CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

Update 28.6.2009: I just got my iPhone 3GS and Iplugged it in and nothing happend. It appears that apple changed something on the power management so the iPhone 3GS can not be charged with it. Crap!

Today I received my external USB Power pack from Amzon. I got it because my phones battery is crap and the iPod Touch does not get through a day of wifi and gaming either. I am currently charging it for the first time so I can not report on the devices performance, but I read in reviews that it is capable of completely recharging an iPhone up to 2 times. The charging it self takes a qutie while. I have it hooked up to my computer for about 4 hours now and it is still not done, but I guess that this kind of charging will increase the overall lifetime of the battery inside. I find this kind of powerpack more convenient that the ones specifically made for the iphone and Ipod Touch since I can charge every gadget that takes power via usb and most other cellphones as well.

Pros:

• small form factor
• looks quite nice – I generally like the appearance of philips products
• low price 24€ at amazon, the kensington one costs about 40€
  
• comes with a ton of adapters ( Nokia,Samsung, Motorola, Nintendo DS, Sony Ericsson,Blackberry and mini USB)
• has 2 ports, one for charging the device and one standard USB jack to plug in your gadgets
• is advertised with 30 hours of battery life( I will test that and post)
• Retractable cable, no additional cable clutter !!!!
• for simple LEDs indicate the level of charge
• comes with a small black cloth bag to keep verything together

Cons:

• charging takes quite some time
• nothing else really

Update 3.6.2009 – Battery performance

the battery works really well. I was able to charge my ipod touch 2 times with one charge. I could charge my girlfriends ipod nano without even noticing a decline in charge.  so keeping in mind that charging the battery takes a couple of hours its an incredibly usefull device.

Philips SCE4420

update 28.6.2009 :this does not work anymore with the 3.0 firmware and an iPhone. It still works on my iPod touch though.

I subscribe to many video podcasts and most of the time I watch them, but sometimes I want to do something else like playing a game while just listening to the audio of a news video podcast. The problem is that video playback stops when you close the videoplayer, whereas audio continues to play in the backgroud if you run another app. After the latest software upgrade even if you selected a video podcast from the audio library it would launch into the videoplayer, which is a good thing most of the time.

To just get the audio of a video, start playing the video –> close the player(the video stops) –> double click the home button so the small media controll buttons come up and hit play –> the audio of the video is still in the audio que and will start playing for your enjoyment

I recently discovered that the apple remote app is capable of waking up a computer from sleep if it has wake on lan enabled, and it can only be woken up from sleep mode, not if the machine is entirely turned off. So if you keep your media server on all the time this is a handy way to wake it up without paying for one of the numerous wake on lan apps in the app store.

Finally Apple released an update to the mac mini product line. I finally got mine and its already up and running. I set it up to be my HTPC, file server and web server. I want to go through each of these three topics and describe the configuration I used.

Hardware:

The mac mini is way too expensive for the hardware you get. I was really disappointed at first because they even raised the price from 439€(with student discount) t0 526€. For 550 euros I could get twice as much ram and way more disk space, eSata, blueray and hdmi output easily with a linux or windows machine. BUT OS X makes it still worth the money FOR ME. I do not agree with the back and forth disccussion about macs vs. pcs. A computer is a TOOL, like a car is for transportation. There is diffrent cars with different uses and different prices. Some cars are easy to drive some require a skilled driver… Everybody has to decide for himself if its worth the money and if it will do what you want it do in the way you want it to be done. Be glad there is a choice!

1 mac mini 3/2009, 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM

mac mini

Mac Mini – The mean reasons I chose the mac mini over other more powerful computer were that its really small and really really quite. The mini is inaudible and I really hated the constant buzz from my old server, even though I already spent way to much money on expensive CPU coolers. The power consumption is also quite low and since the server will be always on its a big plus. The display output options are sufficient. I use the included mini DVI to DVI adapter and connect it to an DVI to HDMI cable. As soon as reasonably priced mini display port to hdmi adapters hit the market I will change to that. I like the built in SPIDIF audio connectors and the built in Firewire 800 port. In combination witth the 2 FW800 enabled drives it is really faster than a USB 2.0 solution and not much more expensive.

