Jailbreak my new iPhone 3GS – blackra1n

Anyway, first job, of course, was to jailbreak the new phone. Last time I did it is was… well, it wasn’t a chore, exactly. But it was a bit of pain, using the redsn0w tool from dev-team, on the PC, to modify the firmware update. BUT – brilliant news, an update to an older piece of software called blackra1n which also hacks the iPhone! I hadn’t heard of it before but it appears that it’s been around before for updating older versions of the firmware and I have to admit it was good to have an alternative!

Installation was… well, it was as easy as downloading it and double-clicking the icon! With a connected phone, Click “make it ra1n”, your phone reboots with a funky new wallpaper and then that’s it! You’ve now installed a piece of software called blackrain which is an icon on your phone – open that and you get a number of options to install a software manager, like Cydia.

Problems with blackra1n

HOWEVER, I have a big problem with blackrain because whenever I reboot my phone it keeps asking my to re-activate my phone and plug it into my PC so iTunes can talk to it. Very odd, and clearly not terribly convenient! So if anyone else has this problem with blackra1n please let me know I’m not alone or going nuts.

It’s tricky, I’m very impressed with how easy and quick the jailbreak was with blackrain but clearly this is a big error to have come up every time I reboot my iPhone. Maybe it’ll just sort itself out given a few more reboots, or maybe there’s something in the rebooting that I’m doing wrong and it’s constantly going into recovery mode or something.

Seems obvious to me!

Anyhoo, I installed a few and thought I’d recommend the free one I found that DOES do the job, it’s called DeskPins:

Find the website here

It’s great – has allowed me to do EXACTLY what I want, which is to effectively pin Chrome to the right hand side of my screen. Yay! Thank you!

Hope that’s useful.

First thing I did was activate the MMS. What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t actually activated until I received 2 texts from o2 confirming that *they* have now activated it. Would have been nice for the software to have made that obvious. I got 3 messages from mobile number 1010 describing the situation.

My biggest real gripe though is messaging, either text or web. I think it’s a lot less sensitive than it used to be and harder to navigate text you’ve already written. The “select” tooltip thing keeps coming up when all I want to do is fix badly auto corrected words. Even now I’m finding that I can type faster than the screen can update. This didn’t used to be the case. Sad. Texting is much slower now on the iPhone and much more prone to errors!
I wish so much that apple would have just given us navigation arrows instead – yunno, like all keyboards do!

There are good things, I’m not trying to be a complete killjoy, I just hoped for more. I think it would have been cool for apple to have given us the voice recognition that the 3gs has – not really sure the hardware would hold that back for us.

However – big problem, I downloaded the application update (240MB, by the way) and I got the following error:

———-
The iPhone “………” cannot be updated at this time because the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable.
———-

Argh! C’mon Apple – I’ve done some reading around and although I didn’t have an iPhone in 2008, apparently this is not the first time.

The solution to the problem appears to be to close down iTunes (you have to install it using iTunes) and unplug your iPhone. Once you’ve done that, reconnect the iPhone and let iTunes load up by itself. Once it loads it’ll ask you whether you want to install the update – fingers crossed you won’t get the iPhone activation server error.

Phew! So it’s still installing while I blog this. Fingers crossed it’ll all be done soon and I’ll be 3.0ing the heck out of it. So long as there aren’t any more server errors!

UPDATE!!

This courtesy of posted lespaul85

1)Click update
2)immediately disable your network connection (several ways, I just went to my internet properties and my connection and right clicked and went to disable)
3) it’ll skip over the offending error and should continue

Thanks lespaul85, and a big yahoo! from everyone who’s finding this working for them.

The URL is www.zodiac4u.com – simple enough, quite easy to remember and ripe for content. At this point it’s just the one page, setting out a kind of mission statement about what I want to do with the site. Effectively I want to give people personalised horoscopes so at some point I’ll create a full enquiry form. Horoscopes are a particular pleasure of mine.

So the Godaddy thing – yeah, it’s alright. I’ve done it before, bought the expired domain name www.nottheonion.com – this did have some kudos with existing pages which I replicated (not content wise, just page name wise). It seemed to do very well for that reason, already has a pagerank (I think 2). I think it’s worth checking it out – it’s not as cheap as buying a domain name from scratch but with so few decent .coms available these days it’s a decent solution.

