Tech Jawa > 2009 > October

This post is mostly for Jacob Wolfrum… because he can’t seem to keep the list of good stuff I give him… douche.

If anybody’s reading this that isn’t aware, Cydia is what is generally installed on jailbroken iPhones, and allows you to get unofficial applications not sanctioned by Apple on your device… I won’t go into it much more than that, because if you didn’t know what it is, you wont be using this list anyhow.

First this is first, go into Cydia and manage your sources, add this.

http://cydia.hackulo.us/

Now, in alphabetical order, here’s my list of Cydia essentials.

AppSync – Will be called AppSync for OS 3.X, depending on what iPhone OS you’re running. This allows you to sync any pirated copies of apps back into and from your iTunes installation.

CyDelete – CyDelete allows you to delete “unofficial” apps just like you would a normal one, by holding your finger over it, and then tapping the “x” in the corner. Comes in very handy.

Cyntact – $1.00, but well worth it. This will show your contacts photos next to their names in your address book, and favorites list. It integrates with apps that pull up your contacts list too.

Emoji – Enables the option to turn on the Japanese Emoji keyboard. These are the high-quality iPhone smiles, and can even be sent to, and received by non-jailbroken iPhone users!

Five Icon Dock – Why wouldn’t you want to have five icons down there? It’s a much better utilization of your dock, you get to add that one extra thing you always wish you could. I use: Contacts, Messages, Phone, E-Mail, iPod.

Installous – This is where you get official app store apps without paying for them. I’m not endorsing this in any way, just letting people know it’s out there.

Lock Calendar – This puts your upcoming calendar appointments on your lock screen… Coupled with Google Sync this is amazing. I have my Google Calendar sync wirelessly (via push) to my phone, and all events show up on my lock screen. This means I never really have to go into my Calendar app unless I need to add a new event on the go.

MakeItMine – This allows you to customize what your carrier logo says. Get rid of the AT&T or anything else you might have up there, and put a personal touch on your phone, or use this to completely blank out your carrier logo if you think it just takes up space.

MobileTerminal – This allows you to enter command ON your phone, without needing to SSH into it. You can really use this for alot of things if you know what you’re doing.

OpenSSH – Well, this is the quintessential iPhone jailbroken app. It allows you to SSH into your phone, and SCP files to/from it.

PrivaCy – Adds an option in your Settings app to keep your iPhone data private. Alot of apps are sending “anonymous” usage statistics back to the mothership, use this to opt out.

SBSettings – With a finger swipe across the top bar (with the time) you’ll get access to alot of power-user features. My favorites have to be the ability to hide my unused icons, but still keep the apps useable via spotlight, the ability to kill processes, and the “free memory” button.

Scrobbl – A Last FM scrobbler that will scrobble tracks as you listen to them over Edge/3G. A must have for any Last FM user.

StatusNotifier – This will give you status bar (top bar) alerts of new messages, emails, voicemails, and others. Extremely well done.

Veency – A VNC SERVER for the iPhone… This allows one to control their phone with their mouse and keyboard. I use it while at work for checking SMS messages and whatnot.

Winterboard – The only way to theme your iPhone. Here’s the custom theme I’ve put together over a few months.

Now I’m sure there’s alot more apps out there, but these are my essential ones. I try alot more Cydia apps all the time, but generally don’t stick to them like I do the list above.

If you’ve found anything thats essential to you, please share in the comments!

Warning: This is something I’ve personally wanted to write about for a while now, just for my own thoughts on the matter to be documented, it’s not meant to be an interesting or informative read, however it may be to some…

The Digital Dark Age according wo Wikipedia is a point in time when it will become impossible to read historical old data, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format.

Now to me, this includes both file formats, and physical media.
Some things on my mind about this topic are:

Hard Disk Drives are one their way out, Solid State Drives are making their amazing entrance into the world of computing, and will soon drive conventional HDDs out of existence and manufacturing. Sure, alot of SSDs are new, small capacity, and expensive, but give it some time and they will undoubtedly be the norm.

Think as far back as you can, about what portable data was stored on. Most of you are thinking of a Floppy Disk I’m sure, in one size or another. Even further back than that, was analog tapes, similar to those we all used to listen to music on before compact discs. Clearly nobody uses tapes anymore, and it’s quite the treasure to find a PC with a floppy drive in it. Hell, with the advent of the X58 motherboards (for Intel’s Core i7 processor) I don’t think any of them even have the cable channels for floppy disk drives anymore. One example of this I can give is at my place of work, we have a ton of tapes just laying around, nobody willing to throw them away because they contained our backups at some point. However, they simply can’t be used anymore, no modern day PC, with any modern operating system can even support a real tape drive, let alone finding the drivers for it would be a puzzling effort. Even if drives and tapes were found, and were hooked to a compatible PC, the chances of the data being 100% intact are wretched, so say the least. The old analog medium just won’t hold up well over time.

Now, taking it into a new court here. 16-bit file’s just aren’t compatible anymore. Everybody today is surely away of the x86 (32-bit) and the x64 (64-bit) standoff, where everybody’s trying to move towards 64-bit, but older systems just aren’t compatible, and the final switch can’t really truly be made just yet. Well the switch away from 16-bit has already happened. There are some Windows programs out there that simply won’t run anymore because they are 16-bit, and were never designed for modern-day hardware. I’ve actually run into this problem a few times myself.

Now lets take that thought a step further, into the file format realm of things. Imagine in today’s world, where we already cannot run 16-bit programs. What if Adobe Reader was a 16-bit program, and PDF’s weren’t actively being developed anymore, but a company had TONS of them as old records. There would literally be no way to open them on a modern system. This scenario is inevitable in the future, with 64, and 128 bit systems to undoubtedly become the norm in computing, old 32-bit applications that used to open, read, edit, and save our records simply will cease to function…