If you’ve ever jailbroken your iPhone in the last months, you know how much of a necessity the freedom of an independent third-party alternative can be. The guys involved in cracking Apple’s continous efforts to fortify the box their customers agree to be locked in have been doing excessively great. Whenever Apple released a new firmware version in beta, they were on the case trying to get around the various protections to allow users the freedom to choose. They would do so impressively fast, too. Now, with iPhoneOS 3.1, Apple decided to up the ante.

Should you decide to update your pre-3.1 device to 3.1, Apple will make it so that not only does it wipe your jailbreak data, but make it nearly impossible for the user to manipulate the device in the future. As it is a highly technical subject, I’ll simply direct you to Jay “saurik” Freeman’s article which covers everything you need to know about this particular topic.

That being said, there’s a hard reality out there. 3.1 is out, and iPhone owners want their devices — may they be jailbroken or vanilla — to run the latest firmware. It’s absolutely normal, and even encouraged. Nowadays, you need to stay on top of software updates for security purposes, if anything. To that reality, you can add the current problem those people have: you can’t jailbreak 3.1. Today, I’m going to enumerate the possibilities that lay before you as a jailbroken iPhone owner who wants to update to 3.1. more…

Lots has changed since the last article I made about WP-prettyPhoto usage, and so it is time to revamp the instructions, explain new features and hopefully be a bit more thorough. First off, let me first mention the following thing:  prettyPhoto is written by Stéphane Caron. Here are some related links to avoid repeating them throughout this article: Stéphane’s blog, prettyPhoto’s project page, prettyPhoto on GitHub, Stéphane on Twitter, WP-prettyPhoto at WordPress Extend, WP-prettyPhoto Support Forum.

Revision History: This article is intended to document the current WP-prettyPhoto (1.5.1) & prettyPhoto (2.5.2) versions.
more…

I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 (“Jaunty Jackalope”) from 8.10 (“Intrepid Ibex”) about a week ago and was surprised how smooth it went. Jaunty’s still in its alpha stage (Alpha 3 as of now) yet it’s surprisingly stable. One thing that Jaunty, once officially released, will add to the regular Ubuntu is ext4 support. Ext4 is an upgrade from (wait for it…. you’ll never guess!) ext3, which is starting to show its age in the filesystem world. Ext4 provides better performance than ext3, mostly due to its delayed allocation and more file support (like you’ll ever have files bigger than 2 or 16 Terabytes?). Anyway, I felt like risking an in-place conversion of my two ext3 partitions for the sake of performance… and it went relatively smooth. I’ll explain how I’ve done it so you can give it a whirl as well. One thing worth noting though is that once a filesystem is converted to ext4, there’s no going back. You can’t convert it in-place to ext3, you must format the whole thing and start over. So obviously, back your shit up.

more…

You’ve all been annoyed at the default iPhone sounds sooner or later. They’re pretty ordinary, I’ll agree with you. One of the extremely useful features of JailBreaking your device is that you have the power to change the default sounds for pretty much any event. Today, I’ll show you how to replace your default SMS tones with custom ones of your choosing. In order to do so, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone (running 2.x), Cydia, OpenSSH and optionally WinterBoard. You’ll also need the audio file you want to use (obviously) an SSH client (ideally a graphical SFTP frontend like FireFTP) and an audio editing application like Audacity. Ready? Here goes! more…

I’m a huge music enthusiast. An audiophile, even. However, and this is not so uncommon I hear, I much prefer the consistence of a song’s lyrics than its melody. I love knowing what the singer says and feels, and you can only truly understand with a good understanding of how emotions translate into music and words. The music part is mostly instinctive, a bass line triggering a feeling in your guts, a guitar riff flipping your heart around, you can’t really learn that. However, it’s within everyone’s grasp to understand what a song says, and I believe it’s important. That’s why I’m going to give you a tip to get the lyrics from every song you love onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s really easy, you don’t have to do much.

First off, I’ll assume you’re using iTunes since you own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple made it so that synchronizing that baby on any other platform is a real bitch, and they’ve greatly succeeded. So open up your iTunes, select a song you like in your library and right-click it to “Get Info”. If you look at the tabs near the top of the popup window, you’ll see a “Lyrics” tab. Clicking on that should simply open the tab with a big empty text area. What we’ll do here is we’ll fill up that box with the song’s lyrics.

more…