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Okay, I took a few attempts to understand this, so I’ve typed it all out in a “For village idiots” style tutorial to hopefully help anybody having the problems I was having.

I’m trying to Jailbreak my new iPhone 3GS with the BlackRa1n Jailbreak application. But I keep getting stuck on the Connect to iTunes logo when the phone reboots. iTunes then tells me that the phone is in recovery mode and will need to be restored to factory default settings to make it work.

Here’s What To Do

I’ll start assuming you’ve got a factory standard iPhone and iTunes installed on your PC or Mac and you’re ready for a little adventure. I should mention that I’m using a Mac and haven’t done this on a PC. Generally I think the steps should be the same, except you may have an easier time stopping iTunes from interrupting but you may have to run the BlackRa1n application in compatibility mode for Windows XP, if you use that fancy Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Step 1: Sync your iPhone with iTunes

Yep, just as usual, plug your phone in, let iTunes sync any changes and make a backup of the device (You’ll need this later)

While this is going on, you might want to take a moment to download BlackRa1n from http://www.blackra1n.com/ – Just click the logo of your operating system on the homepage. The software is free (Thank you Geohot!), but you’ll want to make a donation using that donate button once you’ve tried it out.

Step 2: Restore the iPhone to factory default settings.

Now you’ve got a backup of your iPhone and a copy of the BlackRa1n app you need, It’s time to restore your iPhone back to factory defaults. It’s just like formatting your iPhone and reinstalling the basic operating software. Technically, you don’t have to do this, but you’re less likely to run into any problems without any third party software on the iPhone. You’ll also become familiar with the Restore button in iTunes, which is what you need to press if it all goes horribly wrong.

Once the restore is done, I got a message that the carrier data needs to be updated, so I went ahead and installed that. Next up iTunes wanted to restore all the data from the backup we just made – How thoughful – but this will have to wait for a minute.

Step 3: Run BlackRa1n

Quit iTunes with your iPhone still connected and run the BlackRa1n application (remember to run in XP compatibility mode if you’re using windows). you’ll see the iPhone display show the Geohot loading screen and, after a little while it will reboot.

Other folks say that the iPhone should now be Jailbroken and life is great. Unfortunately, in my experience, the ‘Connect to iTunes’ logo popped up and I couldn’t get the phone to respond.

Getting Past the ‘Connect to iTunes’ logo screen

Okay this is the most technical part – every time yourJailbroken  iPhone restarts, it will restart in this ‘recovery mode’ and think that it is broken. The solution? Just run BlackRa1n again. Yup, just like before. Ignore iTunes telling you that the phone needs to be restored to factory defaults for a minute and run blackra1n again. This time around, black rain will get you to the springboard (The usual iPhone menu of apps etc). Now you’ve got yourself a jailbroken iPhone and, if you look around your menu, you should find a BlackRa1n app somewhere – on the second page of apps if you’re following this guide precisely – run this app and you can install Cydia, Rock and the Unlock application BlackSn0w.

Now if you reconnect to iTunes, you can go ahead and restore your iPhone from your backup – this will put all your music, movies and apps back on for you.

Troubleshooting

A lot of folks noticed they had problems reconnecting to wifi after going through his process (iPhones don’t remember wifi settings so well after a restore from a backup even if they are not jailbroken in my experience). The answer is to reset your network settings on your iPhone (I’ll assume you know that’s located in Settings > General > Reset > Reset Networks Settings), you’ll need to re-enter your network credentials for all your old wifi networks but also you’ll have to reboot the iPhone to reset this data.

Every time you reboot the iPhone, or if it runs out of battery, you will need to run BackRa1n again to get past the ‘Connect to iTunes’ logo.

Luckily, now that you’ve restored everything from your backup, your music, apps etc. are unaffected and will continue to work normally after you re-run BlackRa1n. The iPhone just thinks it’s in recovery mode every time it starts up and needs to be poked back into normal operation.

This all worked for me, but I already got sick of running BlackRa1n over and over, so I’ve restored my iPhone back to factory settings and I’m gonna wait to see if a non-tethered solution becomes available. I don’t really care what carrier I’m on, so I didn’t try out BlackSn0w, but I hear it’s very good.

Please do let me know if this guide has been helpful to you.

Well, I mentioned my Grail quest a few months back and, since then, I’ve been inundated with precisely zero comments, emails and Twitter mentions asking about it. Naturally with this level of interest, I simply have to put you out of my misery.

For many years, I’ve been searching for the ultimate mobile device. I know I’m not the only one. Long ago, I decided that a single device should be able to do, well, pretty much anything a computer can do. Except for burning optical dics and booting from floppy discs perhaps. At the time, this seemed like a faraway dream, but cellular communications went digital, technology got smaller and slowly PDA manufacturers and mobile phone makers got together and started making beautiful freak babies.

Now the market is flooded with cellphones that can do email, Internet even fancy GPS navigation and much, much more. My most recent run of phones; The HTC Touch Diamond, The Nokia E71, The HTC Touch Pro 2 and the iPhone 3Gs have all been very close contenders for my Grail quest. I’ve only just started trying the iphone and it’s predictably very good, but I still feel like something is missing. I don’t know what though.

