hacking the iphone part 3 (string editing)

Oh god I can't stop.

There's a file called SpringBoard.strings that has all the strings on the iPhone.

That means you can change all the things that it says to you.

For example, when you start it, it has a string that says to slide the little slider to start.

That's boring.

Mine now says:



And when you turn it off, it says to slide the bar to power off.

Also boring.

How about:

how to hack the iphone part 2 (tethering)

Yeah, I should probably go to bed.

But I'm having too much fun hacking the shit out of this phone.

I'm sure I will turn it into a brick eventually and be very sad. However, first -

I got tethering working!

One of the main drawbacks to having an iPhone is not being able to tether it to my laptop. And I'll admit, I wasted a lot of time trying to tether it to Vista and failing, but I got it working with XP pretty easily.

First, you install a cool socks proxy on your iPhone, following directions like this.

You set up an ad-hoc network on your PC, and call it something like "testnet". Then you go into your TCP/IP settings, and set the static IP of your machine to something like 10.0.0.3, with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Next, you turn on your iphone, and have it connect to that network, and you give it a static address like 10.0.0.4. Then you tell your PC to use SOCKS and connect through 10.0.0.4 to get to the net.

Boom, iPhone's EDGE is powering my PC.

Proof:

Iphone on testnet-



PC on testnet-



PC loading interwebs over iPhone!



My only concern right now is that you don't really turn the SOCKS proxy on the iPhone on and off. I guess they'll have those sorts of "bells and whistles" in later versions, but right now I'm just dumping cutting edge crap on my new $500 device and seeing what happens. What could possibly go wrong?

hacking the iphone

So, I broke down and got an iPhone today. Yeah, I'm a weak willed, sad, man. However, it is an awesomely fun toy.

Of course, about an hour after I got it, I proceeded to hack the living crap out of it.

A couple lessons I learned, for those of you who might be hacking yours. When you start using iphoneinterface to copy files to your phone, you put and get files using "putfile" and "getfile". putfile only takes full file paths. Like:

putfile /foo/bar/icon.png

If you do it with non full paths, it copies to the root of the iphone. However, getfile only does LOCAL files. So whatever directory you're in, it gets from that directory. If you do full path names, it core dumps and craps itself all over the place.

Yeah, they don't really mention that on any of the sites I read.

So what does it look like? I'm glad you asked. First thing I did was put new ringtones on that bad boy. Pretty easy, just create a ringtones directory in /var/root/Library/Ringtones, and copy your MP3s to it. So easy, you'd think maybe Apple would have let us do it, instead of having to hack the goddamn thing. You know, like every other smart phone does.

Next, I wanted to start hacking the interface. This was a little trickier and more tedious, but involved the same basic idea, of copying new icon files to various directories on the iPhone (/Applications/AppName/icon.png usually).

Wow, does this look awesome. Here's what it looked like at first:



And here's the new super cool looking version:



Woo woo!

I even copied out the old icons, so I could replace them if I ever wanted to. But I don't think I'll want to. These new ones are sweet (with the exception of the SMS one, which seems like they completely ran out of creativity on. However, I also couldn't think of a good picture to represent SMS, so... )

Lots of other things to do now, like getting tethering working, and an ssh client, and some other stuff.

What a fun toy to hack on. The community has made tools that make it super easy.

Links:

I used the following sites a LOT tonight - cre.ations.net , hacktheiphone.com , and the modmyiphone.com forums. Thanks, guys!

craziest pizza ever

Holy crap, Pizza Hut is advertising the weirdest pizza in the world in Japan:



That's a pizza topped with hamburgers and corn, italian sausage, ham, bacon, sliced tomato, onions, green pepper, garlic chips, basil, black pepper, and paprika.

And around the side? The crust is stuffed with mini sausages and bacon.

That is freaking nuts.

And part of me really wants to try it.

Don't believe me? Check out the pizza hut page here.

I'm getting hitched!

So, last night I proposed to Adrienne in the nerdiest way possible, in the intro for a gaming podcast on Youtube.

Watch the first 30 seconds:



And luckily for me, her answer was "hell yes!", which only cements her perfection. Lesser women would have been paralyzed by geekiness of it all.

I'll probably be making a gift video for Adrienne of the 10 takes it took to get that right, since I was so nervous, but you guys don't get to see that. :)

Anyway, we're both very happy and excited. Maybe after 1000 more times, I'll even get used to the word fiancee.

idiots in the media

Wow, I just read an interview with Sanjay Gupta, the "Chief Medical Correspondent" for CNN.

