Admittedly, I think that the jailbroken iPhone is awesome for all the wrong reasons.

I am a huge fan of hacked hardware. I have neither the drive nor the intellect to hack hardware myself so I have to rely on others to hack, then I just use their crap.

I jailbroke the iPhone for a few reasons:

1. Backgrounder. At first I thought this would change how I used the iPhone. Over a short period of time I discovered that I used this very little, then I realized I NEVER used it. Then I deleted it. Background apps sound really great, particularly using Pandora Radio, but for me, I never really found a place for it. Leaving this device, like any, constantly streaming audio over wifi or 3g drains the battery like free pudding at fat camp.
2. Winterboard. Being an artsy-fartsy guy I wanted the iPhone to look pretty. Prettier than it already did. This worked, there’s some battery/performance penalty, but it’s negligible and for day-to-day use it’s unnoticeable. Having 5-icons in the bottom dock is seriously great, as simple as it sounds it’s probably my favourite jailbreak perk. I’m easily impressed.
3. QuickReplySMS. I never bought it, it’s $3. I guess two things influenced my lack of purchase on this one. First thing I don’t trust the iPhone Hack Community with my credit card. I could have taken a big pain-in-the-ass route and used prepaid but that’s just ridiculous. To me, these apps are hacks, not in a bad way, but they are being written by someone who is circumventing an established paradigm to make money. This strains my trust. No offense, I’m sure you’re all wonder and ethical people, but it ain’t happening. Secondly, I don’t know if I will keep the jailbreak, so this may be money in the toilet.
4. Emoji. Turns out, this is already free in the App Store, who knew.
5. Emulators. These turned out to be expensive, the free ones worked ok, but I was not impressed with the performance or the fact that my big, fat sausage-fingers covered half of the screen and these games were meant to use an unobstructed screen. More...

Maybe this is an unfair comparison considering I am using VMWare 2 and Parallels 5. I have been a pretty firm VMWare fanboy for quite some time, but I have to say after using parallels 5 for a week now, I am frickin' SOLD. I have read that Parallels 5 is supposed to be faster, and it is, but WOW, it's a LOT faster. The biggest thing, though is the fact that it properly focuses windows of the guest OS when in Unity/Coherence mode. I am on an older MacBook Pro, it's a 2.16GHz Core Duo, with 2GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive. As I type this I am running Safari on OSX and Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Mgmt Studio, and IE 8. There is... 5% CPU usage and memory consumption is hovering around 70% (and I have 768M allocated to the guest OS, which is XP SP3).

I'm seriously impressed. I think I see a competitive upgrade in my future :) And just for Gheri, yes  I installed VirtualBox, it's ok. It's better than nothing, it's a little lower performance than VMWare.

After 2 1/2 years and something like 500+ cycles, the battery in my Mac died and I had to replace it. First thing first, why the hell are these so expensive (and yes I realize this is a recurring theme in my blog)? I decided not to go to the Apple Store and buy an Apple brand battery because the reviews online are awful, so I decided to go to Batteries Plus and get an Energy+ battery. Turns out... it's an apple battery, granted it's a 5600mAh battery and all.

 So.. we'll see this battery isn't part of the old recall, so that is good, and the gy gave me 10% off so that was nice. lets see how this works.

 Here are a few tips that the battery-guy gave me for long battery life.

1. Only use the battery when you have to. If you use your notebook as a desktop pc, remove the battery and throw the thing on AC.
2. Only charge the battery when it needs to be charged, unplug the power when the charge is complete.
3. Batteries are good for 300-500 cycles (cycles = times you charge it)

1. A Buffalo LinkStation that natively supports Time Machine (CL/CH series)
2. A Mac (or two) with OSX 10.5.6 or higher
3. A lot of time for your computer to sit.
4. SHUT TIME MACHINE OFF ON YOUR MAC
5. Delete the share you created on your NAS 5 hours ago that you haven’t gotten to successfully work yet.
6. Go into the Time Machine tab in the NAS and disable it.

Creating your image file

• SIZE IN GIGS : You can set a max size for the bundle, I used 200 that seemed like plenty.
• VOLUME NAME : Anything you want, I used “Mikes Backup” very creative, I know.
• COMPUTER NAME : This is the name from above (the one below the box that you may have edited) don’t add the .local so just “MikesMBP” in my case
• MAC ADDRESS WITH NO COLONS : Ok, that crazy crap you copied to Text Edit, it’s that… when you remove the colons it should look like 00b443e684f2 or something… so.. the line above, when you are done should look something like this…

Setting up the NAS

Getting Time Machine Working

I was going to write a big long jibba-jabba about my iPhone, but I'm not cause that's stupid and by now you've probably seen a dozen of them. Let me underscore this.. they're awesome ... really awesome.. more awesome thatn you can probably imagine.

 Shortly after I got it (early Christmas present from the wife) I instantly decided that just having isn't good enough, I need to be complicated and start writing code for it. I got the SDK and have been trucking along.

 I am learning Objective C, which I have to say is a lot different than C# and as usual, "desktop" programming is a lot different than web development. There's a lot of oddities about obj-c as well. member variables don't really work as you'd expect, neither do bools. I've found all kinds of odd things.

 Anyway, I am really enjoying it. I am hoping to have my app up in the next few weeks. When it's done I will put up some code and stuff.

