Chad Things

I just got an iPhone, and its great, but Apple does not allow 3rd party applications out of the box (games coming soon). So what to do? Well, if you want more apps, you must jailbreak your iPhone. Before Feb 2008, it was a bit complicated, but since apple released 1.1.4, its easy as apple pie – here’s what i did:

Following instructions from iPhone Atlas, I changed Settings/General/Auto-Lock=Never, downloaded and ran ziphone app on my mac, doing jailbreak-only (i’m already using the official AT&T carrier). It took less than a minute to reboot back into iPhone and there i saw 2 new apps – Zibri’s Blog and Installer. The Installer app is how you easily install your favorite games, utilities, and other apps. Hurray.

After browsing top 20 apps, I installed these (and you should too, copycat)

1. Sources/Community Sources – do this first, gets list of available apps (packages).
2. System/BSD Subsystem – some other apps need this first, including OpenSSH and NES. If you install this, change password from default “alpine” using openssl. Do not use passwd – you may get stuck in “edit home screen” reboot loop
3. Games/Caissa Chess – better graphics than other chess
4. Games/Chess – not sure if its better than Caissa
5. Games/FiveDice – Yahtzee
6. Games/HuaRongDao – puzzle game, simple yet hard
7. Games/iCave – simple, reminds me of vanguard
8. Games/iSolitaire – you know it
9. Games/Labyrinth – tilt iPhone to guide marble around labyrinth
10. Games/Mahjong – classic chinese game
11. Games/Othello – another classic
12. Games/PuzzleManiak – combo of different games, online scores
13. Games/Sudoku – latest fad
14. Games/Tris – one of many Tetris games
15. Multimedia/CameraPro – like default Camera app, but you can zoom, black and white,
16. Multimedia/MobileScrobbler – last.fm client
17. Multimedia/TuneWiki – play music with this, and it downloads lyrics and advances them to the music
18. Multimedia/iFlickr – upload to .. you guessed it
19. Productivity/WebSearch – shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
20. Productivity/Sketches – like the old “paint” .. you can take a pic of your friend, give’m a mustache, then email it.
21. Toys/Flashlight – very simple – get a bright screen to find those keys you dropped in the bar
22. Utilities/iSpit (geeks only) – turn your iPhone to a simple HTTP server
23. System/OpenSSH (geeks only) – lets you wirelessly connect to your iPhone like its a computer (copy/move/delete files, etc).
24. System/Term-vt100 (geeks only) – get your xterm on. if you got login problems, try this vt100 fix.
25. Development/Perl (geeks only) – installs perl 5.8.8-2

You got any cool apps? leave me a comment.

NOTES: More info on jailbreaking from crunchgear, from lifehacker, for iTouch, . If you can’t wait for Apple’s iPhone SDK, there’s already an O’Reilly iPhone Development book to help you write your own application.

ISSUES:

First time i did all this I ran into some issues, had to restore back to 1.1.4 (damn broken passwd). Second time was no issues – so you prolly won’t have any. But here’s notes on what happened to me in case it happens to you:

First was that calling/SMS didn’t work. On the ziphone app i clicked “Help & Info”, then Troubleshooting, and found the following which fixed it.

1. Tap on Settings from the home screen.
2. Choose General
3. Choose Reset (all the way on the bottom)
4. First try “Reset Network Settings” – The phone will reboot. If things still aren’t working, go back and try “Reset All Settings”.

Phone rebooted and now i saw my AT&T and Edge network logos again. Hurray!

The second issue was that the installer could not install anything, which turned out to be a temporary issue. The first time i ran installer, it updated itself (checking sources, refreshing sources, update, restart) .. which is normal. As soon as installer works, the internets say to install Sources/Community Sources, then System/BSD Subsystem, then System/OpenSSH. “Community Sources”, which contains list of things to install (games/utils/etc), installed OK, but i got stalled on BSD with a “Package Download Failed (null)” msg. I did alot of digging, found and did this troubleshooting checklist, but still no luck. Then i figured out I was in a temporary vortex – others noticed as well – and waited till the next morning when I had great success installing many packages.

