It looks like AT&T is going to stop sending out crazy-long bills.

See previously: Netninja, iJustine

Apple released some new iPhone firmware today. Fortunately, they left in all of the loopholes for hacking your own apps into it. The last time I hacked my phone, it took about half a day. This time, it took about 13 minutes (10 of which were waiting for something to download.) This is all it took:

That’s me typing one command, then me selecting #3. Later on, that was me holding down buttons to reset the phone. From that point, you’re given an application on the phone itself for installing additional packages:

Easy!

For future reference, when installing the OpenSSH package…
The root password is: dottie
Code to generate a new hash is: perl -e 'print crypt("MYPASSWORD", "XX");'

I wonder how many people install OpenSSH without knowing what it is, and without changing passwords and disabling accounts.

Back in my day, we got an iPhone and we hacked it by hand! We fiddled with shell scripts and USB connections and compilers until everything eventually worked! You kids, these days, with your fancy GUI installers take all the fun out of things!

So, yes, a few weeks ago, I hacked my iPhone. The text file of notes I took during the process has been posted to my wiki. It’s more-or-less obsolete now. Not only is there iFuntastic, which lets you fiddle with ringtones and files, but there is just now Installer.app, which works like an “apt-get” or “Windows update/installer” system, providing a list of things available to install. Two clicks later, it downloads and installs the application you want.

At this point, “hacking” the iPhone consists of:
1. Install iFuntastic to copy Installer.app to your phone
2. Launch Installer.app

Even the new speed-enhanced NES emulator for the iPhone (version 13L at this writing) is virtually unplayable. Sure, the speed is pretty close to the real thing, if not exact, but you’re still jabbing at virtual buttons behind a piece of glass. I wonder if this is what it would be like to play a side-scroller game on the computers of the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Also:
* The iPhone does not make as great a flashlight as the Treo because in dim lighting situations the iPhone automatically dims its screen to match the ambient conditions. Technically, this is a feature (and could be disabled, at the expense of battery life, if I wanted to muck about in the settings), but it’s not as helpful as the Treo for traversing the stairs in the dark.

For all of those software/firmware/hardware programmers out there with iPhones reading my blog (…all one of you: me…), I did some work on a “real” calculator last night and put the finishing touches on it today at lunch:

For the techies: it’s implemented entirely in JavaScript using primitive datatypes (meaning the range isn’t the greatest in the world.) I’m sure someone out there has a bignum/bigint library implemented in JavaScript. It also doesn’t really like natural numbers too well. I didn’t even implement the decimal-point button because of this (although you can still get decimals by dividing things.) I am debating whether I should just chop everything down to an integer and forget about it. It also doesn’t handle negative numbers very well. You start getting into issues with number of bits and two’s complements that I didn’t feel like dealing with yet. Still, for simple base conversions, bit-shifts, and and/or masking, it’s the best (well, only) solution out there.

You can give it a try in your desktop browser, but be aware that it has been designed for the iPhone’s Safari and has only been tested with Safari and Firefox.

It has been a couple of weeks since I got the iPhone, and while it has been an overwhelmingly good experience, there are still a few things about it that I find annoying.

Annoyances With Workarounds

With the phone on and plugged in to my car cassette adapter, there is some horribly nasty GSM buzz every few minutes. Anyone who owns a GSM phone and has it too close to a radio, speakerphone, or amplified speakers will recognize the sound–it’s the BzzBzzBzzBzz BzzBzz BzzBzzBzz of interference that arrives just before an incoming call. The workaround for this is to locate a cassette adapter that eliminates the buzz (I’m not going to buy a bunch for testing, I’ll just wait until someone can recommend one) and/or set the phone to Airplane Mode, turning off the GSM transceiver, while in the car. The latter one is what I do. Even with previous phones, I never talked in the car. Between road noise, air nose from the ragtop, and a manual transmission, it’s virtually impossible to talk on the phone in the car. So now, if you dial me and get instant voicemail, I’m probably in the car.

