iPhone / iPad / Mac

If you’re like me and you fart about with things when you shouldn’t, then you may have upgraded your iPhone to the illicit Beta release of the 3.0 firmware.  The one I installed was the ‘Gold Master’ version (7A341), and it worked like a charm.  However, it occurred to me that iTunes might get the hump with me when it releases the proper version on the 17th, so I’d better downgrade.

You would think that is simple, wouldn’t you?  Well, after a bit of hair-tearing out and no small amount of using Google, I seem to have managed it, so I thought I’d make a note on here for any other folks who are struggling as I was.  Of course, after all this, iTunes might just upgrade over any Betas without any complaint, but we can’t be sure.

The process is quite simple, but quite fiddly.  These are the steps I followed to downgrade my iPhone 3G.  I don’t have a 2G or a Touch either 1 or 2G to test this on, so no promises that will work!  You will need to have the 2.2.1 Firmware (this link is the 3G version), you might also need to have a copy of  QuickPWN on standby.

Sorted? Okay, here are the relatively few steps you need to take:

1. Open up iTunes.
2. Get your phone in DFU mode – this ISN’T the same as when it displays a plug and an iTunes symbol – follow this guide if you’re not sure.
3. Hold down shift and click on the restore button, select the 2.2.1 Firmware file.  This might just work, apparently – it didn’t for me (it goes on for a while before failing, and for me giving an error 1013).  If you error, carry on.
4. Allow the phone to reboot.
5. Close iTunes.
6. Launch QuickPWN.exe, it will advise you to hold power and home for 15 seconds, then press power for 2 second – do this.
7. If you’ve done it right you’ll get the ‘slide for emergency’ message as well as the USB and iTunes graphic.
8. Open iTunes and it will activate. Woohoo!

Obviously you’re then free to re-jailbreak or whatever else 🙂

I’ve had a Flickr account for ages, but never really used it much; but noticed that I can upload pics to it easily on the go from my iPhone, and can install a handy block over there –> to display some recent ones, which is rather good.. I used to be a big user of photos on t’internet, with regularly updated galleries – and frankly, I’ve been very slack on that lately (although ‘event’ photos do tend to make it onto Facebook!).

So there you go!  A slight change, but a good one I think.  I suppse it depends if I ever use it regularly, hopefully I will, though!

In terms of non-iPhone related things (since that’s all I seem to write about!), the house is still a building site.  With much elbow grease from myself, Cat, Mum and Dad we’ve got the downstairs mostly unpapered.  This week’s been a bit busy in the evenings, so hopefully on Saturday/Sunday I’ll be able to finish off by spongeing down the walls and getting the remaining bits of paper off, clean out the areas that require filling, do the filling and then make use of a power sander (yay, powertools!) to smooth everything off.

Hopefully that will leave us with a surface suitable to paint without reskimming; we shall see!  Either way, we won’t be having wallpaper since our little winged pincers like nibbling it!  The very loud fans the dryers left us are still running; they’re coming on friday to see if we still need them – I’m hoping not, as we can’t really do any work until they’re gone, I’m also needing to get in touch with a plumbing pal to discuss what we can do about replacing our heating with something more practical.

If I didn’t have a pretty hectic day job it would be easy!  Still, no pain no gain.

I had a while back decided I wasn’t too arsed about jailbreaking my iPhone, but well, as I oft do with technology I got a little bored and decided to do it anyway, having discovered that you could do it with a tool called QuickPWN.  Instructions on doing it are understandably sketchy, as developers tend to specialise, funnily enough, in developing rather than user-friendly instructions – plus their target audience tend to be people who can easy out-geek me.

So, amidst fears that in upgrading to 2.02 I had missed the jailbreaking boat, I duly opened up Google which presented me with this really useful guide.  These are the instructions I followed, and it worked.  The only thing they were not clear on was the length of time it can take for restarts – so it does lead to a few spincter-twitching moments; however, I was spurred on by the (as yet untested for me) claims that even if it went horribly wrong, a simple restore via iTunes would sort it out.

Why would you want to jailbreak your phone?  With the inception of AppStore, third party applications are now available anyway (sometimes for a price), however, Apple are less keen on other applications making it onto their beloved platform.  Video recording, for instance – is something my iPhone can now do, thanks to an application called Cycorder.

The other thing that jailbreaking enables is customisation; now, there is a school of thought that points out – not unreasonably – that the iPhone environment was a rather attractive thing to behold, and thus shouldn’t be tampered with.  And I agree with that, to a point.  But I resent being enforced not to, so I do actually quite like the ability to tamper with things; which as you can see from the screenshot are considerably tampered with.

In the past I used to spend many happy an hour designing themes for Geeklog, given the relative simplicity of iPhone themes I could be quite tempted to try to get into designing stuff again.  As it is so far I’ve restricted myself to hacking apart the work of others into something approximating what I would like – I’ve also been investigating how to achieve transparencies in PNG files, which I think could lead to intriguing results; I like the idea of making the buttons fairly blended in.

Other things I’ve amused myself with is installing an application called ‘Categories’ which allows you to create folders in which to put groups of applications; which has tidied up my ‘Springboard’ (the technical term for the iPhone menu system), I’ve installed pretty impressive NES and Gameboy Advance emulators, as well as a more advanced Camera program, and a Video recorder.  It’s true to get the most out of these things you need to be comfortable using either SSH or WinSCP (for Microsoft-based people such as myself) to get full use out of them.

In an extension of theme type stuff, I’ve also just added a small weather ‘widget’ to the home screen, as well as changing things like the battery colour and changing the slider to a zip, using the ‘Winterboard’ application, and the language to say ‘unzip’ rather than ‘slide- using the ‘Customize’ application (which has also enabled me to change my SMS alert tone to a light saber.. ah, t’was inevitable!).  So yes, a myriad of customisations and changes, many of which I will probably lose when the novelty wears off!

I’ve got a couple of hours to kill, having dropped of my car at the garage; hmm, I think to myself, I don’t know Lenton very well, where’s the nearest greasy spoon to get me some breakfast?

iPhone to the rescue! Making use of the Vicinity application, I asked for a café near me, and it duly obliged an easily walkable example complete with integration into Google Maps, providing my start point, my destination and current location en route!

So now I’m arsing around posting this whilst supping a nice cup of tea!

Thanks to a nifty iPhone plugin, I can now update my infrequently updated blog whereever I may be!

Utterly pointless, in my case, but still cool!!