I finally broke down today and got a 16GB iPhone. I mean, seriously, a geek like me waiting like 9 months to own an iPhone? WTF? Well, not not a big fan of the phone and SMS part – the main reason I bought it is to have a mini web browser internet device with a nice user interface. I’ve always loved the iPhone interface – half my friends have iPhones and i’ve been jealous for a while. I considered waiting for next generation iPhone (3G phone, GPS, etc), but according to appleinsider, it’ll be summer/fall before they come. I just couldn’t wait!!

I bought it at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. It took about an hour from walking into the store till chadPhone was totally up and running. Breaks down like this – Buy iPhone .. 5-10 mins. Open iPhone, plug into your mac (I brought my macbook pro with me, so i could register it quickly). iTunes notices iPhone, leads you down registration process. I chose the $59/month (450 mins, unlimited data, 200 SMS TXT msgs/month). For $10/month more, you can get 1500 SMS msgs/month, or unlimited SMS for $20/month. I love SMS but i’m pissed that Apple/AT&T are charging that much for SMS when it basically costs them nothing. I much rather use safari/gmail. Anyway, registration ends with giving AT&T your credit card, and done – 10-15mins. So less than half hour my iPhone was registered and i could make outgoing calls. They said up to 6 hours to route incoming calls to my new iPhone, but really it took another 20 mins. Total .. 50 mins.
Already found these 22 tips, what are your favorites? anything to avoid?

Update – Download hundreds of cool games and applications from people besides apple by jailbreaking your iphone.

Back in 2005, i bought a Buffalo Terastation 1TB NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically its a backup device – a mini-computer box with 4 harddrives, each 250GB, or 1TB total. Last week one of the drives died after a power outage (we get a lot of outages on san jose ave), and today i fixed it. However, it wasn’t that easy – I spent over 3 hours on it – when it should have taken less than one. So i’m just gonna note a few things so the next guy might have it easier. Now here’s where i’m gonna geek out, so all non-geeks .. move along.

When i first setup the terastion, i did a RAID5 + RAID1 – that means i got a 750GB partition out of my 4 250GB drives. So if any one of the four drives dies, i don’t lose my data. I just pop in a new drive and rebuild. Easy. This worked great for 3 years, never had to replace a drive. Every now and then we’d lose power and when i powered on my terastation, it would take 1-2 days to check the disks before we were good to go.

Last week Terastation would not recover – it would boot up for a minute, do disk check, then turn off (power light was off). However, each of the four drive status lights would stay red, with disk 3 blinking red. After reading the manual, I decided to replace disk 3. I also read the wiki FAQ, so i knew i could replace with any same-size or bigger drive. I did this, spending almost 45 mins opening the terstation up, switching the drive, and putting it back together. Turned it on, and it stayed on. Yay!

So now all i had to do is connect to the web manager interface and “rebuild the raid array”. Once i logged in, it said Raid array 1 error – i clicked it, and I’d get to array 1, and it listed disk 1, 2, 3, 4 .. but the checkbox to disk 3 was greyed out. I spent a while looking through the web pages and decided something might be wrong with my new disk. I turned it off, took the thing apart (only took 15mins this time), pulled out my new disk, and basically connected it to my PC in a external USB drive box. It worked fine. Ugh. Was terastation broken? I tried the old drive, that terastation thought was dead. It also seemed OK by PC standards. Ugh.

After going back in forth and trying different things, it turned out that the new drive had to have the jumper in Cable Select to work. The older 3 western digital drives were not in Cable Select mode. Whatever.

Also, the LED lights on the front don’t always do exactly what the manual or FAQ says. Specifically, i loved this blog on replacing terastation drive, but at the what he says is different than what i saw. Once I clicked ‘Restructure RAID Array’ , the lights were all going nuts and within a minute it went to a page that said “Restructuring has completed successfully” “Checking RAID Array”. At this point my 8 drive lights are blinking red and green – the 3 old ones have solid red status, new one is not lit, and all 4 have blinking green activitiy. Power light is on, diag light is blinking green. On web interface, i clicked on Raid Array 1 and it says it is “Rearing (x.x % Complete)”. I waited a few mins and refreshed page .. percent complete is increasing. It’s working !!! 4 hours later it finished – my setup is as good as it ever was.

I love YouTube, but i wish they supported higher quality – 320×240 just ain’t enuf. Enter vimeo – 640×480 and .. 1280×720 – thats right, full 720p HDTV !!! Here’s a video recorded at 720×480 (480p) and uploaded to youtube (right below), then vimeo (below youtube).