First off, he stated that the obesity epidemic in the US is "the cold war of our generation."

Take a minute to think about that and try to figure it out. I can't.

Then, he followed it up with one of the most blatant technical misunderstandings that I've seen in print from a professional in a long time:

"There's something known as Moore's law, which means that we basically double our scientific knowledge every few years. What this really means is that we probably know twice as much now as we did in 1997, which wasn't that long ago."

Oh my fucking god. My brain just leapt out of my ears, and left on a road trip to track down Dr Gupta and beat the living shit out of him.

Coming home again

I've only written five days of travel journal, but that's how travelling tends to go. Now it's been two weeks, and I'm heading home tomorrow.

I just wanted to share some of the painful numbers facing me tomorrow.

Between waking up tomorrow and landing in San Jose, I will be travelling a little bit more than 24 hours.

Of those 25 hours, 15 of them will be spent in a plane. And I'm not a huge fan of flying.

Fuckall. That's a LONG DAY, sir. I'm ready to be home already.

Travel Blog Day 5

Stockholm, Sweden

Our tour wasn't until 2:30, so we headed out into the city in the morning to take a look around. They dropped us in the old town, so we got to wander past the Opera House, and the Royal Palace, but we felt like checking out something a bit more unusual, so we tracked down the Nobel Museum. It's full of information about the Nobel prize winners from the past and present, and lots of films on their works. They had an amazing track on the ceiling running all around the inside of the museum, with a banner about each and every Nobel winner, and they clicked around like cars on a train. Very cool.

The inside was really small though, it felt like a bit of a stretch to charge us $10 each to check it out. Washington DC really is the global exception, I think. I've never seen any other town in the world where the museums are all free.

It started raining, so we walked back through town and caught the bus back to the boat for the tour, which ended up being around... Old Town. So we walked some of the same areas we'd already seen, except this time someone actually told us what everything was. One of my favorites was the "Little Iron Boy", which was a sculpture in a public square, but instead of being huge, it was about six inches tall, of a boy sitting on a table, looking at the sky. His head was polished silver from everyone walking by and rubbing it for good luck.

After that we walked along the main commercial street in old town, a mile or two long, absolutely crammed with every kind of shop you could imagine, about eight feet wide, and crammed with people. ANd it wasn't tourist stuff, it was bookshops, ice cream parlors, and some of my favorite shops so far, a huge science fiction shop completely full of manga, figurines, anime, sci fi books, posters, movies, music, you name it, all nerdy. I've never seen a nerdvana shop like this in the US, and it was buried in Old Town Stockholm. Go figure. Also, an awesome shop called "Metal Town", where you could buy all the skulls and black lights and heavy metal tshirts you could ever dream of.

Finally, we headed off to Ice Bar Stockholm, a bar made up from river ice, kept at -5 degrees Celcius, where they hand you a parka and gloves, and send you inside to drink off an ice bar, from glasses made of ice. All three of us had some mixed vodka drinks, and sat on bear skin rugs on huge ice blocks. Definitely one of the coolest bars I've been to, but you couldn't stay long. After about 20 minutes we were all ready to get back outside.

I never thought I'd say this, but after a week on the ship, I'm ready for some commoner's food. We've had nothing but escargot, lobster, crab, bisques, veal, filet mignon.. my favorite meals have been grabbing a sausage and potatoes, or some greek kebabs in Estonia, I don't need the king's treatment. I appreciate it occasionally, but for day to day eating, I prefer a simple meal.

Travel Blog Day 4

Helsinki, Finland

Ah, back to modernity. Clean, efficient, shiny, new. Helsinki feels like Washington state in many ways, it's got half a million people but still feels very small. We visited during the vacation period of summer, which means that 40% of the population is out of the city. But it felt like a living, breathing town, for once, instead of a tourist attraction. Most of this feeling came from the fact that they didn't seem to allow people to put out carts of crap everywhere to sell. There was a large public square with delicious local food (reindeer sausage and fried potatoes with a beer), and vendor stalls aplenty, but once you left that area, nothing.

One really bizarre thing was that both Rusty and I noticed that the people weren't nearly as thin as the Estonians, there were a lot more chubby bellies. I couldn't help but notice that there were also a lot more McDonalds here than Estonia. I think I saw one every other block. They sure do love their Big Macs. Better watch out, Finnish, you'll look like us soon.