For anyone looking for SEO reasons, I also did a fair amount of research today about purchasing .net domains instead of .coms – my feeling is that seriously – it’s not worth it. If you can’t get the .com you want, unless your site has a particular reason to be particularly geo-centric (eg. .co.uk because the site is about the UK), you’re stuffed. My advice would be to keep looking, keep dancing around the domain registration places typing in keywords that kinda match, making sure your eventual URL isn’t going to be super massive.
The other thing to keep in mind, of course, is that at first of course you’re unlikely to get a high percentage of “type-in” traffic – that is, traffic from people typing your domain name straight into the address bar. Instead people are going to be searching for your site and that’s how they’ll find you. But DO people bookmark? In my experience, no, they don’t. Instead they remember the domain name and search for that!! If you haven’t got the .com, you’re scuppered! Definitely, buy the .com, not the .net (well, BOTH, if you can get the .com).

So when the fifth in the series came out (Oh, I tried the one on the Wii, that was AWFUL!) I had to get it… and I must say I’m really enjoying it! I know it’s standard practice to complete a game before reviewing but I’m not a massive, massive gamer. I play when I can and mostly that’s very casual but I’m trying my best.

The first thing that hit me is how gorgeous the game looks. I was, for some reason, expecting an “on rails” type game where there are hundreds of pauses and camera swings to divert your attention to the next thing. That it’s as free as it is somehow came as a shock and interacting with the environment on this game is a thorough joy. I don’t know whether it’s just me but the controls did irritate a fair bit, as did the odd bizarre camera angle… still, it’s kinda one of those things these days that people just *do* complain about.

The storyline is pretty good considering it’s a Zombie game to all intents and purposes. Oh, and it’s been ages since I’ve played a game with proper end-of-level baddies, how cool is that?! Your main ally in your pursuit, Sheva, is a bit bloody stupid I have to admit – you’re supposed to be able to get her to help you out more often than not but I just kept putting her into “cover” mode and that seemed to be for the best. There’s a need to conserve ammo that’s quite tricky for someone who’s not a confirmed FPS gamer, but the challenge seems fair enough really, rather than being handed everything on a plate. And the cool thing is that I hardly had to blow up a barrel at all!

I don’t think I’ve ever played a more cinematic game, though I’m looking to get Call of Duty: World at War, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

A very solid game, well directed, well executed and voice acted. A very intense and inclusive experience.

The game gets 8/10

Well, I should, because like her or not, she has a family, she has friends, she genuinely does have a lot of people who love her around her. Sure, I can be skeptical about people like Max Clifford but really I have no real reason to suspect his motives of being anything but friendly in the lady’s last days or weeks. Frankly I feel a bit uncomfortable, it’s not like she’s stabbed anyone, or destroyed anyone’s future, or really done an awful lot but take advantage of our own society… if anything should be done on the back of feeling anything negative towards the Goodie, then it should be to take on the most deplorable “media” aspects of our selves.

Personally, I’m a bit tired of the whole thing. She is one amongst thousands who are suffering in exactly the same way, she’s not special in that respect.. and to be honest, I have no idea if she herself would like the attention she’s getting. I just don’t know, and it’s not fair to assume that she would.

The amount of vitriol and humor being poked at her around the internet is immense. There’s a pretty good summary of all this shown here: Jade Goody funny stories and jokes. Don’t blame that site, by the way, it’s just aggregating all the stories around the internet.

It’s a weird state of affairs. The way I see it is Jade Goody is OK. She’ll die, people will mourn, and hopefully Cancer becomes even more pressing in people’s lives as something that needs funding, in terms of research, and hopefully anyone who has profited from Jade Goody’s life (and death) will put some money – if not all that money – that way.

When the time comes – because I won’t blog about it again – RIP Jade Goody.

This review isn’t going to have a “rating” – it doesn’t seem appropriate.

Message away!

I’m not really into social networking, social bookmarking, social…ising. Anything really that involves me having to interact with other humans is not really something I do. Which makes it all the more important that my communication tool of choice really does the job well.

I use MSN Messenger. It might not even be called that, exactly, but I don’t much care either. Messenger is a Microsoft product, which doesn’t immediately mean it’s evil or that it’s buggy or that its Terms and Conditions forced me to give up my first born or the deeds to my eldest Stallion. Nope – it just means it works pretty much half the time and almost certainly contains a lot of functionality I’ll never use.