The Old Ones from Chad Norwood on Vimeo.

Or if you want full HD, check out this HD Video – The Art Of Beat Making – make sure you watch it fullscreen size to fully appreciate it.

For the techie, the only constraint is you get 500MB a week – no 10 minute limit. And they give you instructions on how to encode it depending if you want 1280×720 (HD Help) or regular tv quality around 640×480 (imovie help).

Social Networking is hot right now. Myspace is huge, facebook is growing super-mega fast, and even Google is backing open standards with OpenSocial (tho, not perfect).

Tagging is also a somewhat new (few years old). You can tag photos (flickr), tag websites/blogs (digg, del.icio.us, technorati, furl, etc) .. why not tag friends? Specifically, I have different circles of friends, some friends overlap, and would love to be able to group them more effectively than i can today. Examples

• babysitters
• coworkers
• work project A
• work project B
• lunch friends
• church friends
• hiking friends
• drinking buddies
• college friends
• star trek fans
• DJ/dancing crews

One thing to point out is how this compares to the existing concept of groups on social networking sites. Tagging people with “hiking” is promoting MY view of the world – I get to control who i want to talk to when i want to go hiking. In contrast, a hiking group I join is not my view – I don’t have control on that case. It’s more random, usually controlled by the loudest people (loudest meaning more volume of info and higher frequency), and most likely less personal, therefore a different usage paradigm. But the most important difference is that friends tagged with “hiking” are friends first, hiking people second. Social networking groups are groups first, and may or may not contain friends.

Everybody likes to spend time with friends, so why not change the paradigm to make friends come first?

How would it work? Simple – while looking at profiles on a given social network site, there’s always a section that has “add friend” or “marked as friend”. Around there you could add a tag to that person. Then, on your home page, you could have a friend tag cloud or list of friend tags. You pick a tag and it jumps to a dynamicly created page containing summaries of each person you tagged, with the following options:

• email – easier to manage than creating new email lists all the time
• calendar or event planning – requires them all to use the same calendar system so it can find time when all are free .. not easy
• person summaries, including existing tags (with ability to add/delete here, too), latest posts, pictures, status, …. optionally filtering posts/pics by the current tag (oooo.. advanced)

I’m looking at you, google.

Today my beautiful new 24″ monitor arrived. Thanks, Mr. Fedex!! I ordered the Samsung 245T after doing a bunch of research (xbitlabs, trusted reviews, cnet). Specifically, its the best 1920×1200 24″ flat-screen out there under $1000. Besides awesome screen quality (my, what a wide color gamut you have), it has tons of inputs (DVI, HDMI, VGA, S-Video, RCA, Component), USB Hub, and PIP (picture-in-picture). Its also quite popular – constantly out of stock everywhere as soon as stock arrives (pricegrabber). I ended up paying about $700 for it. Yeah, i’m a geek.

I haven’t had cable or satellite since 2003 – over 4 years. Just a DVD player and computer connected to my TV. And i think its great – easier and better suited to my lifestyle. Everybody knows how to rent a DVD from the local video store or get’em in the mail from Netflix, so today i’m just gonna discuss watching from your computer (I connect my macbook pro to my HDTV and watch it on that).

So what to watch? Well, some people really like Tivo to get shows – it saves stuff for you as it comes on TV, makes it easy to skip passed commercials, etc. I prefer to download an entire season of a TV show at once, like LOST, Heroes Season 1, or my favorite, The Wire. But sometimes you need more recent shows, like The Colbert Report.  You can also get classic movies like caddyshack or browse the latest comedies or latest action movies.

Note – the system is not perfect – if something is not popular, its hard to download. Thats why i always tell people to sort the results by number of seeders (people sharing), and only download ones that are easy to get (like 10 seeders minimum, 50+ seeders is best).

On the techie side, you’re just downloading a small torrent file from the links above, which just tells your torrent client where to get the rest of the data. Kinda like google search results tells your browser (firefox) where to get the thing you’re looking for. Once you have the torrent file, you wait anywhere from a day (new movies are popular) to over a week (Heroes season 1 is 4 GB) while your torrent client does all the downloading. What torrent client should you get? I like Azureus for Windows and Transmission for Mac OS X.

