Joe Zawodny

I Jailbroke my iPod Touch yesterday and wanted to pass along some observations of the rationale, process, and results. I’ve had my iPod Touch for a couple of months now. I waited quite some time for a 64GB version to come out since that was the capacity I needed. Otherwise I would have bought one of the early models long ago. While waiting for a 64GB model, I kept up to date on both the technology and the culture surrounding it. Jailbreaking is something I have watched mature into a simple 5 second process following a simple download.

For those not familiar with the term Jailbreak, it is a process that opens up the iPod Touch or iPhone and allows the user to install software from sources other than Apple’s iTunes Store. While there really is “an App for that” for just about anything you can think of there are certain things that Apple does not want you to do with YOUR iPod. My interests in Jailbreaking are an equal mix of curiosity, entitlement, and necessity. I wanted to experience the process of Jaibreaking and explore the innards of the iPod Touch OS. I wanted to do this because I could even though Apple probably did not want me to do so. I also needed to fix at least one problem I encountered with an App I bought (GeoDefense Swarm – a great game BTW).

Custom Background and Digital Battery Charge (Click for full size image)

A quick Google search reveals that the latest version of the OS (3.1.2) can be Jailbroken. A program called BlackRain, available for both OS X and Windows, is easily found, downloaded, and run. The actual Jailbreak takes about 5 seconds. After downloading the program, you plug in your iPod Touch or iPhone, upgrade to v3.1.2 of the OS if you have not already done so, shutdown iTunes, and run BlackRain. During the process, iTunes will probably try to convince you to restore the OS on your iPhone. If/when presented with what appears to be a requirement to Restore your Touch/iPhone – Do Not! Rerun BlackRain instead. Afterward, the device usually reboots on its own. If the device does not reboot, you will have to reboot it manually. Once you get to the point that the Touch reconnects to iTunes without iTunes requesting a restore, you are pretty much home free.

Custom Unlock Screen

If all goes well after the device the reboots, you will have a new App on the SpringBoard called BlackRain. You need to run the BlackRain App once to select and install an App Loader, I chose Cydia. With Cydia you can search for, download, and install all sorts of Apps. I wanted to customize the look of my Touch, so I installed WinterBoard. With WinterBoard I was able to set a background for the SpringBoard, make the Status and Task bars transparent, and change some fonts. You can also download a Theme from a large set of user developed themes, or create your own. I like Pandora, but want to do other things while listening to a stream of music, so I installed Backgrounder. Backgrounder allows the user to switch a running program to run in background. It is essentially an App that lets you run multiple Apps simultaneously. Apple only allows a few of their Apps to run in background, mail, safari, and a few others. Memory is limited on these devices, so this is probably not a bad idea. Only one App can be in the foreground, so you certainly need a way to switch between running Apps. mQuickDo does that and more. It is also an useful App that speeds up access to your most frequently used programs. Using gestures, mQuickDo allows you to manage the running Apps as well as provide a way to access apps more easily. It even allows the user to put a short list of 5 Apps on the unlock screen so you can unlock the screen and go directly to one of your most frequently used Apps with a single tap.

GeoDefense Swarm Screenshot

I wanted to snoop around the device, so I installed Open SSH, changed the default password for root, and can now mount the iPod Touch filesystem on my Mac with MacFuse/MacFusion. I was most interested in trying to fix a “problem” with one of my Apps – GeoDefense Swarm (GDS). This is a great Tower Defense game. The only problem is that the author has decided to irreversibly link the game to Open Feint (OF). OF is a site that keeps track of your high scores for the various levels, shares that information with your friends, and a few other things. I had no idea what OF was when I first bought GDS and so I activated it. Since I really do not have any friends who play a lot of games and would be interested in this sort of social interaction, I have no use for OF. The problem is that once activated there is no way to turn it off. During the game it will try to connect to OF after completing each level or when you switch between Easy, Medium, & Hard. It breaks the flow of the game for me. The real problem for most folks is that if they are using an iPhone, GDS connecting to OF will cost them something each time. This is especially bad if you are out of the country where the cost of cell phone networking often is extremely expensive. Basically, the author needs to put an ON/OFF switch for OF in the game, but has yet to do so (and may never do so). In my attempts to fix the problem I deleted the App from the Touch and iTunes, bought it again (Apple is good about keeping track of what you have already purchased, so this did not actually cast me anything the second time), and reinstalled it. OF was still turned on and had all of my account info. I suspected that there was some cruft left over in the file system that deleting the App did not clean up. It turns out I was correct. Mounting the file system on my Mac and browsing around was enlightening. I found the GDS directory and a GDS-specific .plist file. I browsed that file with the Property List Editor and saw that most of the contents dealt with OF. I also saw that all of my level achievements and high scores were stored in separate files. So I deleted the .plist file and restarted the GDS game. The first screen I was presented with asked if I wanted to use Open Feint – just like when I originally purchased the game! They really try to cram this OF stuff down your throat and there is a little button at the bottom of the screen that allows you to decline the use of OF. Everything else in the game was just the way I left it. Problem Solved.

