This whole process is thanks to the efforts of the group of hackers who call themselves the iPhone Dev Team. These guys volunteer hundreds of hours of their time so that iPhone owners around the world can make full use of their phones. They are the Mother Theresas of iPhones. They are awesome.

What does “Jailbreaking” do?

Jailbreaking allows you to install software on your iPhone that was not approved by Apple and is thus not available in the App Store.

Example of a custom theme

What is “Unlocking”?

Unlocking refers to removing the restriction on your iPhone that limits it to a particular cellular service provider (a.k.a. “carrier”). For example, if you buy an iPhone from AT&T, you won’t be able to subsequently switch to a different (GSM) service provider, unless your iPhone is unlocked.

Being able to switch carriers is very useful if you travel, because you can then buy a pay-as-you-go or prepaid SIM card at your new destination, and put it into your iPhone for local service, at local rates. This is usually far cheaper than incurring roaming charges from your provider at home.

Do NOT upgrade to iPhone OS 3.1, Yet

You can find out what version of iPhone OS you have by going to Settings -> General -> Version on your iPhone. If you buy a new iPhone today, it probably came with version 3.0 or 3.0.1. Leave it that way. Do not click the “Download and Update” button that iTunes prompts you for the first time that you plug the phone into your computer.

To unlock your iPhone 3GS, you need iPhone OS version 3.0 or 3.0.1; you must never have installed version 3.1 from Apple. If you have, at any time, updated to version 3.1 via an official release from Apple, then you cannot jailbreak or unlock your phone until some indefinite time in the future.

If you installed the official iPhone OS version 3.1, you will have to wait for someone to discover a new software bug that will allow for jailbreaking and unlocking. One may never be discovered. One might be discovered tomorrow. Nobody knows.

Step One: iPhone 3GS Jailbreak

Assuming that you have an iPhone 3GS with OS version 3.0 or 3.0.1:

1. Download the iPhone 3.0 firmware from Apple. You’ll find links to all firmwares here.
2. Download redsn0w from the DevTeam. Download links are near the bottom of the article.
3. Open redsn0w, click the Browse button, locate the iPhone2,1_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw file, and click the Open button.
4. Click the Next button in redsn0w. It will prepare the jailbreak, then ask if you’d like Cydia and/or Icy installed. Select at least Cydia, and click Next.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions (turn off your phone, etc). It will say “Done!” before the process is actually finished. Watch your phone, and do not disconnect it from your computer.

Your phone is now jailbroken, but still not unlocked. If you had OS version 3.0.1, you will still have version 3.0.1, only now it also has the Cydia App installed.

Step Two: Unlock Your iPhone 3GS

1. Now that you’ve jailbroken your iPhone, you should see that the Cydia App has been added to your screen. Start it. The first time you start Cydia, it will do some “rearranging”, and restart the springboard, causing your iPhone’s screen to lock.
2. Unlock your screen, and start Cydia. At this point, it is a good idea to update any packages that need updating (it should tell you if there are available updates). After updating, Cydia will quit again.
3. Start Cydia again, and click the Search icon in the bottom-right corner. Search for “ultrasn”. The 3rd match should be “ultrasn0w”. Select it, and click Install. It will present a Reboot button after installing. Click the Reboot button.

Your iPhone should now be unlocked, and you can use it with any SIM card. Happy traveling! :)

New! Upgrade to iPhone OS 3.1

As of October 2nd, 2009, the DevTeam gave us the gift of PwnageTool 3.1.3, which allows you to create a hacked 3.1 firmware for jailbroken iPhones. Note that if you already have 3.1 installed, and it isn’t jailbroken, this is not for you. Re-read the “Do NOT upgrade to iPhone OS 3.1, Yet” section, above.

If you have already jailbroken your iPhone, the new PwnageTool allows you to upgrade to 3.1 safely, maintaining your jailbreak and carrier unlock.

iClarified has posted a tutorial on how to do this here.

