Chad Things

Now that i’ve had my iPhone a while, here’s some tips and tricks i can share.

• Get a case to protect your iPhone. Following most apple store employees, i bought Agent 18 eco-friendly.
• MegaPhone – mac application – see your call log, SMS/TXT log, iphone filesystem, read/write to iphone notes from your MAC, etc.
• Disk full? 8GB or 16GB iPhone actually has 2 filesystems, first is only 300MB and might fill up if you install lots of apps. In addition to moving /Applications to bigger partition, and chmod +s Installer, i did this
  cp -Rv /opt/iphone/lib /var/root/lib
rm -rf /opt/iphone/lib && ln -s /var/root/lib /opt/iphone/lib

• Geek? Dual Boot your iPhone
• Use iPhone’s internet on your laptop (slow, but useful in a pinch)

If you’re iPhone is freed/jailbroken, get these (best items first)

• fring – finally a found a google talk client (blog). Also does chat/IM with yahoo, aol, MSN, ICQ, Skype, Twitter, SIPwith others apps
• Productivity/WebSearch – shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
• Multimedia/MobileScrobbler – last.fm client – like internet radio, but need good wifi
• iLog – view details about missed/received/dialed calls (with call duration!), individual SMS, etc.

Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB – once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 – that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.

Here’s the deets:

1. Bought four 500GB drives for about $100 each,
2. Copy data from Terastation to one of the 500GB drives – mounted via USB on windows xp, could also work with IDE inside PC (4-6 hours)
3. Disassemble Terastation, pull out 250GB drives (<1 hour)
4. Copy data from 500GB to 2 of the 250GB drives on windows xp PC (6-8 hours)
5. Partial Reassemble Terrastation with 4 new drives (10 mins)
6. Upgrade Terastation firmware to 2.16 (had trouble with disk format till I did this)
7. Format each disk (5 mins) (had to reboot a couple times to get it to work)
8. Create Raid array 1 (RAID 5) using all 4 disks (2 mins), raid “checking” took 13 hours
9. Create shared folder
10. Copy data from the 2 250GB drives back to terastation.

More on http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Terastation_FAQ