Also, the younger crowd looked like they were out of a time machine. Dyed black and red hair (long on top and shaved underneath), piercings everywhere, skateboarding, grunge clothing, ripped jeans.. it was 1995 all over again. Don't get me wrong, I loved 1995, and I felt very at home, but I haven't seen people dressed like that for a decade. When I compare it to the thugged out baggy gear or shaggy emo hair from what's popular now, I gotta say I still prefer grunge.

Because it is such a functioning city, there's not all that much to see. We checked out the two major churches in town, one Orthodox and one Lutheran, wandered around to the train station and a museum, got some lunch from street vendors, and took a boat tour around the islands, and then just walked the streets for a few hours. Instead of "it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there", I found myself thinking that it'd be a fantastic place to live, but there's not all that much to see when visiting. Except for that whole part where all the water in town is frozen for six months out of the year, and the night lasts 18 hours a day. That part would suck.

Travel Blog Day 3

St Petersburg, Russia, Day 2

The second day of St Petersburg was very different than the first. While in the first day we only saw the residential district and Peterhof, the second day we saw the "cultural district", which is where all the beauty in the city is. Of course, 90% of the people don't get to live in this part of town, but it looks a lot nicer.

Compared to other european cities, it still has a very strange feel to it. There's very little parkland, and what is there doesn't seem to be aimed at leisure as much as "here's an area we could march soldiers around in if we wanted to". All of the buildings are meant to impose upon the viewer, and nothing feels new or modern anywhere. A couple new cars, but no new public transit, no shiny glass or chrome in storefronts, no sense of progress or modernity.

The Hermitage was a beautiful museum, but insanely overcrowded again. It really does feel like everyone who comes to see St Petersburg ends up in the same few places. Even when they drove us around sightseeing, we drove past the same Eternal Flame square like five times, I think they just haul tourists around in a tiny little area. I don't care much for viewing opulent room after opulent room, thrones and china, gold paint and chandaliers. The art was beautiful, I enjoyed the Rembrandt, Titian, and Rubens a lot. Rusty and I got a few images of the nameplates off artists we'd never heard of, in the hopes of picking up prints. Jan Mandijn reminded me of Dali, I'd love to pick up a print of his. I've decided that I really don't like impressionism. They had a massive French Impressionism exhibit, including a lot of Picassos, and I found 95% of it to be crap.

Too bad that the one town we stay in overnight is St Petersburg. You can't get off the ship here without a Russian Visa unless you're on a tour, so we're stuck on the ship at night. It would have been fun if Rusty and I could have gotten off the boat and checked out some of the night life. Or we could have ended up bleeding in an alley. Either way it'd be better than sitting on a boat with a bunch of geriatrics, trying to find anything to do other than drink in a piano bar and sing Piano Man for the 50th time.

We got some pictures of us hanging out on our deck at midnight, with the sky as bright as day. I've never been this far north in my life, I can't believe that the sun seriously doesn't set until 11pm, and even then, it stays bright for two more hours. It really messes with your body's rhythms, especially since I'm not used to going to bed while the sun is up. I can see why people say that you go a little crazy when you live somewhere that the sun never sets.

Travel Blog Day 2

St Petersburg, Russia

What a depressing place. As you drive through St Petersburg, all you see is huge dilapitated apartment buildings, overgrown and abandoned buildings everywhere. Nothing is upkept, other than some grassy areas that are constantly trimmed back by government workers in orange. Apparently 80% of people are still employed by the government, earning on average 7-8k a year. There are some small fenced enclaves owned by the wealthy, and everyone else lives in what appears to be abject poverty.

We went to see the gardens of Peterhof, and it was completely crammed with people. As opposed to the universal beauty of Estonia, things of beauty are few and far between here, so they're crowded. Every tour group in the area goes to the same few things. We shuffled through a large, empty, opulent building, approached at every turn by people selling mass produced, identical garbage. If you've been to tijuana, you'd recognize the feel. The whole setup was basically there to show you something halfway decent, and get as much money as they could from you. Instead of being part of an otherwise functioning economy, it was a tiny desperate island of tourism, and you could feel it. Thousands of people were walking single file through a massive mansion, not even able to leave a small roped off path. Everyone had to wear paper covers on their shoes, and not touch anything inside, for fear of causing any damage to what few quality relics there were.

