luminary blur

I’m really more interested in trying this out than anything. When Apple finally announced official 3rd party app support, my initial idea of a “killer app” was mobile blogging software. Now that Wordpress for the iPhone is out, my wish has been realized (I know TypePad was first but I’m a Wordpress guy) and here I am blogging from work. Will this newfound ability increase my output? Doubtful. I’ve vowed to be more prolific too many times to count yet this blog still chugs along at one post a month.

Still, the idea of slowly crafting a post via iPhone throughout the day when a spare moment presents itself is an attractive proposition. Heck, it sure beats wasting time on Twinkle which seems to be slowly morphing into some sort of Web 2.0 dating service (see attached screen grab - “female playmate” - enough said).

And so concludes my first truly mobile post. I hope there will be many more.

Note: After posting originally with Wordpress on my iPhone, I went back in with ecto to center the image (for some reason I hate left-aligned images) and also to add a few links to the body of the post. Despite some minor post-production, I think posting from my iPhone is powerful indeed and will—hopefully—drive me to be more active.

written by Ben \\ tags: iPhone, Twinkle, Wordpress

Now that I’ve got 1.1.4 jailbroken on my iPhone with not one but two package managers with which to obtain 3rd-party apps, I may not care what Apple announces on Thursday. For now, here’s some shots of my home screens…after the jump. Continue reading »

written by Ben

You asked, I answer. Normally I don’t flash-embed on the main page (or the RSS feed) but in this case I will. It’s a video blog post after all.

written by Ben \\ tags: iPhone, The Ben Show, Video

Liveblog contained after the jump. Enjoy!

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written by Ben \\ tags: Apple, iPhone, Jailbreak

Know someone with a new iPod or iPhone? Apple’s newly released iTunes Tutorials may come in handy. Heck, I might even learn something.

written by Ben \\ tags: Apple, iPhone, iPod, iTunes

Found this on Vimeo, my video sharing site of choice. Great spoof, plus he’s wearing a Daring Fireball t-shirt.

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written by Ben \\ tags: iPhone, spoof, Video

There comes a time when a man must learn to admit when he’s done wrong. And my iPhone is seriously messed up. Almost every time I use the device—whether I’m checking e-mail, using a Web 2.0 app in Safari, or listening to a podcast—I experience some sort of freezing and/or crashing. I’m not sure if this is due to my re-jailbreaking a few weeks back or something I’ve installed since then but I definitely have some sort of issue going on. Typically the problem starts with a consistent crash. When attempting to read e-mail, MobileMail will load and will seem to function normally for a few seconds then suddenly crash. After four or five repetitions of this, the phone while kick back out to the “Slide to unlock…” screen. After unlocking the offending app seems to work all right—for a while. Occasionally the entire OS will freeze necessitating a two-finger reboot (home and sleep/wake button together). At this point I feel my only solution is to restore and re-jailbreak. Again. While liveblogging the whole process. The live updates are after the jump.

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written by Ben

Did anyone really believe that I would wait for a non-downgrade jailbreak? Heck no. Maybe that’s not even possible. With that in mind, I tried once again to do the downgrade-to-jailbreak procedure and I was finally successful. My recent Twitter posts will reveal that my primary sticking point was getting the iPhone to kick out of “DFU” mode (whatever that means). My understanding of the process is that putting the phone in “DFU” or recovery mode is something that Apple technicians might use to service the phone. However, using it to install a previous firmware over the current apparently throws an error and leaves the phone in the recovery state without kicking back out to “normal” mode. There is a tool—iNdependece—that supposedly is able to accomplish this mighty feat. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get this program working, especially since it doesn’t support the “MobileDevice” framework that comes with iTunes 7.5. It was made to work with the framwork included with 7.4.2.

Read on to find out how I found out…

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written by Ben

Wow, those Twitter aggregations really provide a slice-of-life, don’t they? At least they fill in the blog nicely—many microblog posts combine to form one macroblog post, right?

In unrelated news, I now have a stock 1.1.2 iPhone albeit not by choice.

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written by Ben

I thought the old blog might be getting a little boring with all of those Twitter aggregations posting every day. The nice thing about the Twitter posts is that they encourage me to post on other topics.

Last night I decided it was time to manually update my iPhone to 1.1.2 (iTunes was telling me it wasn’t yet available). I waited because I wanted to make sure that a working jailbreak was available. The update worked and the jailbreak worked—but not without a few moments of panic.

Uploaded with Skitch!

More after the jump…

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written by Ben