Celifornia.com blog » iPhone

iPhone anniversary – 1 year and 4 days since I got it

bence8810 — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:13:11 +0000

This is to remember that I have been using my iPhone for over a year now. I remember I was on a business trip to Prague on the 13th of September 2007, and on the way I stopped in Bratislava to check something. I went and fetched my emails, and from an RSS feed I read that someone wrote a console command that “could” potentially unlock the device. Since I had the iPhone for 2 weeks already, I carried it with me everywhere to unlock it as soon as I find a solution. I needed nothing more, I plugged in the iPhone to my laptop and started hacking it. In a matter of an hour, I had it unlocked, and for the very first time, it started operating on Orange SK (Slovakia) network. Ever since, I never put it down, it came with me everywhere I went, and it has never let me down once.

My iPhone was roaming in the following countries already:

Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Austria, England, Russia, United Arab Emirates, China, Hong Kong and the list is still growing. I also took it to Japan, but there was no GSM to support international roaming, so I only used WiFi there.

I plan on keeping it for as long as it falls apart, and to tell you the truth, its still witout a single scratch. I protected it well in a sock-like sleeve and it has kept it like new.

I know this post might be boring for most people, but from time to time I need to get the geekyness out of my system

iPhone – Camera Roll picture naming – reset after firmware update

bence8810 — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:14:11 +0000

NOTE: There is an update below in the text as Firmware 2 changed things a bit

If you own an iPhone, you know this. The built in Camera application takes pictures and names them IMG_xxxx.JPG, where xxxx is an ascending number starting at 0001.

This is to keep images named differently, so even if you put them all in one folder, all has a unique name, and nothing gets overwritten. Now this works great, up unitl you decide to flash your firmware, and upgrade. If you do that, this counter gets reset, and the naming starts again from IMG_0001.JPG, and on.

I am on my 5th firmware, so you can imagine the flustration. I have IMG_0001.JPG 5 times already, and need to rename them one by one to eliminate confusion.

Just recently I was wondering if there was a way to alter the Camera’s naming, and sure enough, I found the answer on a popular iPhone forum. Read on for instrucions if you are interested….

First of all, make sure you have Mobile Finder and Mobile Text Editor installed. If you dont have it, and don’t want it, then just enable WiFi access on the iPhone, enable SSH, and log in from a remote PC. This is what I did, but I realized the Finder way is easier, so I created some screenshots with the later method so that you can try it easily. After all, not everyone is familiar with Linux/Unix shells.

Just fire up Mobile Terminal on your iPhone, and make sure under options, you have View System files, etc enabled. Also make sure the setting for showing “..” is allowed, and therefore you will be able to change directories towards the root of the system.

Once Mobile Finder is set up, just go to the following path:

/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/.MISC/

Double tap on Info.plist, and Finder should lauch Text Editor to view the contents of the file.

At this line: < integer >xxx< /integer >, xxx stands for the number that is after IMG_ in the image’s name. Just change it to whatever is next in line for you, and the pictures will be named accordingly thereafter.

This has been a huge headache for me, and as it turned out, the solution wasn’t that difficult.

Hope you find it useful,

UPDATE: Since firmware 2, Mobile Terminal is no longer an accessible commodity through Installer, at least not at present. I am on 2.1 currently. You can however still edit the file via an SSH session, which is what I did and it worked great. You can also use gTxtEdit application that you can get from Cydia, and open the Info.plist file, edit then save it.

Cheers

iPhone – upgrade to 1.1.4 Firmware

bence8810 — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:29:28 +0000

So the 1.1.4 Firmware was out for a while now, and many have upgraded to it without any real issue, so I decided to take the plunge and do it myself. I was on 1.1.2 prior to this upgrade and since I had no problems with it, I kept delaying the upgrades.

1.1.4 has a few neat features, like rearranging the icons, and locating yourself via cell triangulation on a Google Map, but that’s all there is to it. The main reason for my upgrade was that new software is built for 1.1.4 mainly, and I wanted to be able to try them and use them.

