www.prayforsnow.com

In case you don’t read Joel like I do, the folks at Stack Overflow have released a new questions and answers forums for WordPress based on Stack Exchange. Now I know there is already one on WordPress.org but you can never have enough of those and also the Stack Exchange UI/Experience makes it easier to find what you really need fast.

I finally got my iPhone 3GS unlocked. Todd sent me this link www.jailbreakme.com a while back but i didn’t want to risk it before going on our trip to Québec since I had pre-loaded a bunch of movies and games on it and didn’t want to end up with an iBrick. So today I decided to give it a go and it was by far the easiest, painless, fastest jailbreaking and unlocking process of all. No need to find an IPSW file anywhere, no jailbreak software to download. Just go to that website, use the slider and about 5 minutes later, your phone is jailbreaked. You then use cydia to install ultrasn0w and reboot the phone and the phone is unlocked. Very nice.

My wife got me an iPad for our ten year anniversary and I love it. Such a great format. It has also been a hit with everyone on my recent trip to Québec. If there are some complaints I could make about it, they are the following:

1) Flash support would be great. So many times I want to view some content (usually a video on Facebook) and just can’t. That was also the first complaint my sister and brother had as they now watch some TV content via flash. Somewhat of a bummer having to go back to a computer just for that.

2) Some type of way to pan an embedded Google map on a website. I do geocaching quite a bit and it is hard to move the map around.

3) More apps which are designed for the iPad instead of iPhone which just happened to work ok on it. I guess that will come with time.

Besides that it is great. BTW this post was made from my iPad using the WordPress app which works really well on it. My favorite apps so far are:
- WordPress (should be obvious)
- YouTube
- Zap2It – Great TV schedule app with favorites and searches
- Photoshop Express – I can see many hours with that one
- Couple of games from Donut Games
- Video viewer. I converted a few of my DVDs using Handbrake so we could watch them on the plane/car. Very nice.

I am surprised for such a company like Apple that their web site is still not reformatted to be nicely viewable on the device that really made them what they are today (ok perhaps I am exaggerating a bit). This morning, I wanted to see what the price of the new unlocked iPhone 4 was when riding the skytrain to work. I still got to their standard page and it was painfully slow over 3G and still hard to browse. Perhaps they should give BraveNewCode a call and have them do their mobile site for them. I think Duane would like that.

My iBrick is now back to a iPod touch like device thanks to Todd. This post is actually straight from the device. Pretty nice. Now I can post from my couch…

Seems like Google is chopping the Nexus One. Now I was always skeptical about the whole Android thing since specially it was like Google showing the finger to all their partners (Motorola, HTC, and others) that had chosen Android as their platform of choice but I am quite surprised that they killed it after only 6 months. I guess they saw the numbers and were smart enough to read between the lines. I wonder if there weren’t other deals in the background to lead them to that decision as well. Interestingly enough I was playing around with one today (not the first time I did but perhaps the first time I really tried things) and I have to say they have quite a bit of catching up to do compared to the iPhone. The device didn’t respond well to my clicks on the screen. Not sure if my fingers were too dry or what not but I have never experienced that on my iPhone. Also it wasn’t always super clear as to when I was supposed to press the menu to exit from an app versus hitting the “return” key to do the same thing. Also it took me a while to realize the home screen was not showing all the apps. Only the apps you select to have on your home screen. Now that may just be cause my brain is predisposed to expect iPhone behaviour.

UI aside, I think the biggest barrier to entry for them will be transiting folks from the iPhone. I now have about 26 GB of music properly cataloged / classified / organized within iTunes. Of that 26 GB, bunch of them are MP3s I converted from my CDs, others I acquired one way or another, and about 600 on them purchased from iTunes. Unless I have a way to connect an Android phone over to iTunes, I am likely not going to move over. Now I see there are “backdoor” ways to get your music over but then you lose iTunes which would be a bummer (note I use to not like iTunes and prefer Winamp but that changed when I bought an iPod). Also as you saw from how I turned my new phone into an iBrick, I am getting a bit worry about using backdoors to do things. Another thing Android will have to battle will be the apps people have purchased for their iPhones. Will they throw away all of that? Well I guess I am jumping ahead assuming the iPhone has the market cornered which is far from the truth but unless Android provides the same user experience that the iPhone provides, they will have some a hard time. Some days I just long for how easy things to use to be … here is a picture of my first walkman.

A friend of mine introduced me to OpenStreetMap (OSM) a while back. OpenStreetMap is much like Google Maps when Google Maps first started, the one difference is that it is operated by the public much like Wikipedia is. In that manner, the maps are more up to date then say Google Maps cause they get updated pretty much as soon as some changes are done in your area. If they are not done, you can go ahead and update it yourself. There is now a plugin for WordPress for OSM so I am testing this out now.
Essentially the OSM plugin allows you to add maps to your posts like so:

Could become another interesting toy to play with. More to come.

So for the past 2 years, I have managed to get myself cheap iPhones since my buddy Todd can never wait more than 2 minutes after Apple has released a new product to purchase it quickly and kindly offloading his old news phones to me. It first started with an iPhone 2G in 2008, a 3G in 2009, and of course a 3GS in 2010. Now since Todd lives in the USA, it usually means I have to unlock the phones before I can use them, something that in the past did require a bit of time (usually one evening wasted in front of the computer) but this time, is giving me all sorts of grief. Now when I received the new phone, it had just been freshly upgraded to iOS4.0. It was in working iPod touch like function which is nice if you are looking for an iPod but not really what I had looking to use it for. I had been told that iTunes 9.2 (which is designed to work with iOS4.0) can no longer be used to downgrade an iPhone to say 3.1.3 which is the last version of iOS which is safely unlockable. Fortunately I was told that I could use XCode Organizer to force whatever versions of iOS on it, something which seemed to make sense since you would think it would be a logical use of a development tool in order to test software built with XCode on multiple OS versions without having to own 300 devices. After locating a website where I could download old versions of iOS, I proceded to use XCode to push 3.1.3 to the device. Something which failed about 1 minute in with restore error 3004 and left the device in an unusable state. I then tried to push 3.1.2 to the device with the same result. After that, I decided that I guess I would have to wait until iOS4.0 could be made unlockable so I decided to restore the device back to iOS4.0 with iTunes. After waiting about 30 minutes for that process (it had to download the iOS4.0 IPSW from Apple), it brought the device back up except it was requesting me to activate the device with iTunes; however since the device didn’t have the right SIM in it, it won’t let me activate it. Great. I decided to move back to my PC (all of this had been on my Mac) and see if my old iTunes there would work or perhaps old Redsn0w could do the trick and both failed miserably. I then went back to my Mac and downloaded the latest Pwnagetool and tried that. It created a shiny new custom IPSW file for me which I then tried to use with iTunes. After screwing up and not having the file in the right folder, I tried again but eventually iTunes choked with error 1624 (or something like that). I then tried with XCode but the device wasn’t really in the mood so I had to restore vanilla iOS4.0 with iTunes again and then try again with XCode but that also proved to be no luck. So where does that leave me? Well I have a nice shiny brick. I will either have to wait for Todd to come back to Canada (fortunately he does that often) so I can at least get the phone back in iPod Touch mode or for a full unlock to become available. It also leaves me in the “perhaps it is time I actually by a legit phone” mode. Darn smart Apple engineers.