If you don’t mind taking a blowtorch to your pretty unibody iMac and trephining it a bit, you can easily add an eSATA port for the connection of external hard drives to your beautiful 27-inch. That surgery’s not for the meek, though: luckily, OWC will be happy to do it $169 in under 48 hours… and for a gasp-worthy $1649 more, they’ll even cram in a 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. Yowza!
Last week the U.S. government surprised everyone by announcing that jailbreaking, root access, and carrier unlocking was a legal option for buyers of smartphones that want to access apps not sold by the manufacturer or to free the handset for use on the network of their choice.
After this decision it is likely that more people will be jailbreaking their iPhones, iPads, or iPod touches. There are over 100 million iOS devices in circulation and it is thought that a mere fraction of these are jailbroken.
Jailbreaking isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do, but there are many how-to’s (including our own below) that will explain to you how to do it. The problem with that is that you need to find the right one to fit your iOS device. That isn’t easy with the plethora of iOS versions and different iOS device models out there until now.
The Jailbreak Matrix solves that problem. The Matrix is a chart that will show you the details you need to jailbreak your specific iOS device and its version of iOS. It will even tell if you if a jailbreak doesn’t exist, provide download links for firmware and iTunes, and versioning information for firmware and baseband (if appropriate). The information provide is likely to help you to prevent bricking your device.
You can view the Jailbreak Matrix and find the jailbreaking how-to suitable for your circumstances or you can check out Culf of Mac’s Jailbreak Superguide. Regardless of the option you choose you can jailbreak most iOS devices in no time at all.
Is your iOS device jailbroken or unlocked? What circumstances drove you to wanting to do that in the first place? Tell us all about it in the comments.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDj_Q2HuhPw&feature=player_embedded
Although there are already quite a few iOS 4 jailbreaks out there, they don’t work on some devices like the third generation iPod Touch (MC), and — of course — the veritable iPhone 4.
The good news, of course, is that the indefatigable Dev Team is already hard at work on a new jailbreak that will support all iDevices under iOS 4.0.1, including the iPhone 4.
The new jailbreak will be very much like the 3.1.3 ‘Spirit’ jailbreak. Unfortunately, though, it’s not quite ready for prime time.
According to the Twitter feed of one of the most vocal members of the Dev Team, their iOS 4.0.1 jailbreak has been delayed because of issues with FaceTime on jailbroken devices, noting there’s no point in releasing a half-assed jailbreak if some of the best new features don’t work entirely right.
Rest assured, though: a jailbreak for the iPhone 4 is coming. It’s just a matter of patience.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKxMuwq22sM&feature=player_embedded
With its excellent 720p video recording capabilities, the iPhone 4 is sure to gain a proper third-party steadicam sooner or later, but if you’re as impatient as Spencer Watson, you can build yourself a perfectly functional rig out of spare parts you’ve got lying around at home… or buy them straight from his online store. Looks steady enough to shoot my Evil Dead fan film, that’s for sure.
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So apparently, that iPhone DSLR mount we posted on Friday wouldn’t actually work in real life, but that’s not to say that hooking a SLR lens up to your iPhone 4 is total madness: the guys over at vid-atlantic did just that, hooking their iPhone 4 up with a Canon EF 50mm f1.8 lens, and the resulting video is striking: for all of the mock-ups and rigs going around right now of SLRs Frankensteined together with iPhone 4s, I didn’t actually know the quality of the resulting footage would look so impressive. Impractically impressive, sure, but impressive none the less!
Once infamous Hackintosh manufacturer Psystar’s name is popping up again in the newsfeeds. That’s discordant enough to have me tapping the flux capacitor trephined into my right temporal lobe like a faulty odometer: is it somehow 2009 again?
But nope, Psystar’s well and truly back after filing an Opening Brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking them to overrule the order that has prevented the company from making Mac clones.
According to the Mac Observer, Psystar’s strategy is “getting the court to adopt a radical revision of the Copyright Misuse doctrine that would in effect destroy copyright and force all copyrighted works to be licensed.”
This gorgeous pinhole camera on Etsy isn’t just elegantly simple in its design, but its made out of an old iPhone box. Load a standard 35mm film reel into its spool and you’ll be able to take simple pinhole snaps with the best of shoebox toting grade schoolers. It even has a built-in advance and rewind reel, enabling you to “shoot a picture, advance to the next frame, use the entire roll of film, rewind it back into the canister and take it to the drug store for processing!” Who needs iPhoto?
The iPhone 4 already takes some of the best smartphone snapshots around, but it’s no match for a DSLR. No worry, though: the guys over at Hypebeast just paired the iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens through a Manfrotto pocket tripod mount.