2 Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1 TB

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition – Even though I had some problems with this type of hard drive before I chose them because of their low price and their ability to shut down when not in use. For a HTPC noise is a key factor. The new drives are really quiet in the first place but if the server or just the drives are not in use they turn off and are therefor completly silent. The only downturn to this is that when you want to access the drives it takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep but that is not a realy problem. The drives come with a 5 year warranty. Since I already experienced the rather smooth and fast exchange process of such a drive I do not expect any major worries in the next 5 years( In 5 years I hope we will be carrying Terrabytes on our thumb drives).

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Warning: Everything described below only reflects my opinion, I don’t take any warranty if something goes wrong. These are just guidlines!

I got my ipod touch several months ago but never tried to jailbreak it until last week. And I must say with the right tools it is really easy. Before I go on talking about how to do I want to answer some questions that keept me from doing it.

Q: can I brick my ipod touch?

A: no you can’t.

Q: if something goes wrong will it be hard to restore?

A: no not at all, just don’t panic and follow the steps I will descirbe later.

Q: after restoring what firmware will my ipod touch have?

A: the same firmware it had before you jailbroke it.

Q: can experiementing with cause any major problems?

A: no. you can savely play around, if you like it jailbroken fine, if not restore it and you get your old more boring ipod back

So lets get startet: supposing you got your ipod plugged into your mac you want to got to this site http://ipluspwns.com/?q=node/2 and download iliberty+ for mac. There is a PC version also.

There is another tool that says it can do Ipod touch jailbreaks and thats Ziphone, but I never got it to work, neither on a pc nor on my mac.

well one you downloaded iliberty unpack it and run and simply click jealbreak then wait a fec seconds and you are done with your jailbroken ipod touch. really really easy. If you need more details see this guide http://ipluspwns.com/?q=node/99

Now things get a little bit more interesting. Start your ipod and you will find the installer app on the homescreen, which is a great program but I found it a bit confusing at first. There is plenty tutorials out there how to use installer. After I got the installer running I was aksing myself, well what can I do with it. Well first you want to install some vital utilities. In order to do so, in installer go to sources and install the sources that you find there. After that the list of new apps in the installer should have increased significantly.

So lets talk about Files.  Since your new ipod touch is jailbroken it gives you access to its filesystem. So you want to go install –> system and install the BSD subsystem and the openSSH. Plus since we are mac users we can go to network and install the AFPd which turns your ipod touch in a mac – filesystem wise, so that it will show up in your macs finder at the network shares. In addition there is an app called mobileFinder which lets you browse your files on the ipod touch iteself. you find it in the productivity section.

Filepermissions are also important and sometimes need to be set manually in order to use NES for example. In order to work with file permissions you need to go to your mac and download cyberduck – the best free mac FTP /SSH app out there. I found this video very helpful How To SSH File-Share On Your Iphone/ iPod Touch (mac). Once you got the cyberduck connected simply rightclick on a folder -> info -> and there you can set the file permissions.

Games there arent any really good ipod touch games out yet, but there are emulators for NES and SNES aswell as others. You can download and install them from the installer but you wont be given any games. In order to get Games go to theoldcomputer.com or search the ipodtouch friends forum for links and installer sources. once you downloaded the games you need to copy them to your ipod touch in a folder called var/mobile/Media/ROMs/NES/ – the ROMs folder might not be there so create it and be sure to change the file permissions to 755 using the technique described above other wise the NES app wont be able to load the games.

well there a plenty of other apps and cool stuff out there but these things were the most troubling to me.

Update: It appears the site i mention above is down and I have not found a good replacement. please use google to find a download source. But with 2.0 Firmware being out it probably does not matter anyway.

My dad is flying over the US for business and is getting me an Ipod touch since apple is converting euros and dollars I:I which kind of not reflects reality when looking at the actual rate of 1.4877. That means for me in Austria I get a 300 € Gadget for 200€, which is a pretty good discount. I can’t wait to unpack the thing!!