JailbrakeMe.com – The all-iDevice Jailbrake Tool
Posted by Ben in Apple, Cell Phone, Websites on August 4, 2010
Like so many others have done, its quite fun to head down to your local Apple Store and get a few iPhone 4's jailbroken!
No joke here. Thanks to comex and the rest of the dev team for this magnificent release. With jailbraking only recently becoming legal (thanks to some US court systems) you can jailbrake your new iPhone 4 right from the device, no computer needed! It couldn’t be any easier thanks to the work of the Dev Team. Hit up JailBrakeMe.com on your iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS (new bootrom), or iPad, then just “slide to jailbrake”. It will download some stuff then get right to jailbraking with a simple progress bar. Done in about one minutes time, Cydia is added to your homescreen! The only downside to this is that the exploit was created from loaded a PDF with the “jailbrake” code on it. In a way, you can understand how other, more malicious forms of code can work your way onto your iDevice. So just for a recommendation, only load up PDFs on your iDevice that you trust! Or you can jailbrake, and download a package from Cydia that will actually help you monitor the loading of your PDFs. Its an interesting decision, but its up to you. And by the way, I jailbroke my iPhone 4 if you were wondering.
Crazy Smart Hacker Gets Android OS on iPhone 3G
Posted by Ben in Apple, Cell Phone, Software on May 17, 2010
The latest from PlanetBeing, an iPhone 3G can be seen here booting up the modified Linux kernel with Android on it!
When “Geohots” was the first one to unlock the iPhone, everyone knew it was a step into the direction forward into a world of iPhone hacking. Three generations later and 4 OS remakes, and Apple still hasn’t been able to beat the hackers. Well in the latest showing of heroic hacking, PlanetBeing has managed to get a (almost) fully functional version of the Android OS running on an iPhone 3G!
Well for those of you that are “in the know”, you surely are aware that this is already possible with the iPhone 2G, but really, who still has one of those? Well with the latest news from PlanetBeing, it looks like its only going to be a matter of days before the first release of this multiboot solution on iPhone comes to the masses. Complete with a guide, PlanetBeing has managed to fix just about all the errors the Android OS has thrown at him, but with the help of a new development team, I am honest excited to see this new OS coming to such a popular device.
OpeniBoot is the bootloader for the iPhone you’re going to load up, and from there you’ll be able to load either Android or the stock iPhone OS. And hopefully later in time, we can get Palm’s webOS running. Its a great leap in a iPhone hacking and I’m waiting the final release! My only question is how much space is this new Linux kernel going to take up on my 8GB iPhone 3G?
Engineering with Altoids: Portable Power – Part I
This popular alternative, the MintyBoost kit is a simple "Plug-And-Play" solution for those who'd prefer not to get too technical.
At some point in your life, you’ve probably tried the well-known mint (or gum) called Altoids. Known for being “curiously strong” its not just the mints that you’re getting when you purchase. The box these mints come in is like no other and is the perfect size for all sorts of tech projects. Slightly smaller than a deck of cards, it makes a great casing to anything you might house in it. One of the more popular uses includes turning the box into a portable iPod USB charger, capable of recharging your iPod for many more hours. Cheap and effective, its a great way to keep charged up on the road, and NOT in the air. Now before I begin, I’ll like to also mention that this is NOT a how-to for making your own portable iPod USB charger… instead I will be briefly skimming the surface on how you can engineer a better solution for however you decide to make yours.
So what does it take to power a USB port? Well for one, you need 5 volts and a pretty clean amount of amps to keep the current flowing for more than a minute or two. So lets look for a battery solution… A nine volt battery is about the size of two AA’s, provides more than enough volts, but falls short when it comes to the mA (milliamps), efficiency, and internal resistance it can provide. Using a 7805 (which refers to a very common linear 5V regulator) you can bring the 9v from the battery down to 5v and hold it steady for quite some time. Right here you have a very simple circuit that will work, but the efficiency of the battery would no doubt be under 60%, wasting just a little less than half of the battery.
Next up: those AA’s we were talking about. Cheap and effective, AA’s are always an ideal choice when it comes to quick power. So lets show some numbers real fast to show why AA’s are clearly more effective than a 9v battery:
Nine-Volt Battery: 9v x 500mAh = 4.5Wh
2 AA Batteries: 2 x 1.5v (each) x 3000mAh = 9Wh
For the same space, and probably an even cheaper price, AA’s provide just about twice as much power. So now that we know that AA’s are going to be our ideal choice for a battery, lets begin on solving the problems at hand. First off, it takes 5v (as we discussed earlier) to power a USB, so how are we going to do that with only 2 AA’s? Well we need to make whats called a Boost Converter. Now I’m not going to walk you through how there made and why they work, but I will give you a small insight into whats needed to create this stepup converter that pushes 3v to 5v. Well your going to need a chip (also known as a DIP) to start out with. Now for size constraints, you probably want a 8-DIP chip. Running down the list of restrictions, your are going to want one with an internal MOSFET switch (so you don’t have to physically add one in), one that has a high frequency (so that the inductor we need later will be able to be small), and you also need to be able to supply around 100mA at 5v, and you need the chip to still run on about 2v or less. Using Digikey or Mouser, find the one you like the best…
Stick around for Part II in this mini-series on turning your old Altoids mint tin into a portable source of power for your iPod!