You’ll need some sort of an application or a way to create and rename files on your iPhone. I’ve used iFile from the Cydia library.

The method I am explaining here uses a blank file instead of the camera’s sound file and upon taking a picture, the phone will play back the empty file, thus the silence.

Open iFile (or whatever you are using) and navigate to the following location:

/System/Library/Audio/UISounds/

Here you’ll find a file called “photoShutter.caf” which you’ll need to rename. I added an _backup after the name simply. Now create a new file and call it photoShutter.caf. This is it folks, the empty file is your shutter sound.

To create a new file with iFile you’ll need to press first Edit and then the + sign. Choose Regular file and name it photoShutter.caf

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

]]> http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/09/18/iphone-anniversary-1-year-and-4-days-since-i-got-it/feed/ 3 http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-set-time-and-data-plus-timezone-in-linux/ http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-set-time-and-data-plus-timezone-in-linux/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:03:37 +0000 bence8810 http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-set-time-and-data-plus-timezone-in-linux/ I had to do this many times, but still not enough to stick to my head, so I always end up googling for it. I decided to Blog it now finally, so I will always have this information handly, and hope to help others too.

My Distribution is Debian Linux, but I assume it will work on others too.

To set your time-zone, do the following:


ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Budapest /etc/localtime


that is if your time zone is Budapest. Just browse the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ folder and see which location matches you.
When that is done, you need to adjust your time. Lately on systems that have internet connectivity, I just use a Time Server which keeps my time updated hourly, as I set a Cron job to do so.

To get this done, I install “ntpdate”


apt-get install ntpdate


Now I set cron to run the job hourly, but you can set whatever timeframe you want:


crontab -e


Here I added the following line:


#Setup NTPDATE
@hourly /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate


then restarted cron


/etc/init.d/cron restart


and that was it. Our hourly automatic time update is set. Now to test if all went well, I manually updated the time:


/etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate


and checked if it was okay. If you see the right timezone and right time, just save it to the BIOS clock as well so even offline the time will remain correct more or less:


/sbin/hwclock --systohc


and we are done. Enjoy having a Linux box with never failing correct time!

Long time no updates, I am really sorry for that. Life has turned upside down since the recent move. It has been a month now, so we are in the calming stage already, and hopefully I will have more time to maintain the blog.

But just to give you an update, I have already started building my newest and first to Dubai project, a HTPC aka Home Theatre PC.

We purchased a Sharp Aquos 32″ LCD TV, which is small, but perfectly fits in size to our anyways small apartment. But since a TV by itself is just plain boring, I went looking for options. And of course added the fact that I am an Apple geek, I had to go down the proper, Apple road.

After having read extensive amount of articles about options, I have decided to go with a Mac Mini as the head unit, and it will be wired to the LCD TV via HDMI to DVI cable for best quality. I will have internet, emails, iTunes music and videos, and of course DVD and “other” video playback. This will become our entertainment centre, and to have the best control over all this, I purchased a Belkin MediaPilot keyboard, which is wireless, has a mouse built in with an intelligent Remote Controller on board. So one device will drive it all.

This was just a teaser, stand by for the outcome. I ordered via Amazon to a US address to eliminate the horrific UAE and in general non US Apple prices. There is a company called Aramex who provides a US shipping address, I ship everything there, and they forward it to the UAE, to our doorstep.

More later cheers, I am off picking up my wife from her lunch gathering…

Ben

So finally the day has come, the Macbook Air arrived to Hungary. My mother in law brought it over from Tokyo. So that the bag wouldn’t get scratched, I also ordered a Fabrix case from Singapore, which I earlier mentioned, and she was bringing the two together.

As I don’t have much time now, need to catch an early flight tomorrow, I just thought of tossing out a few pictures, for teasers.

Enjoy, a full review will come shortly,

This is how the “package” arrived from Japan, in pieces packed at various suitcases, to eliminate attention from the Custom agents at Budapest Airport.

And some random pictures…. enjoy

And this is how “unbelievably” thin this thing is, compared to a “Fat and thick” iPhone

Doing the remote install from Yuka’ iMac. I wanted to get this done in order to customize the installation of Leopard, and get rid of all the unnecessary languages and save precious space on the otherwise small (80GB) HDD. I was able to cut a good 5-6GB from the install size, making the available space being somewhere above 65GB.

That’s all folks for now, need to get ready for Istanbul. Look out for more MacBook Air updates in the close future….

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

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

What I chose to do might seem agressive, but gets the job done. I take a flat head screwdriver, slide it between the casing and the shiney cover, and pry it open. If you have the special screw driver for opening them, it must be a nicer process, but I dont have them. Once the lid is off, I just smash the “disk” into pieces, and then spread them to various containers around our building.

BEFORE

AFTER

]]> http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/03/26/failed-harddrive-destruction-data-protection-fun/feed/ 0 http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/03/10/sleeve-case-for-macbook-air-pabrix-from-singapore/ http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/03/10/sleeve-case-for-macbook-air-pabrix-from-singapore/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:26:09 +0000 bence8810 http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/03/10/sleeve-case-for-macbook-air-pabrix-from-singapore/ Hi

So I had purchased the AirMail from Manillamac, but since that has not arrived yet, I needed another case for the shipping. The MacBook Air is being brought to Budapest by my Mother in Law from Tokyo, and since I want it protected, I need to send her a sleeve case she can place the precious MBA in.

I went on googling, and found a very nice and in-style sleeve called Blue Suit from Fabrixcases, a company based in Singapore. Since I want it sent to Japan, it actually makes sense to order from the Far East, and of course quality-wise the Far East is unbeatable. I wanted to order in Japan, but the lack of credit card acceptance put me off.

This is how it looks, more on this later once I have it in my hand.

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.

]]> http://www.celifornia.com/blog/2008/03/10/foof-bag-arrived-for-the-iphone-picture-review/feed/ 4