I’m no fan of browser redirects in any form, and I’m even less of a fan of Yahoo which Rogers partners with to, among other things, provide results on their hijacked landing page. But what can you do? It’s their service, and there’s no opt-out link on the page.

Well, the answer is to manually opt-out. Unfortunately, you need to have a rooted/jail-broken phone to do this. As stated above, I have a Google Nexus One which runs CyanogenMod, but this should work with any other rooted Android phone and even jail-broken iPhones (although the paths are different — you’ll need to alter them as applicable).

To manually opt-out, do the following (assumes Android phone):

1. Open a shell on your phone. You can use ConnectBot, Terminal Emulator, or adb shell.
2. Assume root (su command).
3. Remount the system partition in to read/write mode —  mount -o rw,remount /system
4. Browse to /system/etc.
5. Use your favourite text editor to open hosts.
6. Add the following to the bottom of the hosts file — 127.0.0.1 www20.search.rogers.com
7. Save and quit!

You’re done! You’ve just manually opt’ed-out of Rogers Wildcard DNS hijack. Now you’ll just get the normal ‘Not Found’ errors, as when Rogers see that the domain you’ve entered doesn’t exist and tried to redirect you to their search page, your phone will point that domain to itself and fail as it isn’t running a webserver.

TL;DR Version: To prevent getting directed to Rogers’ Search Page when you mistype an address, edit your hosts file to point www20.search.rogers.com to the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Update (05/01/2011): You can now officially opt-out using this link: http://searchassist.teoma.com/templates/rogers/optout

• I can’t live without the CyanogenMod ROM. Android 2.1 is nice, but the tweaks available in CM 5.x are too numerous to mention and offer many features that go well beyond what the N1 can do out-of-box. If you have an N1 (the TMO version, or the Rogers/AT&T one), get CyanogenMod. You’ll never go back.
• The screen is, by far, the best I’ve seen on smart phone – it trumps my old iPhone 3G at every turn. Some people argue that the screen has a purple hue to it, but to them I ask, have you heard of Colour Temperature?
• The last three phones I’ve had (an iPhone 3G, an HTC Dream, and an HTC Magic) have all had noticeable lag on the main screens and when load applications. The N1, both with the stock ROM (that I had left on for all of around an hour) and CyanogenMod simply scream. There’s nothing slow about this phone.
• For all of those who say that the signal quality on the N1 is crap, please actually get one before forming an opinion. I’ve seen an increase in signal strength/quality on the N1 over the other HTC phones I’ve had, and over the iPhone 3G. Additionally, I’ve been able able to clock download speeds greater than 3Mbit/s on Rogers’ HSDPA network. Not too bad at all.
• The camera is amazing – the fast auto-focus, bright flash, and fine-grain controls are simply amazing, and at 5 mega pixels, the picture quality is simply staggering for a smart phone.
• My only real complaint about the N1 is battery life, but then again, I’m always complaining about that (the exception being my MSI Wind U123 with it’s 9 cell battery that gives me 8 hours of use). Under heavy usage, I have to charge the phone nightly. For that reason, I bought an extra battery with the phone, however as I have a power inverter for the car that features a USB port, I didn’t really need to get the spare.

That’s really about it for now. Overall, the N1 is an excellent phone, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone.

• Resolves sporadic issue that may cause iPhone to not wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

However, always the optimist and hoping that maybe this update would fix the ever-present crashing Mobile Safari, and not needing to worry about needing to unlock (ever), I updated my 3G as soon as a jailbreak was available.

The update itself went smoothly, or rather, the restore did. Your best bet, with any new release of the iPhone, is to do a full Restore, and never an upgrade. This will help with performance and battery life, whereas you’re likely to have problems with an upgrade.

As soon as the Restore was finished, and after iTunes happily activated my phone, I downloaded Blackra1n, a jailbreak app by Geohot. The instructions are simple:

1. Upgrade your phone to 3.1.2 – Note: THIS WILL UPGRADE YOUR BASEBAND! As such, you loose, possibly permanently, the ability to use Ultrasn0w, the Carrier Unlock.
2. Run Blackra1n.
3. Connect your iPhone
4. Click “Make it ra1n”.

