I decided to update my iPhone to the new 3G model for a number of reasons

* GPS

* 3G data

* A locally supported legit phone

So far I’m very happy with the upgrade, Viv has inherited my previous phone which I pwned and updated to 2.0 on the weekend.

I have definitely noticed a difference in battery life, on my 2G iPhone with a heavy day of surfing the web and reading emails the battery is at 75% by the end of the day, on the 3G it is a little under 50%

I used the GPS continuously for around 40 mins on Sunday and by the end of the day the battery was down to around 20%

Strangely I rarely use my Phone for actual calls, for me it’s more of a handheld computer than a phone.

I haven’t done the standard unboxing shots so I’m sure Steve is reserving a place for me in hell for blaspheming but I can live with that.

I did have one hiccup worth noting… I bought the phone on Thursday and found that on my was home on Thursday night it seemed to lose the ability to connect to the internet over the cell network. I would get a 3G or GPRS icon on the status bar as if it was connected but no internet apps would work.

I thought, damn I have to swap it for a new one after a couple of days but over the weekend I thought I would try a little poking around. I did a restore to the latest build of 2.0 (5A347), no luck… Then I thought, how about a fresh install and don’t restore settings from the last backup or sync contacts etc, ie fresh out of the box.

That did the trick of bringing it back to life, I can only imagine that some settings from the 2G backup messed it up. I’ve since synced the contacts etc back, the only things I lost were wi-fi & email settings, fav contacts in the “fav” phone page and sms history.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough for now, the upshot is I have a nice shiny new 3G phone and I’m happy with it, Apple haters please feel free to post comments to /dev/null

On the 24th of May 2008 at 4:14pm we welcomed yet another member to the extended Drysdale Collective.

My brother-in-law and his wife took delivery of their first child

Toby George Micheal

The labour and delivery went well and mother and baby are well, in fact they are home now and getting used to the new living arrangements.

Toby’s statistics are

Weight: 3.385kg
Length: 51cm
Head: 35.5cm

We wish Victor and Jen all the best with little Toby and look forward many years of adventures with him.

This brings the roster of cousins to

Connor, Michael, Lachlan, William, Jack and now Toby….

As you can image Seth and Callum are stoked at having yet another playmate.

After many failed attempts amongst the immediate family and friends there is finally a girl!!!!

Contgratulations to Shane & Jo on the birth of their daughter

Makayla Natasha

Born 03:14 on 22/04/2008, weighing 3.36kg (7.7lb) and measuring 52cm

Mum, Dad and Baby are reportedly doing well. I’ll a post a picture once I have one.

At least now we have someone to offload the piles of girls clothes we had amassed on the off chance of having a girl ourselves. 

I wonder if I should start an iPhone category

I recently used the Pwn Project tools to make a custom 1.1.4 firmware that is activated, jailbroken etc, it all worked well and after restoring the firmware to my iPhone everything “Just Worked” except the Mail application.

I have seen this issue before where you start Mail and it immediately crashes, the only way I have fixed it in the past is to do another restore. This time I thought I’d poke around a little first.

I logged into my phone via SSH and found that I could start the Mail application as root with no problem, although it acted as though it was a new installation. Starting it as “mobile” caused the expected crash behavior.

Poking around in the filesystem I found that the directory that mail uses to store its preferences

/var/mobile/Library/Mail

was owned by root:wheel and had permissons that would not allow applications launched as the mobile user to write to it..

# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 272 Apr 7 08:06 Mail

It seems that the only issues I have on my hacked iPhone relate to permissions problems so I changed the ownership of the directory (and it’s contents) to mobile:wheel

# chown -R mobile:wheel Mail

The ownership and permission should look like this.

# ls -la

drwxr-xr-x 5 mobile wheel 306 Apr 7 07:58 Mail

After that Mail worked as normal.

At 05:45 on March 24th, 2008 after an "Easy" 4 hour labour my sister Rachel gave birth to her 3rd boy

William Vincent Whyte

Weight: 3.750 Kg
Length: 51 cm
Head Circumference: 37 cm

Mother and baby are doing well….

This takes the count in my immediate family to 6 boys, 0 girls…  & Viv’s family to 4 boys, 0 girls…

Viv still has a pile of girls clothes waiting for a taker!!!!

I recently updated my iPhone’s firmware to 1.1.3. Last weekend I took the boys to the park and used my phone to take a few photos (or so I thought), unfortunately when I got home there were no photos on the phone….

I searched the web and found a blog post and two Apple Support threads describing pretty much the same issue as I was seeing, unfortunately without a definitive fix….

"Topic : Camera will not save pictures to phone after snapping photo"

"Topic : My iphone will not save the photos I have taken with the phone"

"My iPhone Ran Outa Film?"

