Blue Sparks

I’ve been a big fan of Penny Arcade for a long time, heck the name of my blog comes from one of their comics! They’ve always got some good things going on over there. I don’t any of their books, but I do buy their apparel once in a while. Actually, when Mike and Jerry started their whole Dr Raven Darktalon Blood story line ( A Whimsical God, and this ) I approached them about making a fake website for the “movie” which was in production. They were pretty cool about it, but sadly other things got in the way and all I ever finished was a “Coming Soon” page.

When the PA guys decided to start putting out their own video game I was pretty excited. Mike’s artwork is always good, and Jerry’s prose is just phenomenal. I was looking forward to getting it as soon as it came out! I didn’t actually get it as soon as it came out, I waited for it to come to the PS3… but when the second episode came out ( launched at the same time with XBOX and PC ) I did get that one right away! I swear I did!

For the last couple years I had been patiently waiting for the announcement of Episode 3. I wanted to see the game to its full conclusion. To my dismay the game was announced as cancelled a few months ago (at PAX East I believe). I was quite disappointed with the news, but the reasons were evident… The game cost too much, didn’t bring in enough revenue, and the studio they were working with was doing some other things now.

If you happened to be disappointed like I was, you can rejoice again! I just checked the newsposts on the PA site and noticed something while going back to the previous day (I do this since sometimes miss posts they make on non-comic days). Jerry is putting the rest of the series up in written form! To tell you the truth I’d rather read it than play it anyway. As I said earlier, I love the way Jerry writes. I really think he should pen a novel, if he hasn’t already, I would buy it in a moment!

Recently I updated my iPhone 3G to use iOS4. It took hours… and the results were underwhelming to say the least. I got a new mail app (uh, woo?) and folders (not actually horrible). I understand the 3G can’t do multitasking… the memory it has available just isn’t going to cut it. But no background on the home page? Or a simple battery percentage notification? What the hell…

At this point I should note that if I was willing to actually shell out for a phone, I probably would never have picked an iPhone. I’ve never had anything but trouble with Apple products, and the device lockdown rubs me the wrong way (being a free software advocate). This phone I have at the moment is a hand-me-down from Jackie. She got a 3GS back in February, and I got her 3G with a broken screen. All told, it’s better than the cruddy Motorola phone I got from Telus and the “Pay as you go” rates from Rogers aren’t horrible.

So back to my frustrating upgrade experience. It really did irk me that the upgrade took something like 4 hours. Most of this being the copying of all my music and other data to the phone again. Oh… and since Jackie had been the last one to sync it tried to copy all of her apps over to the phone and delete mine. WTF???

At this point I was pretty pissed with all the Apple BS and decided to look into the jailbreak option. I had attempted it in the past but failed miserably with funky “Error XXXX” messages when trying to restore the custom firmware. This time it actually worked flawlessly with r3dsn0w. The only hard part is getting the phone into DFU mode since the lock button is broken and only works sporatically.  It took some fiddling, but the jailbreak process itself was very easy.

During the jailbreak process I was asked if I wanted to enable the features Apple had turned off for the 3G and I decided “why not!” The features were definitely enabled, but the performance was horrible. After about a week of dealing with a sluggish phone I had to go back and perform the jailbreak process again to turn those features off.

On the whole, I’m impressed with the Cydia package manager. It’s using dpkg for all of the package management work (Go Debian!), and it works pretty damn good. My only complaint is that Cydia itself is a little slow, even after turning off all of the 3GS/4G features I had on originally. I love that I have a basic terminal on the phone now… I can SSH without a computer to any of my boxes at home. I also like Winterboard and the cool themes. In particular I’ve got one theme installed called Glassillumine which is very slick.

All told, I enjoy this phone much more now that I have the ability to put more on it than the things that are approved by Apple!