Simple, right? Well, sort of.

After you click “Make it ra1n”, your phone restarts in Recovery Mode (not DFU mode!) and you should see a picture of Geohot. However, if you have an iPhone 3G, that isn’t likely to happen. Instead, you’ll most likely see the iPhone Recovery Mode logo and Blackra1n stuck on the “Running” message. If you disconnect you’re iPhone Blackra1n will say it completed successfully, however the phone will remain in Recovery Mode. To exit, simply hold Power+Home until the screen goes black, then turn it back on.

If you check the log file Blackra1n creates in the same folder it’s run from, you’ll notice lines like:

ERROR: usb open failed while sending command

ERROR: usb open failed while sending payload

This means that no, you’re phone isn’t jailbroken. Fortunately, it’s not bricked – just reboot it and all will be well.

So, how do you fix this problem? Unfortunately you don’t. There are sites that tell you to put Blackra1n in the root of the C drive, and others that remind you to Run as Administrator, and some that say to use XP vs. Windows 7, or the other way around. The short of it is, though, it’s all crap.

I eventually got Blackra1n to work simply by running it over-and-over.

1. Try it.
2. It fails.
3. Reboot phone in to normal mode (hold Power+Home until screen goes black, then turn back on normally)
4. Repeat.

After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.

1. Halo 3: ODST came out a few weeks ago, and as an avid Halo fan (single-player, as I was never really in to multi-player) I’ve been working on beating the game in all difficulty modes. I recently just finished it in Heroic, and now I’m about half done Legendary. Proof? Right here (look under the Recent Games section).
2. A conference! Last week, the company I work for hosted a conference that I provided technical support for (read: queuing up Power Point presentations and making sure the PA system worked). In other words, four 12+ hour days, followed by two days of catching up on my usual work.
3. Left 4 Dead. Valve Software had a sale through Steam were you could grab Left 4 Dead for $15 USD, which sure beat the $45 CAD that the local Electronics Boutique wanted. I’ve been hammering away at that as well.
4. Being social! I’ve actually been out with friends  a few times in the last few days, which has slightly limited the amount of time I’ve put in to screwing with random shit on the computer.

However, I’ll have a post up at some point later tonight with a note about Apple’s latest update to the iPhone OS, 3.1.2, and the jailbreak for it released by Geohot.

A few things to note: I initally made the mistake of trying to restore the custom .ipsw file in DFU mode, which gave me the dreaded 1600 and 1604 error codes. Easy enough to fix – just downgraded to the official 3.0 OS (ignoring error messages), jailbroke with Redsn0w, and then did a proper shift-restore with the pwned 3.1 .ipsw (yes, the pwnage tool only runs on OS X, but you can transfer the pwned .ipsw it creates to a PC and use the shift-restore method to jailbreak, instead of waiting for a new Redsn0w).

After the restore was done, I synced my contacts, favorites, music, etc… and reinstalled my favorite apps through Cydia without any issues. So far I’ve noticed that my battery life has improved (something rare, apparently – it probably helps that I never do a Restore From Backup), apps run and launch a lot faster, and best of all, Mobile Safari hasn’t crashed on me yet!

So far, 3.1 has been the best update yet from Apple for the iPhone – it’ll certainly be my fall-back-point if future updates aren’t as smooth.

When the iPhone’s Mail.app is setup to use Exchange, it has an initial limit to the number of messages it will grab from the server — the default is the 50 most recent messages. This can be increased to 200.

The key word here is recent – by default, the first 50 recent messages you load will be displayed. Want to see anything other than that? Sorry, you gotta use Outlook Web Access. That’s just how it was designed.

So now that it’s been (nearly) a week, and I’ve had a chance to play around with the new OS with and without third-party mods, I’ve been able to come up with a few conclusions as to whether or not Apple is heading in the right direction. And, for your reading pleasure, I’ve put them in list form.