Even though I rarely use the camera, the fact that it wasn’t working pissed me off so I decided to look around in the phone and see what I could see. Luckily I’m an old-school Unix guy so the iPhone directory structures and commands are familiar to me… 

Anyway, after too much time spent poking around I found the problem… The directory that the camera saves into was missing and the parent directory was not writeable by the "mobile" user so even if the camera app can recreate the missing directory it was out of luck. I replaced the missing directory and fixed the parent directory permissions and it’s all working again….

I’ll post the details below, I also posted to the blog and Apple Support threads.

——8<——–

I recently updated to 1.1.3 (unlocked, jailbreak) and started experiencing the same problem. I rarely ever used the camera so I don’t know if it just started in 1.1.3.

Anyway it was really annoying me so I started poking around via ssh and found that if I ran the camera application manually as root then it seemed to work just fine.

/Applications/MobileSlideShow.app/MobileSlideShow –launchedFromSB –role Camera

I could take photos and look at them, they wouldn’t appear in iPhoto though. If I ran the camera as the "mobile" user which is the normal setting the problem would occur and I would see an error message each time I took a photo

/Applications/MobileSlideShow.app/MobileSlideShow –launchedFromSB –role Camera
CGImageDestinationCreate destination parameter is nil

This lead me to think that the problem is related to permissions as the behavior differed depending on the logged in user.

using the "find" command to see what files were changed today…

find / -mtime -0

I found that there were what looked to be photo files in the directory

/private/var/root/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

Now the camera preferences file has a reference to "DCFLastDirectoryNumber" and a value of "100", looking at the Media directory for the mobile user showed no "100APPLE" directory so I created the following directory

 /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

mkdir /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

and changed the ownership to the mobile user

chown mobile:wheel /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE

and now the camera is working again…..

I also noticed that the parent directory

/private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM

was not writeable by the mobile user so if the directory was deleted then the problem would occur again so I made in writeable by all

chmod 777 /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM

Yes I know this poses a security risk, but then the only users on the system are root and mobile and I want them both to be able to write to the DCIM directory.

After the fix I was able to take photos, import them into iPhoto and delete the originals with no problems.

Note: This fix is maybe 10 minutes old so no guarantees. Also you need ssh access to the phone so only people with hacked phones can use this fix….

I hope it works for some of you at least…

Cheers
Dan
——8<—–

Thanks to the magic of Salary Sacrifice and a friend on holidays in the US, I decided to buy myself a Birthday Present…

The Jesus Phone aka iPhone……

The phone arrived with firmware 1.0.2, I followed an excellent set of instructions at

http://www.winandmac.com/mobile/iphone/ultimate-guide-to-unlock-iphone-111-for-free/

to upgrade it to 1.1.1, jailbreak, activate and unlock it. I’m using it happily on Vodafone and all functions are working just fine. The only problems I have are that my custom ringtone keeps disappearing and the 24 hour time setting randomly turns off.

The phone is dangerous, once you play with it you will NEED one, it’s no wonder they sold 1.12 Million units last quarter. Not bad for a first entry into an insanely competitive market….

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Early this evening at approx 5:32pm, after an insanely long (18 hours) and ultimately unproductive labour, my sister Vicky gave birth to her first child.

• Weight: 3.65 kg
• Length: 50 cm
• Head: 36.5 cm

Special mention goes to the Dad Paul, who, even though he has a tendancy to faint at the sight of hospital equipment managed to hang in for virtually all of the proceedings, only ducking out for the c-section….

I’ll post a picture when I manage to take one. [Update: Done!!!]

The race is on between Rachel and Jen to see who can have the first girl??

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I was reading an interesting post on two new Blu-ray releases.

It seems that there are issues with BD+ on existing units. And of course since Ethernet ports are optional for Blu-ray players it is non-trivial to perform a firmware update.

I can see some punters getting pretty pissed off trying to update their players, this can only serve to help the HD DVD camp.

All of this comes about because Sony were well behind HD DVD on finalising their spec and didn’t want to let the HD DVD guys enjoy the lead. So, they rushed the standard to market without finalising it and now it looks like it is going to bite them in the ass….

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As I posted earlier, we bought a new TV to replace our ageing 43" rear projection unit. It was delivered Saturday and I’ve set it up including a total rebuild of all the gear in the A/V cabinet, I can finally close the rear door again!!!!

Here’s how she looks in place

It’s funny, the "old" tv appears totally unwatchable now, the image is blury and washed out, the new machine is bright, crisp and clean.

Viv is well impressed and ranks it as one of our best purchases, she even watched Australian Idol in real time the other night so she could watch it in High Def…

Despite what my most A/V obsessed friend thought, the new TV hasn’t convinced me to stop watching "Channel BT" content ( in all its low res, compressed glory ) in favor of HD…

Maybe one day I’ll get an HD PVR and we’ll see what happens then, but for now I like to keep up to date with my shows

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