Newer! iPhone OS 3.1.2

On October 8th, Apple released version 3.1.2 of iPhone OS. The DevTeam says:

If you care about your jailbreak and unlock, don’t update your device – 3G and 3G(S) owners should pay particular attention to this warning.

* PwnageTool and redsn0w are not yet compatible with 3.1.2
* There is no estimated release time for compatible tools (please don’t bug us about this).

Newest! iPhone OS 3.1 is cracked!

October 13th, 2009, the DevTeam has released PwnageTool version 3.1.4. The new version allows for unlocking version 3.1, making much of what I said in this article obsolete.

It also allows for updating to version 3.1.2 on your already jailbroken iPhone. Get it and read all of the details here.

Fortunately for customers of underhanded carriers that disabled the APN option in the iPhone Settings, Apple has provided the iPhone Configuration Utility, which allows one to customize the APN. For your convenience, I’ve created a basic configuration profile that does just one thing: sets the APN to “NULL”, so that your phone won’t be able to use your cellular provider’s Internet service. Here it is. Note: do not rename it to end with .txt.  It should end with “.mobileconfig”.

Use a computer to e-mail it to yourself, as an attachment. If you are using Microsoft IE (Windows), download this zipped version, since IE seems to mangle the original file. You’ll have to unzip the file before e-mailing it to yourself. Alternatively you can get a better web browser here.

To install it on your phone, simply open the email on your iPhone. When you click on the attachment in the email, it will prompt you about applying the new configuration, and warn you about no trusted signature (I didn’t pay Verisign). Once the profile is installed, it won’t be possible for your iPhone to use your carrier’s network for Internet access. If you wish to re-enable cellular data access, all you need to do is open Settings -> General -> Profile, and remove the profile. The phone might require a reboot after removing the profile.

Enjoy!

From what I’ve read, Apple’s application firewall is similar to Little Snitch, except that it involves digital signatures built into software packages, and it doesn’t give you any feedback as to what your applications are doing on the network. Apple’s application firewall gives software developers the ability to add a digital signature to their software that automatically grants permission for their applications to open ports on your computer’s firewall. Apple also explicitly states that their application firewall does not prevent outgoing traffic, so it can’t prevent software from “calling home”. They say that "you might be able to block" outgoing traffic for an application — not exactly reassuring.

If you want real control over what applications are allowed to access the network, and you want to be informed about what your computer is doing, get Little Snitch. Or, if you want a free but less sophisticated way to control who can access your computer over the network, and how, you should configure the other firewall that comes with Leopard.

* * Update for Leopard * * (02/11/2007) I did a clean install of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) this week, and found that Apple still hasn’t added the Nokia 6300 to the list of supported phones! However, there is now a free plugin, which I tried and it works perfectly on Leopard.

Dissatisfied with the local selection of mobile handsets here in Canada, I bought a shiny new Nokia 6300 via EBay. Being a technology geek, I checked before buying to see if the device was compatible with my computer, and on the face of it, it appears that Mac OS X’s iSync does not natively support the Nokia 6300. However, a closer look revealed that several other Nokia phones that run the exact same operating system as the Nokia 6300 are supported in OS X, so therefore, the 6300 is actually supported, iSync just doesn’t know it yet.

So I ordered the phone, knowing that it is just a matter of time before it appears in the list of supported phones. I was excited to take my new toy out of the box, and I realized that it has been a long time since I actually bought a new technology gadget. My money has been going into outdoor sports equipment since I moved to the Rockies, four years ago. So it was a bit like Christmas morning, and I explored the new phone obsessively for the rest of the evening.

I quickly realized that I have quite a few contacts in my Address Book, many of whom have multiple numbers, e-mail addresses and IM identies, and adding them manually was going to take a lot more time than I was willing to put into it. Nor could I wait for Apple to catch up.

So I started Googling for other solutions, and discovered this German site, which sells an “iSync plugin” for bleeding edge phones that aren’t yet natively supported. It was tough navigating the site, which has a bunch of broken links and not much English. Babelfish helped, but the checkout screen has image files of words instead of words themselves, so the machine translation wouldn’t work.

