Blue Sparks

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!

I’ve finally broken down and purchased a media server. Just a little guy though… It’s a Shuttle XPC K45. I am putting an Intel Celeron E1400 (2GHz, dual processor) into it, with 2 1TB drives. It should be a fun little box to work with. The pieces should all arrive today… So I’m looking forward to putting it together!

Note : This was developed for linux! It can most likely be made to work on windows, but it was not written for it!

I’ve written various tools over the years to help me out with tasks that take a long time, or are very boring/repetitive. I have uploaded one of these to my website. It is a small PHP script that I wrote in order to rip album art from ID3 tags (embedded in the MP3) and store the file as a BMP (windows bitmap) that rockbox will be able to read and display. I’m not sure it will be useful to everyone, but it’s there for the world.

The download is located here if you are interested.

And here’s the description from the ‘product’ page on my website:

“When I installed the Rockbox firmware on my iPod I was left with a dilemma. I had spent hours (days even!) downloading album art for my MP3 collection and tagging every file with it. Unfortunately Rockbox only supports album art as a BMP file, and not embedded art. I didn’t want to spend more days pulling art out so I could see it, and what would happen if I changed what I had on there?
Enter this little script that I hacked together one night. It will read ID3 tags for your MP3 collection, and dump BMP files into the album folders on your iPod. Woo!”

And there it is! If you want to check out more stuff, there’s a bunch located on the products portion of the main site (although products is misleading… I don’t actually sell anything but my time).

I was listening to my iPod again the other night while I was in bed reading. I had a raging desire to listen to some NIN; Pretty Hate Machine in particular. So, I fired up the album and let ‘er rip. The first thing I noticed was that the first song on the list, ‘Head Like a Hole‘, was actually ‘Kinda I Want To.’ Now, this is really odd! I know I mentioned this happening a few weeks ago with the Smashing Pumpkins, but I know for a fact that my NIN stuff is labelled correctly.

I took the time today to sftp into my home box, and download a copy of Head Like a Hole to verify. Guess what, the copy on my PC is actually right! This leads me to believe this is either a) a problem with rhythmbox or b) a problem with the iPod. I’m guessing it’s most likely the former… but it will require some digging to figure out what exactly is going on here.