Here's some helpful links if you are starting out...
Apple's Developer Site
Wikipedia Entry on Obj-C
iPhone book... great price

When I installed Leopard, being a geek, I chose the most complicated FS I had to choose from, the Mac OS Journaled, Case-Sensitive FS. While this seemed like a cool idea at the time, I quickly learned that this is not a preferred option and you should only use it if you have a reason why you need it. Why that would be… no clue. Perhaps it’s that you don’t want Photoshop to work, or that you vehemently despise the THQ children’s game series like Cars or The Incredibles.

On Thursday evening I took it apon myself to go back to a non case sensitive FS. Here is how I did it without destroying all my data.

Things you will need:
•    Clean up your HD so that you have about 55%-60% free space. You can also use an external drive but I am not going to cover that route as I did not have one.
•    Ubuntu Live CD (I used v.8.10 but any version will probably work)
•    Mac OS X CD/DVD (I am using OS 10.5)
•    Boot Camp or DiskUtility.
•    Carbon Copy Cloner
•    Something to do while data is moving. I recommend Mortal Kombat vs. DC or Call of Duty 4, or Call of Duty: World At War
** DISCLAIMER: This worked for me, hopefully it will for you. Back up your data before doing this. We’ll be moving and resizing partitions, that goes south… you’re screwed. **

Preparation:
    Boot with the OS X disk (put it in the drive, hold down C when the screen turns gray), go into Disc Utility (at the top) and run a verify / repair on the physical disk that you need to modify. Reboot.

Creating a usable partition:
First thing to do is create a non case sensitive partition. Open up Disk Utility (DU), click on the PHYSICAL DISK you want to modify. You will know you have clicked a physical disk because you will get the “Partition” option on the right.
Click the partition button. Now you see all of your partitions. The blue part is your data, the white is empty space. Grab the corner of the partition and drag it up until the partition is a little UNDER 50% of the total drive capacity.
Apply and reboot when it’s finished. DU should finish within a couple of minutes, see note below.
NOTE: if you don’t reboot after every partition change DiskUtility will freeze while updating the partition table. I safely killed DU during that freeze many times, but it is a dangerous operation.
Once rebooted, open up DU again, select the physical drive and select the open space you created. Create a new partition under there, you will have to create a case-sensitive, but we’ll fix that in a minute.
    Apply. No need to reboot yet.
Once the partition is created, click on the NEW PARTITION in DU, click on ERARE on the right, select the MAC OS Extended Journaled FS (NOT CASE SENSITIVE) then click on ERASE.
TADA! We have a new partition!

Cloning the Data:
Open up Carbon Copy Cloner, select the source drive as your original partition and the target as the new partition. In the Target box, you should see an indicator that this volume will be bootable. Hooray.
Clone it… now is a good time to go play those videogames! 40Gb of data took my machine about 1:20:00 to copy.

Data done copying …. Ok play more games…

Done now? GOOD!

Open up System Preference and select STARTUP DISK. Click on your NEW PARTITION and close System Preferences.
Open Finder , browse to your new partition go to the Users/[your profile name]/Desktop folder and create a new folder called “HEY IM NEW” or something. I used “WANG” but that’s me. We’re doing this so that we know instantly on reboot that we are booting from the correct volume.
Reboot.

Removing the old partition:
You may have seen a folder with a “?” (missing folder) flash on the screen before the Apple logo, and the system may be booting slowly, that’s ok, we will fix that later, nothing critical.
If you’re booting from the new partition and you see your new folder on your desktop then verify all your data exists on the new partition and blow the old case-sensitive crap away. Open DU, click on the PHYSICAL DISK, click on the ORIGINAL partition (probably at the top) and click the (-) button. GONE!. Apply and close DU.
Don’t start jumping for joy yet. Now it gets weird. For some reason DU and boot camp won’t let you resize a disk unless the free space comes AFTER the resizable partition… see our dilemma now?

Reclaiming your disk space:
Reboot with the Ubuntu CD (do the hold-down C thing again). In Ubuntu, at the top go to System > Administration > Partition Editor.
Click the Move/Resize button. Drag your partition to the beginning of the disk. Hit Apply… go play videogames for another… however long. Mine took another 1:20:00.
Ok, all is done. Notice you can’t resize the partition… sucks. Now we have to set up the drive so that OS X will let us resize the partition. Click on the unpartitioned space and create a new partition, close the LAST OPTION in the filesystem dropdown, which is UNFORMATTED. Apply.
Reboot with the OS X DVD. Once In the OS X DVD, do the VERIFY/REPAIR again on the PHYSICAL DISK. Reboot.
Still getting that weird “?” folder.. no problem, promise we’ll fix it.

Ok back in OS X. I used Boot Camp for this but DU will work too. I RECOMMED USING BOOT CAMP ASSISTANT.
Boot Camp: open Boot Camp Assistant from the Application > Utilities folder. Once you’re in hit continue, you will need to select the option to add/remove Windows partitions. Your next option will be to remove the “Windows “ partition (haha. .we tricked it). Apply the change. TADA!
Disk Utility: You can open DU, click on the physical drive, select your good partition, and drag it to use the full drive.
From the command line you can use “diskutil list” to show your partitions, then use “diskutil resizeVolume [your good partition] 96G “(or however big the drive is).

Fixing the “?” on bootup, the missing folder… whatever it is:
Finally… fixing the stupid “?” folder and slow bootup. Open System Preferences and go into Startup Disk. Click on ANY OTHER VOLUME, close Startup Disk, reopen Startup Disk and select your new, awesome, non-case sensitive volume. Reboot. Tada.

Hope you found the success I did.. my kid can now play Cars and we all know.. when the 3 year old is happy… everyone is happy.

I would like to thank David, Apple, Ubuntu, and the many other who wrote articles on parts of this.