Posts Tagged ‘tech’

Da Vinci Reversed Text For PC

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Well, I am not satisfied until I discover something acceptable for my goal.  This goal would be to reverse all of the English text on my Windows PC in a manner consistent with Da Vinci’s unique backwards-right-to-left writing style.  It’s done for other languages on Windows, so I don’t see why it couldn’t be done on English with some kind of a hack.

Somehow, I think reversing the video output horizontally (mirrored) would achieve a decent result without any side-effects other than EVERYTHING being horizontally reverse (including images and buttons, and all UI elements).  However, then I would have to get used to moving the mouse cursor to the left when I want to go right, and right when I wanted to go left.  Unless of course, there is a way to invert the mouse’s horizontal directions as well.

The closest thing I’ve found is a Da Vinci backwards font.  However, this doesn’t achieve the result of making all text read right-to-left.  Besides, the system actually uses many different fonts, and making it hacked to use a single font like that would take a lot of work, and make it darn near boring.

If you have any ideas I could try, please let me know!

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8 Reasons To Jail-Break Your iPhone

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

I just thought I would come up with a list of some of the great things about jail-breaking an iPhone.  Please please PLEASE: See the note below the list before going ahead and attempting to jailbreak your iPhone.  I won’t give any links or instructions on how to do a jail-break.  That part is up to you…there’s plenty of web sites and forums and videos out there that show various ways.

8 Reasons to jail-break your iPhone:

  1. Alternative keyboard configs! I absolutely hate the standard QWERTY keyboard.  I type with DVORAK on my PC, and it is so much easier on my fingers and hands…and I don’t get carpel tunnel.  I downloaded a free DVORAK keyboard config for the iPhone and BAM… now typing on the iPhone just became a lot easier.
  2. Blacklisting apps which allow you to completely block unwanted or unsolicited calls. (cannot be done with regular apps on a regular firmware.
  3. Ability to install customizations such as the SBSettings feature.  It lets you set up simple on/off switches in a very accessible place that you can usually access from most apps.  This is very nice to enable or disable the phone, or tethering, or the wifi, or data network, or SSH, etc.
  4. Alternative phone service through VoIP providers.  This can work through a SIP app that can be installed, which the best one I’ve found isn’t available from the iTunes store: Siphon (FREE).  You can save your minutes by using this!
  5. Tethering your internet service on your iPhone to your computer!  I don’t use it a lot, but when I need it, it’s sure handy!
  6. Further customize your icon dock to have more than just 4 apps.  I have 6, and although it’s crowded, I much prefer it this way.
  7. Exceptional apps that Apple doesn’t approve of.  Some apps are really great and for some reason unknown to man, Apple decides not to allow them.  Probably because they would take away from their market share.  At any rate, some apps are hard to live without.  The OpenSSH (secure shell) app being one of them.  I can get into the inner workings of my iPhone and transfer files in and out without hassle…all done over WIFI.  This is very useful when I’ve got apps like Cycorder (free video recorder for the 3G) and need to copy the videos off.  The iFile app actually provides a half-way decent PDF reader which makes a GREAT alternative to the built-in PDF reader on the iPhone.  This way I can read my eBooks from my phone the way one would read a book on a Kindle.
  8. The obvious reason to SOME might be that you can install cracked apps.  While that can have it’s advantages, you must be careful not to get ones with viruses, and sometimes the apps come corrupted or something and might just simply crash on you.  It’s a risk you must weigh yourself.  Also to be noted, the place for downloading the cracked apps which was the safest and most official, has stopped offering their repository of iPhone apps.  So that’s another thing to consider.

With all of this said.  Please don’t go out and just try and jail-break your iPhone without doing some research or consulting somebody with experience.  I would hate four you to brick your phone on account of my suggestion because you didn’t find out that you had better not do it a certain way with your particular model or something.  From what I understand, you have to carefully consider jail-breaking an iPhone 3GS because it can mess things up, or even cause it to have to be booted from a special app on your computer if it gets turned off.

Personally I’m glad I don’t have the 3GS, because I love the way my phone works as a lovely jail-broken extension of ME.

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iPhone Totally iPhailed And Wouldn’t Boot!

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Well, guess what.  Another iPhailure.  I had seen some recent updates in RockApp and I was definitely skeptical about if they’d not cause problems.  Apparently after today I did some research and it turns out that the updates were causing widespread problems.  Serious problems.

Now I’m not talking about just making stuff crash or not work.  I’m talking about full blown serious issues…not being able to boot!  I would see the iPhone show the Apple logo and then about 5 seconds later it would just shut off again.  Even more serious was that when I put the phone into DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode, it would fail when trying to restore the firmware to factory settings.