We saw the same pattern as elsewhere of only women working in the shops, but they were tired looking, and not friendly. There was very little enjoyment in what they were doing. I was reminded of the descriptions that were given in Atlas Shrugged of what a world looked like when very little new production was happening, and people covet those items that were left, in this case from the opulence of hundreds of years ago. The tour guide told us that one of the major exports of the area was shredded scrap metal, which is obviously a short term cannibalistic setup, I'm not sure what they plan on doing after they've shredded and sold everything that's not nailed down.

The highlight of the day was definitely the folk show in the evening. It was held at the St Petersburg Hotel, and it was fantastic. It was full of joy and humor, the music was haunting and catchy, the performers were spot on, and the performances were really varied. They did gymnastics, dancing, jumping rope.. Rusty and I got a couple good movies of it. If any Russian folk shows ever tour in my area, I'll definitely catch them in the future.

Travel Blog Day 1

I figure I'll put up the pictures when I get back, but I've always ended up forgetting most of my thoughts from my trips in the past, so I'll drop them on here as I go.

---

Copenhagen, Denmark and Tallinn, Estonia

It's a cliche, but it's true, Americans are flat out ugly people. I'm constantly floored by how thin and attractive everyone is. It's not just the thinness (although that helps), everyone here has good teeth, great skin, attractive features.. being the world's mutts has done us no favors in the looks department. I feel like a hunchback over here, walking amongst the pure blood. It's really hard to emphasize how jarring the difference in beauty is, people work hard to surround themselves with things of beauty to improve their quality of life, and you don't really stop to think about how the people around you can be things of beauty as well. They're certainly not at home.

One mystery that we've been trying to figure out is that the employees of every single restaurant, jewelry shop, gift store, coffee shop, and any other store we've seen, have been female. I'm not really sure if there's just a social custom of only putting attractive women in public facing roles because it's considered "women's work", or maybe because they figure people will spend more, or if there's a lot of male unemployment. It could be that the invisible work of truck driving, delivery, industry, etc are all done only by men. It's certainly bizarre though. Also, most stores are vastly overstaffed (or maybe US ones are understaffed), but even tiny little shops with three rooms will have six girls working in them, ready to assist you at a moment's notice.

A strange thing to note, but one that hit me several times while I was here was that it's nice to have nice smells. My house at home smells like nothing. Most of the shops and restaurants and hotels and even streets in Estonia just smell nice. Fresh flowers, spices, incense, having aromas around is very pleasant. Smell is a sense that I usually just use for food and noting when someone has pissed on the street in my vicinity. It's a whole different dimension when the smells are good and varied. I'd like to add more to my life when I return somehow.

As always, I forget how much everyone smokes in europe. Everyone, everywhere, smoking all the time. And they still live longer than us. How the hell does that work? They say stress makes you older, and the lifestyle around here is certainly less frenetic. On the other hand, the US is still at the heart of most of the technological innovation that I find interesting, I'm not sure if you can combine the two. Sure does make me miss smoking, though. It's easier to stay quit in California when no one ever smokes. Here, it's a part of life.

I think this is one of my favorite European towns that I've ever seen. Everyone's happy and beautiful, there's history and art everywhere, the weather was perfect, the town was clean and vibrant. We climbed to the tops of old church towers, and clung to copper roofs hundreds of feet off the ground, looking down over Tallinn, wandered huge public squares where performers were trumpeting from the rooftops, and genuine craftsmen peddled products they'd made, instead of piles of the same manufactured crap being sold from every corner like many tourist towns. There's a lot of old next to a lot of new, and it seems to really work well together. And the views from up on the hills of all the green mixed with the red roofs of town is one of the prettiest towns I've seen.

my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

I've been meaning to blog for like two weeks about various weird things that have happened to me, like the crazy young earth creationist that we ran into up at a telescope, absolutely convinced that the astronauts had found that the dust was only 5000 years old when they landed on the moon. Or the white trash woman I ran into at 7-11 at midnight who was buying for her child in a stroller a 1 liter of Dr Pepper, a bag of Cheetos, and a hostess cupcake. I wanted to stage an intervention and tell her that she was doing parenting incorrectly.

However, I was too busy with getting my house redone, and now I'm off. I'm heading to Europe for a two week cruise with the family, all around the Baltic sea. I'll still be reading email if anyone needs me, but cell phone is off. Should be awesome, I'll be posting lots of pics.

See ya!