Tag Archive for "apple" - scriptflipper.com

Posts Tagged ‘apple’

How I Killed My iPhone

March 22nd, 2009 | 1 comment

With the recent hype about iPhone 3.0 OS, I decided to jump the gun and try installing 3.0 in it’s beta stages on my own iPhone, which resulted in the death of my iPhone.

First, I downloaded the iPhone 3.0 restore file (iPhone1,2_3.0_7A238j_Restore.ipsw) via bit torrent and attempted to manually restore my iPhone from iTunes with the 3.0 file which was located on my desktop. Everything was going smoothly, it took a couple of minutes for the update to install on my iPhone then my phone restarts and I see this lovely screen in iTunes.

After doing some research I learned that in order to use the 3.0 beta OS you must be apart of the Apple Developers Program which came along with a price of $99/year for the standard package and $299/year for the enterprise. At this point I figured I’d just wait a couple months for the 3.0 OS to be released to the public and decided to restore my iPhone to latest backup which was that day, before I attempted the 3.0 upgrade. Unfortinuately there was no way to restore my iPhone from iTunes, so after a bit more research, I learned that by a specific key stroke I can reboot my iPhone in something called “Restore Mode” which will give me the option to restore my iPhone from iTunes from a file on my computer.

I was able to successfully restore the 2.2.1 OS on my iPhone but after the completion of the software update my phone would reboot as always and iTunes would give me the error below (1013). Apparently the baseband that comes with OS 3.0 won’t downgrade using any method on either the 2st Gen or iPhone 3G. There is no unlock for the new baseband (or the current one for that matter).

When you DFU restore to 2.2.1 iTunes will give you an error at the end (most likely 1015 or 1013) indicating a baseband/firmware mismatch.

So feeling pretty frustrated at this point, I decided I would just put 3.0 back on my iPhone and purchase the Developers Program from Apple. I filled out the application and at the end was notified that the Application has been submitted and I will be contacted by a representative within 5-7 business days. Meanwhile I have no phone, so I figured the best thing to do at this point would be to bring it in to the Apple Store and have them take a shot at recovering it.

Of course the Apple Store in the Fashion Show mall was busy and had no openings to see me until the following day. I was without my phone for over 24hours and it was pretty bad, but when I finally got it into the Apple Store, they attempted the same restore I did, failing as I did and ended up just replacing the device with a new one.

So all is well again and I guess I’ll just have to wait like everyone else for MMS, Landscape texts, Internet Tethering and copy & paste.

How Apple TV will replace my digital cable

February 8th, 2009 | no comments

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appletv I picked up a new toy at the Apple Store the other day. I was skeptical about it at first, since it doesn’t get the best reviews, nor is it the most popular Apple product, but so far I think it’s the perfect solution for me. I don’t watch much TV but when I do it’s usually pretty late at night and nothing actually good is on. For example I use to watch The Office every week, which airs at like 8/9PM on NBC problem is I’m never watching TV around that time to catch the new episodes. I know there are solutions, such as TiVO and DVR to accommodate me, but they come with monthly service fees and hardware rentals.

One of the first things I did after unpacking the Apple TV was hacked it using the following tutorial: Hack Your Apple TV With Boxee. It was a painless process and only took me 20 minutes to do. Now that I have installed the patch I can now watch any type of DRM free multimedia (e.g., DIVX, AVI, MKV, ISO and BIN) from any computer connected to my network. I can even play multimedia through internet streams (e.g. hulu, YouTube, podcast videos) which consist of a large collection of movies as well as many popular TV series. As long as you have a good internet connection, the video streaming works flawlessly and it’s nice to be able to browser through all the episodes of your favorite TV series and watch the latest episode from the series when you’re ready to watch it.

Even without hacking the Apple TV you can still rent or buy all new DVD titles and TV series for a reasonable price, but with the Boxee Patch you aren’t required to purchase anything, really. Another feature that comes with the Apple TV is the ability to share iTunes libraries on your network. So if you have a desktop computer on your network with all your music and videos, the Apple TV will make all the media available to you, similar to the Remote iPhone application. The Apple TV also makes it easy to stay up to date with your favorite Podcasts, if you enjoy a specific podcast, you can set it in your favorites and watch the latest episode as soon as it comes out.

Now I just need to find a good Home Theatre system and I’ll be set up nicely in my home office.

Trick your iPod during software update

May 3rd, 2008 | 1 comment

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This afternoon I decided to restore my iPod Mini back to default factory settings. During the process iTunes suggested that I “Upgrade my iPod to the latest software” so I went ahead and answered yes to the upgrade. After a couple seconds all I seen was a little “plug iPod into the wall charger” icon thing.

After doing some research, apparently to complete a software upgrade on most iPods you have to plug your iPod into the wall charger. This is so the iPod doesn’t die mid-firmware flash, in result turning your iPod into nothing but an expensive paperweight. Probably a good call on Apple’s part, but what if you don’t have a wall charger handy? In most cases you would be out of luck.

Besides the obvious (borrowing a wall adapter) there is a surprisingly simple solution. If you’ve ever looked closely at a FireWire or USB cable you’ll notice that two of the pins stick out a little farther than the rest. Those are the pins that carry the electricity to charge the iPods while the other prongs are used for data transfer (right?).

The Fix:
Trick is if you plug in the USB or FirmWire (while the other end is connected to the iPod) into the computer just a little bit so only the two charging pins touch the accompanying pins on the computer, you should be able to fool the iPod into thinking it’s a wall charger. The firmware will update, and you’ll have a working iPod again.