It’s funny thinking about the way this all happened.  It seemed so innocuous…so innocent.  I was working with it just fine.  Then I was prompted by somebody to enter their phone number quickly into my phone for safe-keeping.  I entered it into my SBSettings Fast Notes as I do a lot of things when I want to jot something down super quick.  When I thought I’d just leave the fast notes open and hit the sleep button, I didn’t realize that the darn thing would leave the on-screen keyboard up!  This was a big problem….I couldn’t use the phone any longer since the stupid keyboard blocked my view of the unlock slider!

What I ended up doing made my heart sink with what happened next.  I went to go shut it off….slid my finger across the screen to confirm shut-off…and waited.  Then when I turned it on again, it wouldn’t boot.  I got the results described above.  At first it seemed I had messed it up by shutting it down with that keyboard still up…but that really doesn’t make any sense.  After looking online for a solution to my problem, I found it was a huge issue due to a recent Rock update.  Great…the one I had installed.  The one that seemed to be working just fine.  But I hadn’t actually powered the phone down and up again until this moment.

So what did I do to fix it?  I tried a LOT of things.  Took me a couple of hours to finally get it sorted out to where I could restore the thing.  Of course restoring it was a last resort to me because I didn’t want to lose my files, and restoring all my apps and settings is a pain.  I had to try everything I could find before deciding that I should just restore it.

First I remember trying to use the iH8Sn0w iREB v3.1-2 for Windows.  First I thought I’d try the Recovery Boot Loop fix…which all it did after I got the libUSB installed and clicked the button for my iPhone 3G was reboot and still shut off.  Then I tried the actual iREB app and clicked my 3G iPhone button, and it didn’t appear to do anything.  Then I downloaded and tried iRecovery for Windows.  At first I thought it failed, but then I read the README.TXT file which said it was supposed to be run from a command prompt window.

iRecovery had two options.  To upload a file, or to start up a shell.  So I started up a shell.  The shell might have been able to do something to fix the darn thing, but I don’t know enough about doing that stuff.  I had tried to use some commands that I found online:

setenv auto-boot true
saveenv
fsboot

Doing this didn’t seem to do anything, but I’m thinking it may have contributed to making the restore work.  After those commands I typed in the “reboot” command and watched it reboot and then shut off.  So at that point I decided to try a restore again, which also failed.  Then…this might be the only thing which was necessary: I rebooted the phone into Recovery mode & was able to restore a custom firmware file to the phone. For those who don’t know… Recovery mode is entered when you boot the phone like so: press and hold both the Home button AND the sleep button for about 12-13 seconds…then while still holding the Home button, release the sleep button once the image on the screen pops up, – still hold the Home button about 10 seconds until iTunes says that there’s been an iPhone detected in recovery mode.

Also for those who don’t know, you can download a custom firmware file to your iPhone by SHIFT-CLICKING the Restore button in iTunes (that’s holding down the shift key while left-clicking).

A fair warning which many would already know if they jailbroke their iPhone, but worth mentioning: DO NOT update to the latest official Apple iPhone firmware (3.1.3).  It contains no new features, and nothing was done to it that is worth updating.  If you like your iPhone jailbroken as I do, then do yourself a favor and pay attention and special care to NEVER update the iPhone to that version.  A friend of mine did it by accident and he cannot jailbreak his phone anymore.

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YouTube Fail Again

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Well, you know what. I am sick of Chrome having issue’s with Google’s OWN video site…YouTube. I’m sick of it! SO sick of it! Why can’t they just make their browser work right with their own videos??? It’s like they purposely sabotage their browser so it fails. It’s been having issues with youtube videos since as long as I can remember….the early versions of Chrome. It’s not necessarily all the time, but it seems to randomly decide not to work at all. It’s so much fail that I blog about it’s epic fail.

So Google, can you fix your browser? Don’t tell me it’s my fault… don’t tell me my comp has some kind of virus. That’s bull crap and we know it, because I keep my comp spotless from that junk and I know because everybody getting viruses has all sorts of antivirus apps and anti malware apps, and I don’t use but one, along with virustotal.com.

If it’s anything to do with my computer, then it’s got to be due to a flaw or something overlooked with standard compatibility within the browser related to the hardware I run on. I have a pretty typical setup, but you can’t blame it on software. It was doing this back when I was running a fresh install of XP, then the same thing on Vista…now a fresh install of Windows 7 and it is STILL wacko!

Get it friggin together Google!

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Mouseless and loving it!

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I’m pretty proud of myself! I found a mouse-replacement application that uses the keyboard. It’s similar to Microsoft’s own accessibility application “Mouse Keys” which is built into windows. I hated how this application was completely cumbersome and hardly customizable.

When I found that there was a script included within the AUTOHOTKEY help files that did the very same thing only better..I instantly loved it! I can now customize any part of it even, since it’s an AUTOHOTKEY script. I’m remapping the keys so that I use the Caps Lock key instead of the Scroll Lock to activate the mouse keys. Also to use the right hand of the “home row” as the basis of my mouse keys. Now I can stay at the home row and still be productive in the GUI portion of Windows.

WOOT.

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