For me Jailbreaking gives me more control over those things (devices and apps) that I have purchased. Things I believe I have a right to control in more ways than the OS allows by default. Artificial limitations on my access and use of something I own is intolerable to me. Those walls simply must be brought down. Jailbreaking my iPod Touch does just that.

Two styles of LED lamps

I’ve been searching for some LED lamps to test since I have been less than impressed by the very short lifetime of Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs). The CFLs do not last anywhere near the claimed 5,000, 8,000, or 10,000 hours. I think they might last that long if I turned them on and never turned them off, but that is not exactly my home lifestyle. So, I’ve been watching and waiting for some Suitable LED lamps to test. That day arrived when my wife said she was sick and tired of those CFLs in the kitchen that took 30+ seconds to get bright first thing in the morning. The problem was bad enough that I had switched one CFL back to an incandescent bulb months ago. When you want/need light you pretty much need it now. So I went to LEDtronics.com and bought a couple of R30 and PAR30 lamps.

I bought two completely different styles. One used five high power dimmable LEDs with a narrower 25 degree beam width and a 3000K color temperature. The other uses many lower power LEDs to produce a 5500K beam with a width of 40 degrees and could not to be used with a dimmer. I planned to use the latter in the kitchen where the distance between the lamp and the counter top was about 5′. The high power lamps are going in the ceiling of my family room 16′ above the floor. I selected the specific lamps based on their total lumen of output and their candle rating (includes the effect of varying beam width). My goal was to select a lamp that appeared to result in the same candle rating of the incandescent lamps I was replacing.

LED lamps are very intense, but not all that bright. These lamps in particular have clear lenses and produce a very direct light. The 40 degree spots did not work in the kitchen. We wanted a more diffuse light there. They do, however, work very well in the bedroom and the bath over the spa where they provide a delightful ambiance. Before I installed the high power spots in the ceiling fixtures I ran a quick test by putting them in a work light fixture. They produced a nice bright spot that was easily visible during the brightest part of the day on a wall 25′ away. I have since installed them and am very happy with the intensity of the light when I’m sitting at the computer underneath one of them and very pleased with way the light looks from across the room. It gives the room a completely different look. I’m planning to get two more for the other pair of corners in the family room.

I have to give these a thumbs up so long as they last their predicted lifetimes. The nature of the illumination is quite different from either incandescent or CFLs, so you should not expect that they will perform exactly the same way. In the right situation they perform better. In the wrong one, they can be worse. Given their current cost it will be an expensive experiment.

I bought the 5-license upgrade to Snow Leopard and it arrived today. I installed it on two systems (one more to go). The install goes pretty quickly and mine took just over 45 minutes each. On one system I did not install Rosetta. When I tried to start an Office 2004 app, which requires Rosetta, the system told me it needed Rosetta and asked if it should go and find a copy to install. I said OK and it was done in about 4 minutes. On the second system, my main home system which has all of my email, I use Mail. After the install, I was informed that I needed to convert my old Mail account to work with the new Mail app. Again, I said OK, but this time things didn’t go perfectly. Mail fumbled the hand-off of my account settings, specifically the settings for the outgoing SMTP authentication. I had to edit the settings so Mail would use a username and password. Not hard to fix if you know where to find the controls, but I do not understand why Apple missed such a fundamental setting. Other than that, Snow Leopard saved at least 7.5GB of disk space. Unfortunately, only Parallels version 4 works with Snow Leopard. iStat menus also does not work. Those are the only two things I have found that do not work with Snow Leopard.

MLAS Video (click to view)

I know this was just a test to demonstrate a proof of concept for an alternate launch abort system for Constellation, but it does seem to be quite complex and rather impractical given all of the excess mass of the system. Nevertheless, it worked amazingly well and will hopefully contribute to the overall safety of NASA’s new vehicle. It was tinkered together in a very short time. Some folks have great jobs!

