Month: September 2009

I have been playing Wolfenstein for the 360 for the last week and was having a good time until all of a sudden whenever I loaded a save game past my last one the game would completely lockup and I would have to power cycle the 360. Some googling revealed this is a known problem if you get more than 80% of the items in the game. Being a completion-ist I hit it the 80% mark pretty quickly. So now my options are to:

1. Wait for a patch
2. Start a new game and don’t collect that many items

I have decided to wait and hopefully it gets fixed soon. It’s a wonder how this made it past the Q&A process.

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First of let me say that Netflix streaming is awesome. I have XBOX Live Gold so I can use my 360 to watch it on my TV. My wife and I have been watching Murder, She Wrote. I love mysteries and the lead character, J.B. Fletcher, is like a female version of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s nice to see a program with older people in it. Seems that all the TV lately is all about the young people. It’s also great to see a world with no internet or cell phones.

Personally after watching a few episodes I figured the F.B.I. would hunt her down as being a serial killer since everywhere she goes someone dies and she “solves” the crime

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I have been an iPhone user since February when I got the 8GB 3G model. I love it. I call it my tricorder. It has everything a geek on the go needs. I have about nine screens of applications and games.

A lot of my friends also have iPhones and most of theirs are jail broken and run the Cydia app store. I thought maybe I was missing out so I decided to take the plunge and jail break my phone.

There is a lot of documentation out there and I was a little nervous about doing it. I wanted to be sure I had the latest and most up-to-date information.

A Google query here and there revealed two primary methods. Every time I searched for “iphone unlock” ads for automaticiphoneunlocker.com were shown. Its looked good. I pay $29.99 and download a piece of software that does all the work for me.

Well there is a sucker born every minute and it was my time to be the sucker.

I paid the $29.99 and instead of getting a piece of software that does it automatically I got instructions and multiple downloads that pretty much mimicked everything else out there. Now the instructions were so detailed even a noob could follow them but still it was not automatic.

I had to follow this complicated 20 plus step process that involved wiping my phone and deleting everything on it. (I had backups so I wasn’t worried).

The whole process took about 30 minutes quite a bit longer than the five minutes the ad promised.

Okay so my phone was now unlocked and I had this Cydia app store icon – now what? Well that was the end of the instructions. At this point I had to do more googling and reading up on Cydia to see what exactly I could do with it.

In a nutshell its Debian apt-get with a nice front end similar to Synaptic on Ubuntu.

Okay what to install? Well more googling revealed something called winterboard which is a theme manager. From there I installed some different themes and a category application.

All of a sudden it was 1997 again and I was playing with Enlightenment (an awesome window manager for X). For its time there was nothing cooler. Gnome and KDE were babies and if you wanted something “cool” you ran it.I was back in that mindset. What looks cool. Oh a neat clock. New icons! Look at that awesome wallpaper.

After about an hour playing with the themes and Cydia I realized that one of the reasons I love Apple computers and the iPhone so much is it just works (and it looks good in its own right too).

I have long since given up making my desktop and windows look “cool”. I am firmly in the function over form camp now.I don’t want to tweak my phone endlessly. I don’t want to worry about upgrades breaking everything. I didn’t want to be cool; I just wanted an iPhone.

So I un-unlocked my phone.

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