The upgrade went fine thanks to the fine folks at the iPhone Dev team, Aviegas and Geohotz who all contributed to this solution. I used iPlus 2.0b which takes the freshly restored iPhone on 1.1.4 firmware, jailbreaks it, unlocks it, and does it all with no harm to the iPhone itself. The process is completely reversible, which make it a friendly solution should a hardware damage occur and I have to take the phone back to Apple.

Here is a screenshot of the About screen on my iPhone, you can see its on the 1.1.4 firmware.

Read on for further details….

The upgrade like I said went fine, the only thing i needed to make sure is that I don’t lose my SMS’s, contacts and Browser History, call history.

For keeping SMS, Call History and Browser History/bookmarks, I had to copy the following files off the iPhone, and then back again once I was done with the upgrade. You will see the paths are different, and that is because some folder structure changed starting with 1.1.3 and on.

[code]
/var/root/Library/CallHistory/call_history.db - /var/mobile/Library/CallHistory/call_history.db

/var/root/Library/Safari/*.plist - /var/mobile/Library/Safari/*.plist

/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db - /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db
[/code]

Other than this, I had Lockbox which I needed to keep, and it had 2 .db files. One for the data and one for the settings. Again, I just copied these db files off the iPhone, and back after the upgrade, things are working great.

And finally contacts, I use iTunes sync to Outlook, so all my info, calendar entries, tasks were back on in a matter of seconds.

Here you can see some pictures I took on the way of upgrading, and finally the home-screen with the wiggly icons. The icons wiggle when you manipulate their positions. Its the main new feature in 1.1.3/4.

Cheers

Foof bag arrived for the iPhone – Picture review

bence8810 — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:15:44 +0000

So the bag I ordered from Australia has finally arrived. It is just like what I expected, its handmade, perfect, and gives good protection to the iPhone. For more pictures, read on.

This is what it looks like with the iPhone in it:

This is the bag by itself, you can see the silky inside part. This really pampers the iPhone

Shipping envelope, and the foof sock-bag on top. The actual iPhone bag came in a plastic sleeve, and all that was shipped in a padded paper envelope. Shipping took 3 days from Australia, which is impressive by my terms. From payment to receival it took 7 days.

The plastic sleeve it came in:

The iPhone with the two cases, the new Foof bag and the old black case I got in Hong Kong a good 6 months back. So far it has protected my iPhone, so it was a well deserved retirement for the old bag.

And finally the iPhone takes a last “ride” in the old bag.

iPhone protection baggie – on the way from AU

bence8810 — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:41:38 +0000

Hi,

So, the little sock baggie I got for my iPhone back in Hong Kong has started to wear out, but again, I am using it daily for 6 months now, which means it goes in and out of my pocket about 20-30 times a day, you can imagine. I would say this was probably one of my best spent $2 USD in my life, as it has protected my precious iPhone for a half a year. However, it was time for a change, and since I am on the market for the MacBook Air, I started looking for cases too, and I stumbled upon a very interesting site selling different hand-made bags for Apple products. They don’t have the MacBook Air’s case just yet, but they have outstanding sock baggies for the iPhone, and I couldn’t resist. I got one for myself, and it wasn’t even expensive. Its made of Japanese cotton, which I must tell you was 80% where my attraction to the product came from, but also the fact that its hand made from Organic materials made me feel quite good.

The pattern I got is very Japanese, and as with most Japanese things, it has no sex. Its red, but men use red and other warm colours often in Japan, and my wife convinced me it isn’t too “girlish”, so I got it. Have a look below, I cannot wait to receive it. I will post a review once it comes in.

On a sidenote, I paid 3500 HUF for it, which is just about $20 USD including shipping, it was a great bargain I guess. It comes from Australia, which is probably the farthest place on Earth from Hungary, but hey, whatever it takes to hype my iPhone up…

If you are interested, visit their Website:

The company is called Foof, and they can be reached here:

Foofshop

iPhone – HowTO Set Voicemail on non supported carriers

bence8810 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:36:21 +0000

So you’ve got an iPhone at a carrier other than AT&T, but would still like to get your voicemail? You are just as demanding as I am, but luckily there is a solution for us. You can set the voice mail button to auto-dial a preset number that connects you to your voicemail service. This however still doesn’t solve the issue of not getting notified by SMS when I receive a voicemail, but still a step forward in the iPhone mystery world….