Just a quick note on replacing the 7200RPM HD in my Wind with an OCZ SSD. Again the backup/restore using Acronis True Image Home 2009 went quickly and flawlessly. Formatting the 120GB SSD with NTFS took 140 seconds. Boot time of the Wind using a fast Scorpion drive took exactly 30 seconds, 10 of which were spent while the BIOS did its thing. Booting with the OCZ Vertex SSD took 23 seconds. When I first booted with the SSD, I thought something horrible had gone wrong. The fan came on and then the entire system went completely silent. Nary a peep nor hum. Only when the login screen appeared moments later did I realize that this total silence was now normal. Very nice.

Fit-PC2 Front

After using my MSI Wind to run the observatory for a while I found out about this tiny little 1.6GHz Atom-based Windows PC. Doing a little research into its size and other specs, I bought one. The reasons? It will fit inside my AP 900GTO mount, it has 6 USB 2.0 ports, and is fast enough to run the mount, autoguide, manage a filter wheel, and operate my camera. My hope is to monitor observatory ops from inside the house during those cold winter or bug-ridden summer nights. Placing the computer so close to the equipment will significantly reduce the usual tangle of cables associated with digital astrophotography.

Fit-PC2 Rear

One challenge I face is to get Remote Desktop Server running on this system. It came with Window$ XP Home SP3. I have a spare XP Pro license, but I can’t upgrade directly from SP3 (Thanks Micro$oft). So, I’m going to fake it and force RDP to run on Home – or at least try before taking the normal path. I have not tested a headless boot of the Fit-PC2, sans KVM, yet as RDP is required. I do have a fall back position where I put a Keyboard, Video, & Mouse in the observatory at the end of long cable runs.

Since the temperature extremes out in the observatory can be more than you might want to expose a computer to, I plan to swap out the 160GB HD in the Fit-PC2 for a 30GB SSD. 30GB should be plenty for everything I do except for planetary and lunar imaging. For that I have a Sager NP9850 laptop on order with three 320GB 7200 RPM HDs in a RAID-0 configuration, but that is a topic for a future post. I’ll have a fair amount of testing to do, the wireless network throughput out into the middle of my back yard in particular.

Fit-PC2 Top with 2.5" SSD

For those considering the Fit-PC2, here are a couple of initial impressions. It IS small. Build quality seems quite good. I did manage to crash the system once and that will be something I will monitor closely and followup with a more detailed review. You can hear the HD (it was sitting right in front of me during testing, however). The HDMI to DVI adapter cable terminates in a female DVI, so you need a regular male-to-male DVI cable to hook it up to a monitor. Personally, I would have liked a short cable that I could use to directly connect the Fit to monitor, at least initially. I suppose there will be those that can make good use of the supplied cable – folks who intend to use this as a media center. If I need to use a monitor in the observatory, the supplied adapter cable will be replaced by a long HDMI to DVI cable. The power supply brick is small and the cables are pretty short – outlet to Fit is just a hair over 6′ with the brick 2′ from the outlet. It is a standard cable going from the outlet to the brick, so you probably already have a longer cable in your possession.

I have an 80GB music library accessible/shared through my iMac. I’d like to use an iPod Touch to control the library and stream it via AirTunes to my stereo system out by the pool. As ‘with it’ as as Apple seems to be, why is this not a default capability of the iPod Touch?

The computer I built for my In-Laws died this week and I no longer had the parts to repair it. The trusty old Windows 2000 computer that had served so well for so long was toast. They needed a windows computer to run their genealogy software (otherwise I would have bought them an iMac) so, I went shopping in search of a replacement. Dell had a 2 week wait on a system that I thought would fit the bill, but 2 weeks was too long to wait. Best Buy does not sell just a computer – they want to sell you a monitor with it. The same goes for Costco. I did find a nice little computer, sans monitor, at Walmart made by eMachines and bought it.