There is no Bluetooth Dialup-Networking. I wasn’t expecting this (aside from the expectation of someone hacking the phone at some point in the future.) Fortunately, I have discovered the proper settings for taking the AT&T SIM and putting it in the Treo for use as a Bluetooth modem. It’s similar to the T-Mobile configuration document I wrote a while back, only the account name is WAP@CINGULAR.COM (all uppercase, and WAP even though it’s not really WAP) with a password of CINGULAR1 (again, all uppercase) and a telephone number of wap.cingular. The Treo, when turned off, holds a charge for a very, very long time and doesn’t take up that much space/weight in my laptop backpack. Besides, with more and more things migrating to webapps, I see this as less of an issue over time.

It’s not really a gripe, but the keyboard did take some time to get used to. Learning to trust the auto-correction was a big leap, but once done it works quite well and is perfectly adequate for what I need it to do. I’m not going to write The Great American Novel on it any time soon, but it’s sufficient for a sentence or two as an SMS or blog comment.

Annoyances Without Workarounds

In the Calendar’s month view, you get a single dot on each day that holds an event. It would be nice if more than one dot displayed–one of each color for each category of event as defined in iCal. It would also be nice to only view one category at a time. For instance, I have calendars for work, home, and yearly (anniversaries, birthdays, etc.) They are green, blue, and red in iCal. When at work, I only care about the green events–meetings, interviews, deadlines, paydays–and it’s hard to see, at a glance, which days have events I’m interested in.

Why doesn’t the camera record videos? Even crappy $50 phones take video.

Where is the scientific calculator mode? What about a programmer’s calculator (with hex, decimal, and binary conversions and bit-shifting)? It’s my intent to code this up as a JavaScript page, but it would still be nice to have it integrated without hitting the internet.

In case any iPhoners are interested, I’ve publicly released the code for my iPhone bookmarks webapp. It’s pretty simple, but kind of slick. I’m constantly improving it, but I figured I needed to at least get a 1.0 release out. A read-only demo (the admin password is “secret”) is at http://m.netninja.com/demo/. Be sure to click some links in the demo for the spiffy OS X style launch effect. (Unfortunately, the effect doesn’t actually display on the iPhone, but it will if/when they make iPhone Safari a bit more web 2.0 compliant.) The actual description, code, etc. is at http://netninja.com/projects/phonemarks-bookmarks-for-your-iphone/.

So, I picked up an iPhone over the weekend. To all the people who waited in line for over 24 hours, I say: HAW HAW. To all of the people who waited in line for over 24 hours to buy multiple iPhones to sell on eBay, I saw: DOUBLE HAW HAW. I had to stand in line about 5 minutes to play with a demo iPhone and I had to stand in line zero minutes to actually buy one.

The phone itself is really nice. The applications are great, the data connectivity is a bit slow, but not noticeably different from my Treo. The ability to watch video podcasts someplace other than the Mac Mini under the TV is pretty nice. I had to perform a little email magic to get the email working the way I wanted (i.e. only messages addressed directly to me go to the phone, ignoring mailing lists and other mass-mailings.)

I only have two gripes. 1: the large fancy-schmancy completely-engulfing-the-ear headphones I use at work have an earphone plug that is not quite slim enough to plug into the recessed earphone jack, so I needed a $10 adapter from Belkin to plug them in. 2: when listing to podcasts in the car, I have to put the phone in airplane mode (turning off the cellular radio), otherwise I get that chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp interference through the cassette tape adapter. This isn’t that big a deal to me because I don’t use the phone in the car (stick shift + rag top = hard to drive + hard to listen), but I do have to remember to turn the phone back to normal mode when I arrive at work/home. I probably have a magnetic choke (is that what they’re called?) lying around at home or work that I can use to help clean up the signal.

Here is where I post “my first iPhone app.” Okay, it is less of an app and more of a mostly static page. I wanted my bookmarks to work like the applications on the home screen, with icons, rather than as a list of text. I also wanted the ability I have in Firefox of being able to quickly search different places (i.e. I can type “imdb Hackers” into the URL field to search IMDB for the movie “Hackers”), so I made something similar in JavaScript. It’s here: http://m.netninja.com/ as well as http://m.brianenigma.com/ (because some web filters still block Netninja.) If anyone wants to tweak it, the list of links, link names, and icon images is a simple PHP array and can be easily modified. The source code is at http://m.netninja.com/index.phps.

Next up, unless someone beats me to it, is a JavaScript-based programmer’s calculator. I need to be able to do, at the very minimum, base conversions.