I’m glad that the purchase didn’t workout, because I discovered this forum post, which describes how to add a phone to the list of models that iSync supports. It turns out that it’s fairly trivial to do:

Quit iSync if its running. Right-click (control-click, for you one-button mousers) on the iSync application in your /Applications folder, and select “Show Package Contents”. Navigate through the folders to Contents -> PlugIns -> ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice -> Contents -> PlugIns -> PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin -> Contents -> Resources. Now, back-up the MetaClasses.plist file by clicking on it, and select File->Duplicate from the Finder menu.

** Update: for those who aren’t interested in carrying out the simple procedure outlined below, you can put this file into the Resources folder, and unzip it (by double-clicking it). Overwrite the existing file when prompted. Then continue reading below, starting at “Before you pair your Nokia 6300″…

Next, open MetaClasses.plist with a text editor.

What you need to do is find a phone in the list with the same operating system as your phone. The Nokia 6300 runs Series 40, 3rd edition, with Bluetooth and USB. The 6280 fits the bill, as indicated by the string “family.com.nokia.series40.3rdEd.bus.usb-bt”. So I made a copy of it’s XML entry, did a search & replace to change 6280 to 6300, and inserted the new entry below it. Here is my Nokia 6300 definition.

The next step is adding an icon for the phone. You’ll see the file name mentioned in the XML definition: NOK6300.tiff. The icons are 60×60 pixel tiff files with transparent back-grounds. Here is the icon file that I used for the 6300. Put it in the Resources folder, along with your MetaClasses.plist file.

Before you pair your Nokia 6300 using Bluetooth, you need to unpair your old phone, if you have one set up on your computer. Open the Bluetooth preferences panel in System Preferences, click the Devices tab, and delete other phones. Close System Preferences.

It should work now. Save and close the MetaClasses.plist file and start up iSync. Make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your phone. Select “Add Device” from the iSync Devices menu. iSync should find your Nokia 6300, and display the icon that you added. Enjoy!

mod_authnz_ldap.c:40:2: #error mod_authnz_ldap requires APR-util to have
LDAP support built in. To fix add --with-ldap to ./configure.

mod_authnz_ldap.c:62: error: parse error before "deref_options"
mod_authnz_ldap.c:62: warning: no semicolon at end of struct or union
mod_authnz_ldap.c:76: error: parse error before '}' token
mod_authnz_ldap.c:76: warning: data definition has no type or storage
class
mod_authnz_ldap.c:92: error: parse error before '*' token
mod_authnz_ldap.c:92: warning: data definition has no type or storage
class
mod_authnz_ldap.c:93: error: parse error before '*' token
...

I’ve run into this on both Apache 2.0 and 2.2, on Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. When this first happened, back when Apache2 first came out, I thought, fine, the code is young, and its a bug to be worked out. But here we are at version 2.2.3, and the problem is still around. The advice printed in the error: “To fix add –with-ldap to ./configure” makes it even more frustrating, because of course, you did have that switch in configure.

The work-around is to build APR & APR-util, which is part of the Apache2 httpd source code, before the rest of it, then re-make httpd. It’s fairly straightforward. Configure httpd as you’d like it and run make. When the build bombs out, as above, do this:

cd srclib/apr
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-threads \
--enable-other-child
make

(... compile ... compile ... compile ...)

cd ../apr-util
make clean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --with-apr=../apr \
--with-ldap-lib=/usr/lib --with-ldap-include=/usr/include \
--with-ldap=ldap
make

(... compile ... compile ... compile ...)

cd ../..
make

Adjusting, of course, for your directory and option preferences. I had one instance compiling apache 2.0.58 on solaris 2.9, where the build failed a second time, after the above. Changing back into the apr directory and re-configuring and re-making, then back to the root httpd source dir and re-making, fixed it.

It would be nice if the Apache team could create a Makefile that compiled apr and apr-util in the correct order so that this wouldn’t be necessary!