I have now had my first taste of Micro$oft Vista – What a joke! They have added transparency to all of those annoying, pop-up, ‘Are you really sure you want to do this?’, click-happy confirmation dialogs and they have artfully moved all of the the tools and configuration GUIs to places where they are hard to find. Oh, and they now dim the rest of the screen so you can tell what little pop up you need to pay attention to. There appears to be more wide spread use of pop ups and they have restricted what I am allowed to do  – even though I am a frackin’ administrator! All of the ‘power tools’ I need to quickly configure/fix things are now either completely hidden or hard to get to. They have been replaced with wizards that perform inanely simple tasks. Micro$oft must think we are all idiots! Aside from the rearranging of the locations of the tools, there is really very little  – other than eye-candy & fluff – to Vista. I was really happy that I could make almost everything appear in ‘Classic’ form so as not to shock the In-Laws with the new computer. That alone tells me that Micro$oft knows that nothing in Vista is really that different from Windoze 2000 – other than fluff. Those stupid Wizards aren’t that helpful either. I had copied all of the user stuff from the old system over to the new one’s D: drive. Importing the email settings, address book, and mailboxes was a real pain. Apparently, you need to import things in a particular order. Once I imported the address book, I could then import the mailboxes – not the other way around. I never did figure out how to import the Favorites in Internet Explorer – it appeared to want to import them one link at a time(!!!) – so, I just copied them over to the proper location – which had not changed in Vista. I still have no idea where the email mailboxes are hiding though.

I just hope that damned Genealogy software runs under Vista.

Well that took longer than it should have, but I managed to upgrade the memory and hard drive in my MSI Wind. The memory was easy – open the case and insert the SIMM – Done. The hard drive was a bit more difficult primarily because I wanted to clone the existing drive with all of the software I had already installed on it and had to do so without the aid of an external CD/DVD drive. I tried a lot of things and this is what ended up working for me. Planning for this upgrade I did buy a Thermaltake BlacX SATA to USB “adapter” which made this process easier since the drives just plug into the top of the BlacX. My target drive is a WD Scorpion 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive that uses slightly less power than the original 5400RPM 160GB Fujitsu. I partitioned the new drive with 3 partitions using my iMac and the OS X disk utility. The partitioning scheme was MBR. First partition was 39.5GB, slightly larger than the Wind’s C: drive. The second is an 80GB HFS+ for OS X – eventually. The third partition is a 200GB FAT32 partition I’ll share with whatever OS is booted. I moved the disk over to my XP notebook and (re)formatted the first partition. I had to do this after trying several other ways to clone the drive. I then downloaded Acronis True Image Home 2009 which has a fully functional 15-day trial. It is nice software and is reasonably priced at $50 – although it did not quite do everything it needed to do as you will see. I put the original Wind HD in the BlacX and made a full backup (including MBR) to an image on my notebook HD. This was a pretty fast process. I then swapped out that drive for the new Scorpion and restored the image to the first partition and replaced the MBR. OK good to go now, right? Wrong. After reassembling the Wind with the new drive I got a little bit further than I had previously using other tools, but came to an abrupt stop with a “Non-System Disk” error during boot. After a little reading I had concluded that the problem was probably the assigned drive letter (D: instead of C:) that True Image gave the clone (you can’t have 2 C: drives on a system). It appeared that there was no way around this. Just for fun, I decided to have a look at the disk using XP’s Disk Manager. So for the umpteenth time I disassembled the Wind and hung the HD on my note book. Naturally I could not change the drive letter to C, but I did notice that the third partition on the drive was marked active. Could it be that simple? I marked the first partition as the active one and reinstalled the disk in the Wind, again. It Booted! … and the drive letter of the boot partition was now C: -  just like I had hoped. So my Wind now has 2GB of RAM and a fast 320GB HD – it is also overclocked to 1.8GHz and is stable. For those who may wonder, it is just as quiet as the original. Oh, and it boots in under 30 seconds.

I hope this is of help to someone out there.

Hopefully within the next week I’ll have a new Netbook in my possession. This device is compatible with the hardware requirements of Apple’s OS X. I purchased the 5-pack license for Leopard for my two iMacs and still have 3 unused licenses so I am considering installing OS X and dual booting the netbook. In doing some advanced research on the process of installing OS X on non-Apple hardware, it has become obvious that this is a trivial process. I wonder what implications this has for Apple and the way they enforce their licensing for the OS.

The Netbook I selected is the MSI Wind (U100-432US) 10″ system. I’ll be adding 1GB of memory and upgrading the HD to a 320GB 7200 RPM Western Digital Scorpion 2.5″ SATA HD. My goal is to have a tiny computer to run my observatory – freeing my other notebook to run the camera and deal with the high data rate processes. I do not need OS X to run the observatory, but I would also like to have a small netbook for other reasons. I only run windows when I am required to and prefer OS X for “normal” computing, hence the desire for dual boot.

Does Apple’s financial future require that they artificially tie OS X to their Hardware? If so, are they doomed?