The OS 3.0 Features Themselves

• Cut/Copy/Paste: Overall, it’s handy when you need it. I find that when I go to move the cursor around when I’m correcting a typo (of which I tend to make many), the little pop CCP pop-up often comes up right away, beckoning me to select something, as if it’s saying ‘You bitched about me not being here since you got the phone, now use me dammit!’. Unfortunately, I don’t find myself using it anywhere near as much as I thought I would. So far it’s been to dump things in to Tweets on Twitterrific, and that’s about it.
• MMS: I rarely text anyone – my wife, occasionally, when we’re both out of the house and in different places, and maybe a friend here and there if I can’t reach them on Live Messenger/IRC/Twitter/Phone/etc…. In fact, Twitter has nearly completely replaced texting for me, and I really can’t ever see myself using MMS as most people I know don’t have phones that support it, so they just get a link from their carrier with a URL to go to find the picture. That said, I may as well just send then that anyways. Or Tweet it.
• Tethering: Rogers, the iPhone carrier in Canada, decided that you can tether your iPhone at no extra cost if you’re paying for a data plan that’s 1GB/month or higher. I happen to be on the 1GB plan (although I rarely use even 500MB, my wireless router at home and work saving me from the rather slow 3G network), so I tried it out on my Acer Aspire One. The verdict? Well, it’s about as fast as you’d expect, which is to say, not very at all. However, if I manage to find myself in an area without free WiFi or at least free wired internet, and 3G service is available, it would be worth doing. For now, like MMS, it’s turned off.
• Scrolling: I’m happy to report that scrolling is ever-so-slightly smoother in OS 3.0. Not much, and no where near as smooth as the 3G s apparently is, but it’s a noticeable difference.
• Safari: The upgrade Safari received almost makes the 3.0 upgrade worth it just by itself. It opens and runs faster, and the best part of all, it hasn’t crashed on me at all since I upgraded. Not once! Of course, I tried to crash it – I opened Slashdot, Arstechnica, Digg, FMyLife, Twitter, the Dev-Team Blog, Wikipedia, and a page that I put up on the backend of this server specifically designed to put load on the browser. Safari handled it all with ease.
• Flash: By far the best feature of the upgrade! I can actually get the full browsing experience most sites offer, and don’t have to look at that stupid questioning block anymore!…..is what I’d be saying, if Apple had actually pulled their heads out of their collective asses and actually included support for it. Then again, most all-flash sites are garbage anyways, so I’m actually not missing that much….
• Spotlight Search: It’s last for a reason. I honestly don’t have enough stuff on my phone to warrant searching for anything. My contact list only has around fifty people on it, I use the Mail.app only while I’m away from work, and then I clean it out after I’ve read each message, and the notes that I take are one-off’s 99% of the time. In fact, the only time I generally use it is when I’m trying to scroll to the first page of the Springboard and accidentally go a page too far to the left. Whoops.

Jail Breaking

• Cydia: Oh my. For the first few days after jail breaking, Cydia was hell. I actually re-installed Icy because it was just that bad. The constant crashing nearly drove me insane, but the worst part was how slow it was. The main page would take minutes to load, and then when I’d try to navigate through categories, it would take upwards of 10 seconds for it to acknowledge that I’d clicked anything. Then saurik (the app’s author) discovered that Javascript debugging had be left on and released a update to turn it off. After that, everything was right-as-rain.
• Icy: Still sucks. Badly. Although it launches faster than Cydia, it takes forever to refresh the sources list, and (now that the Javascript-debugging thing has been sorted) responds slower than Cydia while browsing categories. And maybe I’m just too used to Cydia, but I can’t stand the package layout of Icy (little differences, like how it shows already installed packages in the Categories view when Cydia doesn’t). In my option, skip Icy – there’s a reason why the Dev-Team includes Cydia by default in the Pwnage Tool and RedSn0w.
• BossPrefs: I installed it, tried to tweak a few settings, then removed it. The problem? I tried to disable the numeric battery. That worked. Then I tried to enable it again. That didn’t. Then I rebooted – very bad idea. Normal Pwnapple loading screen, then to my surprise, the Apple loading screen with a progress bar. Shit. Get to the Springboard and find a hint about arranging icons, and everything back to defaults. Apparently it fucked up the Springboard settings (probably changed a Plist in a way that 3.0 didn’t like) and reset everything.
• SBSettings: Pre-3.0, I’d always used BossPrefs because SBSettings seemed to constantly crash other apps (whether because of a bug in the release version I was using or due to the increased memory usage, I don’t know). However, the SBSettings released for OS 3.0 works beautifully, and there’s even a skin for it to match the Winterboard theme I use.
• Mobile Terminal: Still really handy when I need a command prompt to nmap something or ping something else, however it’s got an odd bug right now that causes it to flip upside down on launch, so you have to turn the phone upside down to match. Very, very strange.