However, today I decided to try researching the problem a little bit first, because as you all know, Google knows everything. I of course was not the only person to experience this problem, and as it turns out, there is an easy fix for it. I found the solution at this ZDnet post, but it is for MS Windows users.

On my Mac, the solution was essentially the same, but I used the command line to quickly locate and remove the problem files. Here are the steps that I followed:

1. Plug-in the iPod. An icon for it should show up on your desktop. If it doesn’t, then the file-browsing function, aka “disk mode”, is probably not enabled, and I forget how I enabled it in the first place, but I’m sure that Google will be able to tell you how to enable it.

2. Open the Terminal (its in the Utilities folder). Run the command “df”, to see where your ipod is mounted. For total newbs, running a command consists of typing it and pressing enter, in the Terminal window.

$ df
Filesystem                Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
...
/dev/disk2s3               28G    14G    13G    52%    /Volumes/BrentPod

As you can see, my iPod is mounted on /Volumes/BrentPod (this dir is known as the “mount point”). Change to the Device directory on your iPod running the command:

cd /Volumes/BrentPod/iPod_Control/Device

substituting “BrentPod” for the name of your own mount point.

Remove the Preferences and radio files by running the command:

rm Preferences radio; cd

3. Eject the iPod either by pressing the eject icon in iTunes, or by dragging the iPod icon from your desktop to the Trash.

4. Reboot the iPod by holding down the middle button and the menu button. Problem solved!

The embedded music is from Johnny Cash’s Ragged Old Flag album of 1974. Its amazing that, 32 years ago, he recognized that ‘we’re pouring every kind of evil in the sea’, yet the practice continues to this day. Cash was right: future generations would have to pay the penalty, and the bill, it seems, is due now.

(Click image to enlarge)

The highly toxic Red Tide normally blooms every decade in Florida’s Gulf Coast, but recently it has been coming back every year, and staying around for longer periods. With it comes piles of dead fish along the shores, brain-damaged and/or dead marine mammals, and an ocean breeze that causes severe respiratory problems and other illnesses in humans. Florida has seen a “19% increase in cases of pneumonia, a leading cause of death among the elderly.” Neurotoxins from the red algae have been detected in the air up to 3 miles inland.

The algae is fed by the billions of gallons of partially treated human sewage that we pump into the ocean, and by run-off of fertilizers from coastland farms.

Hundreds of visitors from the Midwest and New England have posted questions and complaints on websites, seeking to learn why, after a short beach vacation on the west coast of Florida, they suffered weeks of coughing, bronchial infections, dizziness, lethargy and other symptoms.

If you think breathing the toxic air sounds bad, try a mouthful of the algae-water directly, like this surfer did:

“I felt like I inhaled a garbage bag,” said Purdy, 33, a former high school swimming champion. “It locked up my lungs and throat like a paralysis.” The seconds ticked by. “I was thinking, ‘Is this the way it’s going to end?’ ”

Eventually, he managed to sneak in a little air. It was like sucking through a cocktail straw. He made his way to shore but didn’t feel much better until emergency medical technicians hooked him up to oxygen.

The dead fish that wash up on the shores are also a hazard to wildlife, and pets, that eat it. During one bloom of red tide, “local veterinarians treated 16 dogs — all twitching, vomiting and suffering from seizures. One died.” Pet owners in the area now know to keep them inside during a bloom. However, staying indoors isn’t enough: the toxin-rich air seeps in on the sea-side of the house, leaving “a metalic taste” in the back of the throat, and a dry cough that makes one sound “like a barking seal”.

Like the sea lions on the west coast, manatees, the “cows of the ocean”, are sucumbing to toxicity from algae around Florida. Greg Bossart, a veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, says the manatees are sentinels for human health: “[the manatee is] Florida’s 2,000-pound canary. We’ve opened a Pandora’s box of health issues.” Specifically, the manatees are dying because they inhale the air just above the algae, and the toxins in the air attack nerve tissue, causing their lungs to fill with blood.

Anyone want to go for a swim in the ocean?

Be sure to check out the videos and photography for Part 3 here.