Tech Jawa - www.techjawa.com

A few days ago, one of our authors (Sean Harper) suggested to me that he wanted to make an iPhone app and mobile version of the site. Unfortunately however, he never got the chance, as I found a very quick and efficient way to make a mobile version of our site. It also functions closely to a native iPhone app as well!

Above is a quick overview of what you’ll get if you go to our page on your iPhone. It’s clearly a mobile version of our site, and should be extremely easy to navigate, as we’ve implemented a special menu shown here:

If you have an iPhone, be sure to add our page to your home screen. You’ll be greeted with a fancy Jawa icon, and be sucked into the app all the time, I promise.

If you’re on another type of smartphone, try checking the site out and let us know how it looks in the comments. Screenshots are also welcome!

During this past summer I was searching for a new storage solution to replace my Dell PowerEdge 1800 server. I had this system loaded up with 6x Western Digital 1TB hard drives in 2x RAID 5 arrays which gave me about 3.6 TB of usable storage between the 2 arrays. I used to backup the various PCs in my home as well as to stream files across my home network. This system had been working rock-solid for about a year and 1/2, but sadly I began to run out of space.

I was faced with a dilemma of how to increase my storage capacity in the easiest and safest way possible, in the hopes of not losing any of my files. I thought about buying 3x 1.5 TB hard drives, backing up the data on the array to multiple external hard drives, re-creating the array with the new hard drives, and finally copying all of the data to the new array from the external hard drives. I saw two issues with doing this:

1) This process would be very time consuming

2) I would have to copy my data back and forth which would increase my chance of missing files and/or corrupting my data.

Aside from that, I was faced with the option of purchasing a new storage solution. The more I considered my options, the more I realized how much better of an idea this was. By getting some sort of storage array I could eliminate a power-hungry server from the electrical bill! So I began investigating…

All the solutions I kept coming across would, technically, do the trick. I had one major gripe about all the ones I was reading into, all were RAID 5. This would pretty much put me back into the same situation I started in. I would have to purchase all of my hard drives up front, they would all have to be the same size, speed, etc. which added to the cost substantially. I was then tipped off to the DroboPro by Data Robotics, Inc.

The DroboPro is an 8-bay storage solution that has redundancy built in and manages itself, and if that wasn’t great enough, it uses Data Robotics “BeyondRAID” technology. Put simply, you can use any size/ speed/ brand SATA drive in the unit and it will automatically handle the redundancy and setup of the disk. Another great feature of the BeyondRAID technology is that you can add a disk at any time, not so with traditional RAID setups. The unit has several options as far as connections: USB 2.0, FireWire 800, and Ethernet for iSCSI. All of this is packed neatly into an esthetically pleasing 1ft x 1ft x 6in case.

After much debate and online price comparison, I purchased a DroboPro in October 2009.

I salvaged a WD 2TB hard drive from an external enclosure, purchased a second one, and also used a 1TB drive that I got back as part of an RMA. Setting up the DroboPro could not have been simpler, all I had to do was pop the front (magnetic) cover off and insert the drives into the hot swap bays. Power the unit up, it ran it’s initial startup and configuration then a healthy approx. 2.5TB drive showed under My Computer.

Since then I have added 2 more 1TB hard drives (thank you black friday) as well as a 250gb I had lying around bringing my storage capacity up to 4.7TB. Sadly, Christmas Eve one of my 2TB hard drives was reported as failed in the DroboPro, no worries however. Once the DroboPro detected the failed drive it automatically removed it from the pool of drives and began making sure that all the data was safe and redundant once again. I replaced the bad drive with a new one and RMA’d the failed drive, the DroboPro automatically recognized the new drive and began to rebuild the array instantly. All the while, there was zero downtime where the DroboPro was inaccessible, I was still able to access my files as I would if everything was running as normal.