In summary, the OS 3.0 update is definitely worthwhile, however be aware that until app authors start pumping out compatibility updates, especially in regard to apps that require the jail break, you’re likely to run in to a few issues along the way.

The DiNozzo method. Not pretty, but it’s effective.

- Leroy Gibbs, NCIS

I downloaded the Privately Web Browser from the App Store this evening, but was a little disappointed that it doesn’t include the ability to change the home page.  Having jail broken my iPhone hours after getting it, though, the workaround was pretty obvious.

By default, Privately uses http://start.sax.net as it’s homepage. This really doesn’t work for me, as I like to have Google at the ready, and although it has a search box, I like having the ability to search images/groups/etc… at one click instead of two. This method will work for nearly any site, though. To change the start page, simply do the following:

1. Open Terminal (again, you will need to have jailbroken your iPhone, and be slightly comfortable with a *nix CLI).
2. ping the site that you want for your homepage so you can get it’s IP address. ping google.ca -c 1 works well, as it will only ping once and won’t flood your console before you can ^C out of it. At time-of-posting, the IP for Google.ca was 64.233.187.104.
3. If you have sudo installed, type sudo nano /etc/hosts (replace nano with your favorite editor, such as emacs or vim). If you don’t have sudo, type su -, then your root password, and then nano /etc/hosts.
4. At the bottom of the file, enter “64.233.187.104   start.sax.net” (without the quotes, and using whichever IP address you want instead of Google’s).
5. Save changes and exit.
6. Close Terminal and open Privately.

You’ll noting that the address still shows as start.sax.net, however the site you chose will load as the home page.

A few things to note:

• This won’t work if you want a specific page on a site (eg, www.example.com/whatever.html)
• If the server hosts multiple sites off one IP address, you’ll get whatever the default site for that IP address is (which, in some cases, will be a placeholder page)
• If you don’t know what a CLI is, or have no idea what nano, emacs, or vim are, this isn’t for you.
• And, of course, you’re iPhone needs to be jailbroken. If you haven’t done it and don’t know how, I won’t offer support. Plenty of information here.

Yes, it has a stunning interface, it’s blazingly fast, and the animation that goes with package installations is beautiful, but it falls short in several ways.

Previews: One of the best features of Cydia – most package/theme authors include screenshots of their works behind a More Info or Screenshot link. Icy, for whatever reason, doesn’t parse these links making it impossible to see what you’re downloading. You also don’t get any information about the package that isn’t in the first page summary.

Changes: One of my favourite features of Cydia is the Changes tab, which lets you see new packages that have been added since you last launched the app. This feature makes it much easier to browse themes, especially if you have multiple repositories added – without it, the task of sorting though 1,200+ packages in one category to determine which ones you’ve already seen is a major task.

Category Listings: For a first release, Icy ships with a major bug – some users, myself included, were met with an empty categories tab on the first launch. For some people, restarting the phone fixed it, but in my case the only thing that works to get the categories to appear is to refresh the sources list multiple times. I had to do this each time I opened the app.

Seach: Icy’s package searching leaves a lot to be desired. A search for ‘Winterboard’ in Cydia results in a plethora of themes, whereas Icy returns no results as of my last half-dozen attempts.

So the final verdict? Icy is a nice attempt at replacing Cydia, but it still has a long ways to go. Cydia may take a very long time to load up, but it’s still tops in my book.

Update: Icy v1.1 was released today, and it appears to taken care of almost all of my concerns! The categories issue seems to be resolved, and there’s now a blue arrow on the package description page that take you to the package description page you see in Cydia, with links to screenshots, more info, et al…. The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is the Recent Packages in the Categories list (the equivalent to ‘Changes’ in Cydia), but with any luck that will be resolved shortly. Once the next version is out, I’ll do a full review.