Mininova is the most popular site to get torrent files, but there are other torrent sites.

Disclaimer: Don’t download any movies you don’t already own – thats illegal.

I love wordpress.com, but I’m finally ready to move on. They are a free site, and i’m glad i started off blogging with them, but now its time to run my own site.

Welcome to ChadNorwood.com. I have much more control here over themes, plugins, stats, among other things. For now, i’ve picked a basic theme to get the ball rolling, ya know, get the new URLs up and running. Expect it to look a little different over the coming weeks.

Just gonna share some geekiness in this blog – short and sweet.

First, how to make your own custom ringtones (tested with several verizon phones)

1. Download Audacity (Windows or Mac) and Lame mp3 codec. This lets you cut a 10 second selection sample from your favorite mp3.
2. Download and install Lame mp3 codec (copy to wherever audacity is).
3. Drag your favorite mp3/wav file to Audacity and make a selection that will be your ringtone. Best if its between 3 and 20 secs.
4. File – Export Selection as MP3. First time it will ask you where Lame mp3 codec is, tell it. Then Give ringtone a name, save to disk.
5. For Verizon – Email it as attachment to <your_10digit_cellphone_number>@vzwpix.com. For example, 4151234567@vzwpix.com
6. Done.

iPhoto – merging multiple iPhoto libraries for free. I couldn’t agree more with this dude.

Google Analytics – been out for about a year, but i just started using it. You basically add some javascript code to the end of every html page you want to track, and google does an amazing job of showing you stats and other useful info. Really. And its great to manage different domains, or setup multiple profiles within a domain. Once again, google is way better than anything else thats ever tried to do this. Sux that i can’t do it on wordpress.com .

Oh, and not a geek thing, but give some love to my friend otto – he needs it and deserves it.

I have several domains hosted out of my apt, meaning the computer that controls samo.org (among others) sits in my apartment. Now that i’m moving, i decided to look into hosting these domains somewhere else a bit more reliable (although it was fun to walk fritz and shayna thru a reboot from Thailand).

Here’s what i’m looking for

• cheap monthly (less than $10/month)
• virtual hosting (2+ domains)
• linux/BSD/Unix
• PHP access
• ssh access (csh, cron, .htaccess, php.ini, etc)
• web stats (access to apache log files)
• decent disk space and bandwidth (?)

I’m happy to see that shared hosting (one machine serving many domains and many customers) is pretty cheap ($5-$10/month). This is in comparison to dedicated hosting, where a customer gets their own machine – for high bandwidth and/or highly customizable stuff. I used to think i needed that, but now i don’t. First I tried to find current reviews of web hosting, starting with GoDaddy, since that’s where i have some domains registered. Basically they are one of the cheapest around, but there are many on the net that complain about their customer support. After a bit of digging, i found some decent review sites and decided to do it right.

Webhostingsitesreviews does a good job evaluating the company and their offerings – their top linux sites were BlueHost 95%, StartLogic 95%, IX Web Hosting 92%, HostMonster 92%, HostGator 87%, Yahoo 87%, and last place GoDaddy 83%. I also liked Hosting Review’s top 10 table with links to their verbose reviews. YourWebHosting also lists a top 10 with BlueHost at the top, followed by IX, GoDaddy, Dot5, StartLogic. Top 5 Hosts picked Hostmonster, Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic, and Hostgator. Ahh, those names sound familiar – I think i see some patterns. Good.

I also found a few sites that seem… off. Perhaps paid placements? Hostsearch allows people to review sites, which is nice to get user issues, but they are not as thorough as webhostingsitereviews. Hostsearch’s top picks are (in order) Webstrike (402 reviews), WebHostingBuzz (258 reviews), eBoundHost (43 reviews), Galaxyvisions (22 reviews), HostForWeb (259 reviews). Web Hosting picked these as their tops: Globat, Poweb, HostRocket, GoDaddy .. and none of them seemed like a good deal.

Anyway, on with the Round-Up – My Summary below. Most of the top ones were about the same, altho I noticed a few things i wanted that not everyone has, like SSH access and access to log files (i like to ssh and tail logs while troubleshooting).

And the winner is … Hostmonster, everything i need for $6/month.

Notes – doteasy.com only had 1GB storage and 20GB/month xfer for $7/month plan. Yahoo was equally lame.