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michael ciccarelli is a web designer & developer out of buffalo, ny.
I am currently available for freelance and other opportunities.

Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

How I Killed My iPhone

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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.

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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.

Hacking iTunes

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I’ve recently picked up a few iPhone/iTunes tricks that I’d like to share with those of you that would like to do the following:

Creating Custom Ring Tones with iTunes only

Using the instructions in this article I can now take any DRM free music (MP3s) from my computer and convert them into perfect quality ring tones without paying iTunes $1. Not that I’m cheap or anything but it’s nice to be able to create ring tones from any song you’d like and not be limited to the few songs iTunes offers as ring tones.

In short what your doing is clipping the song down to 30 seconds or less, converting the .MP3 into iTune’s AAC format (.m4a) then renaming the file extension .m4r so iTunes recognizes the media as a ring tone. It’s really quite simple, and only takes a couple of minutes.

Synchronizing your iPhone with multiple iTunes Libraries/Computers

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In my opinion this should be an option to any iPhone owner. I understand why Apple designed it this way, so you can’t just plug in your iPhone to any library and steal other peoples music, but what if you have 2 computers of your own, both sharing a library on an external HD on your own network? I’m sure there are a ton of other scenarios where people would want to synchronize their iPhones with multiple PCs and not lose the data from their device.

Thanks to this article I can now sync all my Contacts and iCal with my Macbook, while I control which music I want on my iPhone using my desktop PC. Basically I changed the library ID on my PC to match the library ID of my Macbook so iTunes thinks it’s the same library each time I synchronize. Just be careful with these steps, you could very easily mess things up.