I recently hit the 5,000 tweet mark on Twitter, and figured that it’s as good a time as any to write something about my experience on the abbreviated social networking site. It also seems appropriate as I permanently deleted my Facebook account (well, I’m in the process, anyway).
Click ‘Continue Reading’ below for the wall-of-text review.
Although I can’t confirm when this happened (it may have happened a while ago and I just never noticed), I was browsing the internet last night on my Google Nexus One and noticed that, when I mistyped http://imdb.com, I was redirected to http://www20.search.rogers.com (which doesn’t work outside of Rogers’ network) instead of receiving a normal Not Found error. This all smacks of the infamous VeriSign Site Finder fiasco.
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):
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
Now that I’ve had a few weeks to play around with my Nexus One, here are a few observations I’ve made:
That’s really about it for now. Overall, the N1 is an excellent phone, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it anyone.
So the other week, Apple released the latest version of the firmware for the iPhone, OS 3.1.2. Not really a lot in the way of fixes:
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:
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.
After around the 20th try, it finally completed and jailbroke the phone. Lesson learned? When all else fails, keep trying.
Last week I upgrade my iPhone to OS 3.1 using the iPhone Dev Team’s Pwnage Tool. As I don’t care about unlocking (Rogers is the only GSM/3G carrier in Canada, aside from Fido which is owned by Rogers), I was only interested in the jailbreak.
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.
To the person who found my blog using the search term ‘iphone exchange “missing emails”‘, it’s an easy answer:
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.
Sometimes there’s an advantage to only having one 3G carrier in Canada – when the OS 3.0 upgrade came out for the iPhone, I upgraded my 3G immediately without having to worry about waiting for the unlock to come out. Instead, I just waited for the Pwnage Tool (as I have access to a Mac at work, otherwise I would have had to wait slightly longer for RedSn0w) without my jail break for a few days.
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
Jail Breaking
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:
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:
So there’s been a lot of buzz of the last few days about Icy, a new project from RipDev. Icy uses the same repositories as Cydia, but makes use of sqlite and libcurl instead of APT. The concept is there, but is it ready, in first-release form, to completely replace Cydia on my iPhone?
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.