Carry on reading for the fix….

Go to the dial screen on your iPhone, and dial the following string, then press CALL.

*5005*86*YOURVOICEMAILNUMBER#

In my case, it was the following, as my voice mail number is 170:

*5005*86*170#

Once you do that, please CALL, and it will set your voice mail number to it’s memory. There should be some message about this. From now and on, whenever you press the Voice Mail button, you will get a screen like this minus the dog in the background :

….and you should be connected to your voicemail.

Happy Voice Mailing and hope for a day when we can even get notified by SMS of awaiting voice mails….

iPhone 1.1.2 OTB software unlocked in Hungary – Feb.8th 2008

bence8810 — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:23:30 +0000

So here we go, got the first software unlocked iPhone 1.1.2 OTB in Hungary. The solution just came out, it was announced on Geohot’s blog, and putting the raw notes together, my great friend Marios helped me out to finish in success. I believe this is the first 1.1.2 OTB (Out of the box) iPhone unlocked in Hungary.

Read on for details…..

The iPhone belongs to a friend’s friend, and he asked me a while back if I could help. I said the only way was to order the Bladox made Turbosim, which we just got yesterday, and I started working on it. I made a couple of mistakes as I was pretty tired, and we delayed the final unlock to today, 2008 Feb. 8th. I came in this morning, and saw the news, and thought, holy moly, I may just spare the TurboSIM and get it done the software way. I got started quickly, downgraded the iPhone to 1.1.1 FW, jailbroke it, installed octoprep, and upgraded to 1.1.2. Its important to UPDATE to 1.1.2 after octoprep, and not RESTORE, as restoring will destroy the octoprep patches. On 1.1.2, we run the jailbreak java file, and it brings us to an open but still SIM locked iPhone.

Once we are done, we have a 1.1.2 iPhone, on which we need to install BSD Subsystem, Open SSH, and Terminal. Terminal is needed, as in the process, we will lose WiFi.

I am not a very experienced iPhone unlocker, this is only my third unlock, so please dont rely on my notes only, but this would be a good starting point. Besides, the process is still very much in it’s child stage, and I am sure in a day or two, we will see a nice, packaged solution, where no more passing commands manually to the baseband etc will be needed.

However, since this is a blog, I will share the notes I used to accomplish this. Credit goes to Geohot, who is behind this unlock 100%, and who was by the way the first person unlocking the iPhone back in 2007 August I think.
Other than Geohot, I would like to thank Marios, my friend from Cyprus, who held my hand over the phone while I was doing the unlock. Cheers Marios.

Notes on how I unlocked an already jailbroken 1.1.2 iPhone with 4.6 bootloader.

1. Open Instller on your jailbroken 1.1.2 OTB and install OpenSSH and Term-vt100 (under System) 2. Connect via WiFi to your iPhone using WinSCP 3. Copy all the files (gunlock, ICE04.02.13_G.fls and secpac) to /usr/bin 4. Set permissions of gunlock to 755 in WinSCP 5. Put iPhone in Airplane mode (IMPORTANT!) 6. Execute the following commands in Terminal: (Note the long lines with launchctl are actually one line, just broken by the blog window into two)


cd /usr/bin/
launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist
gunlock secpack ICE04.02.13_G.fls
launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.CommCenter.plist

7. Restart iPhone and throw your ***sim out of the window

Again, please note that I take no responsibility for this if it bricks your iPhone. Hacking, and unlocking are both things we are not supposed to do, but we still do it. Have some common sense, do things calmly with lots and lots of reading, and thinking. After all, you are playing with your 400USD toy, or us in EU who get it shipped here, $500USD +