The end result? Probably worse photos than the iPhone 4 took before. But until smartphones get DSLR-style CMOSes (improbable until someone figures out how to shrink a CMOS without making the pixels less sensitive to light) and lenses (pfft), this kind of Frankenstein rig is probably the most that serious iPhone 4 shutterbugs can hope for.
Laurent Bourrelly, who likes to collect a few Apple-related things, had a great idea for a USB memory stick: how about make one out of some old Mac junk?
Here’s the result: the command key stick. If you want to make your own, Laurent has published some instructions – they’re in French, but you’ll be fine with just the pictures.
Then again, if you can read French, you might enjoy Laurent’s blog about all things Apple: pomme-c.
The JooJoo Tablet has had a long and troubled history. Originally a project by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to build a $200 tablet and called the CrunchPad, the JooJoo came into being when its outsourced Singaporean developers violated their contract and decided to cut Arrington out and sell the tablet themselves… a mere month before Apple unveiled the iPad at a similar price point.
By March 30th, only 90 JooJoo tablets had been sold. But if you happen to have one of those 90 JooJoos, good news: you can now install OS X on it. None too surprising — the JooJoo boasts an Atom processor, which is compatible with Snow Leopard — but why would you even want to? OS X is an even worse tablet operating system than Windows 7, let alone the finger-based custom Linux distro the JooJoo ships with.
But hey, if you’re the kind of person who was willing to drop $500 on the JooJoo when you could have bought an iPad, you’re probably already prone to some truly questionable decision making,
Yesterday, we posted an iBook that had been hollowed out and modded into a working iPad keyboard dock.
Today? The same concept, but accomplished far more elegantly with a vintage Mac Classic… complete with a custom MacOS desktop to keep things appropriately retro.
This antique iBook has been hollowed out and transformed into a working iPad keyboard dock, with a new Apple aluminum keyboard replacing the iBook’s and the iPad itself nuzzled into the iBook’s LCD display hollow, connected together through the umbilical of the official iPad Camera Connection Kit.
This user hack is a bit of a kludge, but we don’t care: we love it anyway. Sure, it can’t close without scratching the iPad’s display, and it would be even cooler if the iPad charged when the iBook was plugged into the wall socket. It reminds us of Lenovo’s now-cancelled Ideapad U1 hybrid tablet/notebook, and makes us wistful for the day Cupertino itself will try to merge the iPad with the MacBook into a single iBook-like device. We can dream!
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yO2KQHkt4A&feature=player_embedded
If you’re looking for a little project to pursue this Memorial Day, word comes down the pipeline that installing Android on your iPhone 2G or 3G is now easier than ever, thanks to the automated iPhodroid application.
Earlier methods of installing Android on the iPhone were rather complicated, but this new method only requires a jailbroken iPhone running firmware 3.1.2 (in other words, jailbroken using PwnageTool, RedSn0W or Blackra1n and not Spirit), OpenSSH installed with the “alpine” password, MacFuse and the iPhodroid software. Connect your iPhone, run iPhodroid and five minutes later, you’ll have a dual-boot iPhone running the two best mobile operating systems on the market. Shiny.\
[via 9to5Mac]
Boxee, the innovative software solution that puts the Internet on your television, has long been among the brightest lights in the strange hinterland inhabited by users of AppleTV.
Friday, the company announced a new partnership with Wolfgang’s Vault, the virtual motherlode of live music recordings, that immediately sweetens the pot for those intrepid souls who dare to invite the Internet into the living room.
Lest one mistake Wolfgang’s Vault for a sparkly bauble dangled at aging Boomers and Hippies lost in nostalgia for the Summer of Love, the company also offers access to plenty of current music, including high-fidelity recordings from artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Ani Difranco, Sean Hayes and Vampire Weekend.
Some people are hesitant to jailbreak anything because they worry it will ruin their device. Think of jailbreaking as an addition to your device and not a substitution. Jailbreaking is the only way to unlock some awesome features on your iPad. Earlier this week I walked you through on how to jailbreak your iPad using the Spirit jailbreak. Now I will tell you why you should jailbreak your iPad.
Got an iPhone 3G and looking for a project to occupy yourself this weekend? The binaries of hacker David Wang’s Android port for the iPhone 3G has now been released.
Android on the iPhone is still more of a “because you can” proposition than recommended for day-to-day use, but follow Wang’s somewhat complicated guide and you’ll soon have an iPhone that dual-boots into Android.
There’s some drawbacks, of course: Wang has yet to implement any sort of power management into Android for iPhone, so your fully-charged handset will only last about an hour before it shuts off. Also, if you want to switch back to the iPhone OS, you need to do a reboot.
Still, if you’re interested in what the mobile space looks like from the other side, Android for iPhone looks like a worthwhile little hack.
It’s common knowledge that plugging a regular SIM into the iPad is as simple as cleaving it down to microSIM dimensions… but what if you want to use the unlimited AT&T iPad data plan on your iPhone? Over at HiJinks Inc, they’ve posted a great guide to doing just that.
