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!

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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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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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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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.