Cheers,
Ben

iPhone – one of first in Hungary, definite first software unlocked one – Sep13th 2007

bence8810 — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:46:56 +0000

So here we go again about the iPhone you may say, as blogs, news and forums are all full, way way full of stories about the iPhone. That being sad, I also have my own story re the iPhone. It started back in August 2007, when I ordered my first iPhone from Ebay. At that time, people were scared to buy iPhones from ebay, as due to the great demand, there were many hoaxes posted. Since I was more anxious of having it than scared of losing the $500 I invested, I ordered my 4GB model. I have a great deal of history with Ebay, and I have been a member since 2002 or so, back when I lived in the US. Even since, I bought and sold kind of a lot on ebay, so my confidence is somewhat greater than other Hungarians, which is why I got my hands on one of the first iPhones in the Hungarian market.

My iPhone arrived on the 10th of September to Hungary, where I had to claim it from the customs. In Hungary we have a rule that if an item is over 25USD in value, we need to pay import tax on it. Now being a smart, well kind of street-smart Hungarian, I asked the seller in the US to mark my item with a value of 20USD, and note on the box that it contains a toy camera. Yeah, you might say I am quite cocky, and I could have been burnt too, but hey, it worked. And it has always worked so far, so I figured if my item is stolen once, i am still better off with the savings on all the other items’ taxes. This might be not ethical, but the Hungarian government is taking 48% of my Gross salary, which isn’t quite ethical either. I have a great theory on this anyways, but that should not belong here.

So I walked out of the 8th district Post Office’s Customs building with an iPhone in my hand. I was so excited, I nearly dropped on the tram while waiting to get back to my office and finally open the sucker up. At that time, there was still no software solution for the iPhone, and only a handful of people around the world have successfully hardware unlocked the iPhone. I was debating between cracking the phone up and doing the hardware unlock, or waiting for the Software solution.

Since I had an upcoming business trip to Prague, I decided to postpone the action after I am back, but just in case, I took my phone along. Sure enough, on my quick stop at our Slovak office on the way, I got an email with a status update, that a Beta version of the software unlock was out. This was on the 13th of September already, I think. I immediately downloaded it, crossed my fingers, mourned a quick prayer, and got to it. In a matter of 30 minutes, there I was with a working iPhone, on Orange Slovak network with my Pannon Hungary SIM roaming. Wow, I thought I am the luckiest guy ever. It was just so great having the iPhone working, I cannot tell you. And it has been almost half a year ago, but still every day, I am amazed when I answer a call by sliding the virtual slider away with my finger. Its the greatest invention since the Mobile industry kicked off.

The first iPhone I had was a faulty unit on the other hand. It had some weird pixel malfunctioning, and every time I moved my finger around the screen, it started producing black spots across the screen.

I recorded it with my camera, and posted the video on Youtube, take a look at yourself. It wasnt too bad, but since I wanted it to be perfect, it had to go

It wasn’t a screen defect, but rather some mainboard issue. I was still in Prague, having my iPhone just over a week, but I couldn’t stand the defect. It was 5PM in Prague, when I headed towards the highway to make my way back to Budapest. Just before my departure, I quickly posted an AD in a Hungarian online bazar, and I stated the phone had a pixel damage, but otherwise brand new, and listen now carefuly, UNLOCKED. Boy, at 7PM I got the first phonecall, and by 11Pm when I arrived to Budapest, I had 2 potential buyers already. I sold it at 11:30PM for 170% of my initial purchase price, as it was the first software unlocked phone, or amount the very first ones, if someone beat me with a few minutes as the unlocked was just announced. I went back home, at 12 midnight, I already had my new 8GB version ordered from Ebay yet again, and in just a mere 2 weeks, I had it in my hands yet again unlocked. That is the phone I still have, and love so much. Since, it has been to Slovakia, Czech Republic, Japan, Hong Kong, and China. Japan was the only place I was unable to Roam, as they have the weird system, otherwise I was successfully iphone-ing my way across China on trains, etc etc.

Here are a few more pics, if you are also an iPhone owner, I guess you understand what I am writing about. If you are one without a piece, have a look yourself, you wont regret it.