The same hackers who got the Android operating system running in a dual-boot configuration on the first and second generation iPhones are now working on porting the hack to the iPod Touch.
In a new blog post, Linux on the iPhone is reporting that the binaries of the iPod Touch port are coming soon for jailbreakers to play with.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB9gQgaVJsw&feature=player_embedded
The iPad Camera Connection Kit has always been an intriguing accessory, not just because it allows the iPad to directly interface with cameras and SD cards, but because it seemed like a ripe target for hackers to add third-party support for other USB accessories once the jailbreaks were in. In fact, when it was first announced, I wondered how long it would take someone to figure out how to get their iPad reading data off a USB hard drive.
Not very long, it turns out. Max Shay has just posted an in depth walkthrough on how to hook up an external hard drive to your jailbroken iPad.
It’s not simple: you need a split USB cable to supply enough juice to the hard drive and an external computer with a terminal application to fool the iPad into mounting the external storage. But as a proof of concept, it’s pretty interesting stuff: I wonder how long its going to take hackers to figure out how to use the SD dongle in the iPad Camera Connection Kit to give the iPad expandable storage.
Yes, we have an official replacement for the MacQuarium as the best use for a 25-year-old Mac: Cut a slot into it so it can serve as the ultimate past-meets-future iPad stand. Great work from Flickr user Mapgoblin, though you might want to consider washing the front of your old Mac if you decide to emulate him.
(And yes, I know the photographer thought it was a Mac Plus — I’m pretty sure it’s actually a 512k Fat Mac)
The “Spirit” iPad/iPhone jailbreak is available for download from the Dev Team. You can download Spirit here.
The free, untethered jailbreak is available for Mac and Windows, and works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch on firmware 3.1.2, 3.1.3, or 3.2. It’s a quick, easy, one-click process, according to QuickPwn, although the Cydia app is buggy. Just download the jailbreak software, plug in your device, and your iPad or iPhone is instantly recognized. Hit the “Jailbreak” button and you’re done.
Note: Before performing a jailbreaking make absolutely sure you’ve got a backup of your SHSH blobs so that if anything goes wrong you can restore to 3.1.2. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Spirit is not a carrier unlock (which allows you to use unauthorized wireless carriers like T-Mobile).
The Dev Team highly recommend syncing with iTunes before trying this jailbreak. If anything goes wrong, you will have to restore the device. It’s especially iffy on the iPad.
Note: On iPad, all this is still sort of beta. Some packages in Cydia, not designed for iPad, might screw up your system and require you to restore. Be careful. (And no, Cydia’s appearance is not final.)
Dev Team: Spirit Freed.
As expected, the iPad 3G has already been jailbroken — only a few hours after its launch.
MuscleNerd of iPhone Dev Team posted pictures and a video to YouTube showing a jailbroken iPad 3G running Cydia.
MuscleNerd used the “Spirit” jailbreak, an software tool that promises untethered unlocking of Apple’s recent devices (iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, and iPads). The Dev Team has promised to release Spirit to the public soon. In preparation, be sure to backup your SHSH Blobs. You can find a step-by-step guide from Redmond Pie here.
Here is MuscleNerd’s video showing Cydia running on an iPad 3G.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFmy1rolqpw&feature=player_embedded
Via Redmond Pie. Thanks Taimur.
Although individuals have already demonstrated working hacks of Apple’s iPad, it seems like it’s taking them forever to actually release a working jailbreak… and if you’re an iPod Touch owner, it seems like it’s been even longer since the first working, untethered 3.1.3 jailbreak was demonstrated, only to never be released.
It looks now like everyone has something to look forward. According to the iPhone Dev Team’s blog, they intend on releasing an iPadjailbreak sometime soon after the iPad 3G goes on sale.
We’ve shown you a first generation iPhone dual-booting into Android OS, but want to do it yourself? You’re in luck! Here’s an easy to follow seventy step guide, simple enough for that even a drunk, googly-eyed neonate could figure it out.
We’re slightly kidding: a lot of this instruction list is devoted to things like setting up virtualized Ubuntu installs, so it’s really only fifty steps. Still, that’s an order of magnitude too many steps for a guy whose technical sophistication tops out at dragging the install icon to his Applications folder.
Are you Cylon enough to attempt it though? God speed, and let us know how you get along in the comments.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM
Yerga Cheffe figured out how to turn his old Apple IIe into a dedicated Twitter machinee, not only displaying tweets in that gloriously pixel blurred Apple II font but blowing up the user’s profile picture into a glorious 8-bit portrait. The venerable IIe is too underpowered to actually run a networking stack or Twitter client, so it’s only the display that is being used, but even so: this is what Twitter would have looked like as an 80s door program.
[via Make