In this one event the DroboPro proved to me that I had made a wise investment. I consider that, had that drive just been installed in my desktop, it would have not been properly backed up and if I had an up-to-date backup I would have had an hour or two of downtime when I would have had to power down my PC, crack open the case and reconfigure the hardware and then proceeded with getting all my files back in order. Not to mention having to do it all over again to reinstall the new hardware once the RMA came back.

My DroboPro gives me piece of mind knowing that all my data is safe and backed up and easily accessible. All in all, I feel that I have made a great purchase on a rock-solid unit that will last me for years to come.

Overall Rating:

WARNING: This guide is NOT for those who are uncomfortable using SSH to manipulate databases on their iPhones!

Will you mess something up? No… probably not, but you can’t come crying to us if you do!

Now, if you’re like me at all, you LOVE Google Calendar, and you use Google Mobile Sync… The sync is great, as it does contacts, gmail, and calendars… However it does not sync over your calendar colors. This is due to two things: There is no place in the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to include colors, and Apple has a terrible bug in their iPhone not allowing any custom/manual colors by default. Even if you use iCal to sync your calendars you’ll have noticed by now that the colors are NOT the same in iCal and on your iPhone.

If you have a lot of calendars, this can become mentally straining trying to memorize two different sets of colors. Not anymore! I’ve figured out how to manually chose those colors on your jailbroken iPhone!

First thing is first, you need to find out what colors you will need. You need RGB vales for this, NOT hexadecimal color codes. I just opened my Google Calendar, took a screenshot, and used a color dropper tool from any random photo manipulation tool to get my RGB values, and I jotted them down on a piece of scrap paper.

At this point you should also make sure SQLite3 is installed on your iPhone, just load up Cydia and search for it, if you’ve got a green check next to it, you’re all set, if not install it, and reboot if required.

Next up you’ll need to SSH into your iPhone. Use your favorite SSH tool to get in, and log in as root. Once you’re in you’ll want to issue these commands.

iPhone:~ root# cd /var/mobile/Library/Calendar/
iPhone:/var/mobile/Library/Calendar root# sqlite3 Calendar.sqlitedb
SQLite version 3.6.12
Enter “.help” for instructions
sqlite> select title,color_r,color_g,color_b from Calendar;
Default|-1|-1|-1
Personal|15|77|140
Work|181|0|13
School|229|98|0
Facebook|103|10|108
Tech Jawa|229|98|0
Tech Jawa Live|181|0|13
Holidays|47|141|0

Once you issue the above commands, you should see your calendar names and their current colors in RGB format. From here we’ll need to update the database to make changes. I made my changes to match my Google Calendar colors exactly, and here’s the commands that I entered, you should do the same, but replace the color values with your own, and obviously replace the titles with the titles of your calendars.

sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=102, color_g=140, color_b=217 where title=’Personal’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=217, color_g=102, color_b=102 where title =’Work’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=101, color_g=173, color_b=137 where title=’School’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=51, color_g=102, color_b=204 where title=’Facebook’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=242, color_g=166, color_b=64 where title=’Tech Jawa’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=140, color_g=102, color_b=217 where title=’Tech Jawa TV’;
sqlite> update Calendar set color_r=221, color_g=85, color_b=17 where title=’Holidays’;
sqlite> select title,color_r,color_g,color_b from Calendar;
Default|-1|-1|-1
Personal|102|140|217
Work|217|102|102
School|101|173|137
Facebook|51|102|204
Tech Jawa|242|166|64
Tech Jawa TV|140|102|217
Holidays|221|85|17

That last command is just to verify your results, and you should be good to go, just open up the Calendar app (or re-open it, if you already had it open) and you should notice your changes. These changes also carry over to calendar based apps from Cydia such as “LockCalendar” and “LockInfo” as well.

Here’s my final results, compare them to the image at the top of the post of my Google Calendar colors.

Just in the case that you screw something up, here’s the original color values if you want them back.

181,0,13 – Red
229,98,0 – Orange
47,141,0 – Green
15,77,140 – Blue
103,10,108 Purple