several times, whenever it was on.
Anyway, I don’t know how widespread this Wargames screening is, but I highly recommend going to Fathom Event’s site to see if it’s showing near you.
