iPhone Passion

Every time I connect my iPhone to the computer, iTunes would start backing it up. And it’s slooow - really slow - at least half an hour of waiting.
There’s a fix for this, which I found on Zerologic: disable automatic iTunes backup, and only allow manual backups for it.

Here’s how to do it:

1. - Quit iTunes.
2. - Open Terminal.app
3. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true

4. - Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

5. - Open iTunes
6. - Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

Now it finally looks more like in the good old days of the 1.1.4 firmware. Almost instantaneous sync. Hurray!

On my daily blog I wrote a step-by-step tutorial for upgrading and jailbreaking your iPhone to the latest Apple firmware, using the Pwnage Tool app.

The tutorial is in Romanian but feel free to use Google Translation Tools to read it in English.

Enjoy!

The title is right: you can install Wikipedia on your iPhone. Most articles on Wikipedia are there, in only 2GB of disk space. Sure, there are no pictures(nor other multimedia items), and the navigation is crappy, but after all… it’s Wikipedia on your iPhone, to read and to love whenever you’re offline.
In the author’s words:

What
An offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I wanted to write an iPhone app over Christmas, and so hacked this together during the break.
Why
It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain. You have an iPod Touch.

Here’s the noob’s step-by-step guide on how to install it on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

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The guys from HermitWorks have posted this Friday an amazingly impressive video of a networked Quake 3 game running on two iPod Touch. I know, there are already a couple of 3d shooters running on the iPhone platform, but this one beats the crap out of them - controlling the movement by tilting your iPhone, this is an amazing new level of interactivity for a Quake 3 shooter.

Words are worth less than the video. Watch and be impressed!

Via Touchpodium

Remember I promised I’d introduce u to the many uses of having SSH and BSD installed on your iPhone. Here’s the first of a bunch of tips and hacks that will make your iPhone experience a lot less frustrating.

The bug:

On 1.1.4 firmware(and possibly 1.1.3), for some iPhone setups, after you log into a website from Safari, when you get back after having closed Safari, it’ll keep ask you to login.

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Zibri just announced the release of ZiPhone 3.0, which has lots of great cool features:

New Features:

- No more need of fix nvram!
- Solution for GREYED wifi!
- No need for YouTube Fixes!
- Embedded apps installer!
- Customized plugins !

I just reformatted yesterday my iPhone (using the DFU method) and already spent quite a bit of time reinstalling several cool iPhone apps, but I can’t refrain myself from doing it again, so that I can test ZiPhone 3.0

Congrats to Zibri, and don’t forget to donate him a penny or two, as rewards for his great work.

The second thing you do after jailbreaking the iPhone and importing the SIM contacts is, without a single doubt, installing one of the hundreds cool iPhone apps available on various Installer sources. In most cases, you’ll get away with only this. However, occasionally, some of the coolest apps will require a bit of advanced iPhone usage, and that’s what we’re gonna cover here.

You might have already heard some rumors about this, anyways here it is: the iPhone is a real computer, running a tiny stripped down version of Mac OSX, similar in many ways to what you have on your MacBook. In order to unleash its full potential, we’ll have to “unstrip” it a little bit by installing some of the tools found on Unix .

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So.. you did something wrong and your iPhone won’t work anymore. Perhaps, like me, you wanted to change the root ssh password and as a result you got the SpringBoard (the iPhone window manager ) restarting every 10 seconds and a popup telling you to edit home items. Or perhaps you installed a buggy app that crashed your system. Or, maybe, an upgrade went wrong.

Don’t despair. There may still be hope. It’s called the iPhone DFU mode.
I’m not sure what DFU stands for, but what it does is simple - it puts your iPhone in the “out of the factory” clean state; sort of like having a clean hard drive to your computer, without Windows, Linux or anything else. DFU mode is a security mode that lets iTunes see once again the iPhone and install the latest firmware on.

So, how to get to DFU?
Watch the following video, or keep in mind 7, 2, 10: for 7 seconds keep the “power/lock” and “home” buttons pressed simultaneously, until the iPhone’s screen goes black; keep them both pressed an extra 2 seconds, then release the “power” button and continue holding the “home” button pressed. At the end of 10 seconds, iTunes(which was opened already) should see the iPhone; you can let go, the toy is in DFU mode, you can now “reformat” it to the latest firmware (agree with whatever iTunes is saying related to “Restore”) so that you can jailbreak and unlock it afterwards.
Sure, you lost all your apps, music and videos, but that’s a pretty small price to pay for getting your iPhone back up and running, right?

Much to my surprise, after I managed to unlock and jailbreak my iPhone using the ziPhone utility, none of the contacts I had on my card were accessible. Zip, nada, nothing.
I started to look around and noticed that ziPhone had installed the “Installer.app” utility. Taking a peek inside, I saw that this wonderful app lets one install a lot of native iPhone apps from various sources.

iSIM

The app I used was iSIM for iPhone, a shareware that imports the contacts. The free version only lets you import contacts one by one. In order to import them all, you need to buy the full version. Even with one by one(I was bored), it took me less than 5 minutes to import all of the contacts. Some extra fun 10 minutes later, everyone was in place, names were corrected, duplicates removed, contact photos were added and my contact list was in place.

Had I known better, I would have certainly used the better, free alternatives to iSIM:

SIMport

SIMport is a free app that, according to some, is better in more ways. I haven’t tested it but you could try it(on your own risk, obviously). This is the defacto contact import app, recommended by the major iPhone - related blogs. SIMport imports ALL the contacts(or only the selected ones) in a couple of seconds.

After months and months of waiting I am the proud owner of a brand new iPhone. As any of you, I was an absolute novice in all iPhone related matters. Words like jailbreak, cracking, hacking, bootloader, baseband were(and some still are) strangers to me. All I wanted was to be able to use my iPhone with my current carrier(not AT&T) and that I wanted to be able to upload music, videos and cool free games onto it.

Anyways, I got the trick pretty quickly so now I’m gonna teach you, step by step, everything from unpacking the iPhone to getting it running.

Today, first lesson: the 4-minutes jailbreak. I’m assuming you’re using an Apple Mac(as me), but the instructions remain similar for Windows PC’s as well. We’ll be using the software ziPhone version 2.5c.

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iClarified.com brings thorough instructions about unlocking an 1.1.2, 1.1.3 OTB iPhone. The instructions assume you have already jailbroken the particular firmware you would like to be on. This works from 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 firmware, but only if you are on a 4.6 BL iPhone. This means that your iPhone came with 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 Out of the Box. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU DON’T DO THIS ON A 3.9 BL IPHONE!

Read the entire install/unlock process over at the iClarified website. Please tell us how it went..