Personally I think out of all the instant online chat machines, Messenger is the best (out of interest, ICQ was the worst). It’s functional, it lets you have your own avatars, it’s quick, it lets you have privacy (I’m always in “appear offline” mode). Yeah – it’s a good product.

Appearance: 8/10 (It hasn’t ever changed much but personally I *like* that)
Functionality: 7/10 (It doesn’t do much, really, but what it does it does well)
Funk factor: 4/10 (It won’t do much for your street cred)

Overall I give MSN Messenger a healthy but not stunning 6/10

So, instead I’m having to put up with using an external USB keyboard which has its own issues. It’s OK, but the whole point of a laptop is that it’s portable and not clunky… right now I’m having to carry around a keyboard which doesn’t even fit in my laptop bag and juts out.

There’s not much to say really, using an external USB keyboard (this one happens to be a Dell by the way) is hardly the bane of my life, but it is a bit of a pig.

I’ll give the keyboard a pretty impressive 8/10 – it’s functional, the keys are nice and springy and the spacing of the letters is all good.

I’ll give the experience on the whole a dismal 3/10 – it’s a pain, I don’t like using an external USB keyboard.

Overall then: 5/10. Done!

Speculation about Google releasing a web browser into the market had been around for years since it was confirmed and it was eventually released in September 2008. It launched with a pretty big “hoo-hah” and had zillions of downloads before the day was out. However, many skeptically (and probably rightly) suggested that a great number of these downloads would then sit as unused desktop items that your OS would kindly remind you should be tidied at regular intervals. There was, many said (and I was amongst them), no real room for a new browser in the market. Internet Explorer was going to be used by anyone who had no real reason to look elsewhere, whilst FireFox had the market of those who needed to look under the hood of websites. Safari had fairly recently been available to download for Windows users – and so what need was there for a new browser?

Chrome – the fast browser

In my use of Chrome one of the best things I can say about it is: Whoa! This thing’s fast. I don’t just mean at loading itself, although that is fairly nippy, but the actual rendering of web pages is very impressive. True, I must temper this with the confession that I have a silly number of “add ons” plugged into FireFox at any one time, but nonetheless I’ve never seen a browser render a page quicker. And it makes a difference you know, I never really thought about it but it makes the internet feel a heck of a lot slicker. I spend a decent amount of time in my job working out how to make the back-end behind websites process quicker, whilst at the same time ensuring that the front-end developers around me are also producing slick code and well optimised imagery. But all this work is heavily diminished if the browser itself is sluggish, and Chrome has pointed out (hopefully) to the big-boys exactly how it’s done. Yeah, I’ll call Mozilla’s FireFox browser a big-boy because it really is now.

Another feature of Chrome that I’m really impressed with is that each browser tab or window is (apparently) a separately running application, meaning that if one tab crashes, the rest doesn’t go with it. This might sound stupid but I’m sick of losing the dozen or so tabs I’ve got open with IE or FireFox, even if FireFox does offer to open them up again next time… and crash for the same reason

Speaking of tabs, I LOVE the way you can drag a tab outside the tab-line and it turns into a new window. That’s magic, that’s exactly what I wanted from FireFox, especially when you’ve got 2 monitors. The ability to create a new window from an existing tab is such a simple one but something I’ve genuinely missed having!

Chrome – the ‘meh’ browser

However, when trying to think of other positives, I’m kinda struggling. It’s not that Chrome’s doing much wrong, it’s just that I get everything it does, more or less, from either FireFox or IE. With IE I know I’m going to find the website I’m looking at (probably) looking as it was designed 1, with FireFox I know I’m going to be able to get the functionality expanded, that everything I already use it for works really well, and I can rely on its rendering engine to displays things exactly as programmed.

In terms of what it’s actually missing, there’s not a great deal, I’d suggest. The only thing I have noticed is a lack of internal RSS reader – a bit weird when you open up an RSS/XML file and have it load in the page like an HTML file (ie. tags invisible, content spewed).

Overall, I mean, I like Chrome. I’d give it a home, maybe in the garage, but I suspect there’ll be others who’d give it the couch, maybe even offer it a beer. But I just don’t care enough. Y’know?

Score: 7/10. It’s not its fault, it’s just a bit meh.