So far the only issue I’ve had with the iPhone is the inability to download files from the web such as mp3 files – unless they’re from the iTunes store of course. I suppose there’s an app for that?

I’ve added a Smilin’ Countdown timer to the right hand bar of my blog here. It’s got a rough countdown to when I should be all done with these Invisalign Aligners.

The current countdown is 1 Years, 2 Months, 19 Days, 11 Hours and 21 Minute until I smile.

The braces continue to keep me entertained. I notice that all the teeth on the right hand side of my mouth are gradually shuffling into their new positions. Not much movement on the left side yet, although I notice that the aligners I’ve got at the moment say “Rx Only” on the packet. So presumably the Left side will get moved around later. I’ve had two ’stripping’ appointments with my dentist which, was a slightly scary experience at first;

Admittedly I was only scared because the dentist produced what can only be described as a miniature grinder and then said ‘Hold still because I don’t want to cut your face’. Maybe I’m just a bit of chicken.
Anyway the process is painless and pretty quick. You get a small cloud of enamel dust coming out of your mouth as material is shaved off the sides of two teeth to create a gap. Typically the gaps created in my mouth were around  0.1 – 0.3 mm each which is, I’m told, an acceptable loss of material for each tooth and since the loss comes from between two teeth, I reckon’ each tooth is only losing roughly half of that.

I’m on aligner 6 now. No more stripping needed until next year. I’ve also got a complete schedule of all my aligners and appointments for stripping & checkups until the end of the treatment in February 2011. I must say I am looking forward to having a smarter smile. But the aligners can be irritating at times; sometimes I feel like i’ve got a bit of something in my mouth that I just want to spit out. Unfortunately if I do, I’ll probably have to buy a replacement set of aligners or skip forward / backward a set, which could be unpleasant.

Oh well, only 1 Years, 2 Months, 19 Days, 11 Hours and 09 Minutes to go…

Reasserting my geek credentials…

Well it’s been a while since I’ve done anything remotely technical. Even longer since I blogged about such things. So I thought I would share with you, dear reader, a small adventure I’ve just got back from.

Installing MySQL on Mac OS X over SSH

Having recently upgraded my Mac Mini to snow leopard, I was not entirely surprised to find that my old MySQL installation mysteriously vanished breaking my neat little PHP application. But, the only time I have access to said Mac is when it is in service playing DVD’s as a part of my home theater system. So, the mission is to install and configure a MySQL server on Mac OS X without interrupting the screen usage for more than two minutes (I will confess my sins as we go).

My fist sin to confess is that I like things to be easy. So I downloaded a nice Mac binary rolled into a .dmg file… on my mac book.
Of course, with file sharing already set up, it’s easy as pie to transfer my .dmg file onto the Mac Mini without interrupting anything. The next trick was to mount the .dmg file and install the MySQL binary over ssh.

Mounting a .dmg file and installing a .pkg binary over ssh

Mounting a .dmg file over ssh is fairly straightforward:

hdiutil attach mysql-5.1.39-osx10.5-x86

This mount the disk image file in /Volumes/mysql-5.1.39-osx10.5-x86 on the remote machine. The next trick is to run the installer files.

cd /Volumes/mysql-5.1.39-osx10.5-x86/
sudo installer -pkg mysql-5.1.39-osx10.5-x86.pkg

Note that you need to play the superuser role in order to install the package. Since We’re here, I’ll install the MySQL startup item as well…

sudo installer -pkg MySQLStartupItem.pkg

Happily, we now have MySQL installed and, yes, we haven’t had to mess around with the Mac UI at all yet. At this stage, I must confess, I did nip into the UI when  nobody was looking and install the MySQL.prefpane into the system prefences window and then use it to start the MySQL service. Although I confess that the service could have been started over SSH by using mysqld.

So lets take stock. We’ve installed a MySQL binary from a .dmg on Mac OS X over SSH, the MySQL Daemon service is running and now we just need to make a few minor changes to the basic setup that has been installed to make things ready to reinstate my PHP application and rejoice.

After installing MySQL, the documentation says that a /tmp/mysql.sock file should be created automatically. Unfortunately, this seemed to be missing. So my next port of call was locating the naughty .sock file and creating a symbolic link in the /tmp folder where it belongs.

ln -s /var/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp

There we go. Finally, all that needs doing is running up mysql and running a few queries to set up my database, tables and permissions and I’m all done. I won’t bore you with the SQL, because it’s way past my bedtime now.

– Incidentally, I had already enabled PHP on Mac OS X’s existing Apache installation and, with the socket file linked in correctly and the databases re created and populated, everything started working again. Ain’t life grand when you discover you can do something the hard way too..?

G’Night!

Well, that hurt.

Two extractions and 10 days later, I got my first pair of invisalign aligners.

Yes i had two premolars yanked out.

Actually it wasn’t bad. The anesthetic really works and you’re just left with a big hole in your smile. Or two in my case.

How do the the aligners feel?
Well, did you ever get the feeling that your teeth are ever so slightly out of position and you just need to push them back with your tongue? Yes? Once or twice? Well, imagine that sensation on most of your teeth and they won’t go back. It doesn’t really hurt. Just uncomfortable to begin with. But this feeling wears off after a few days and then you’ve just got the unusual sensation of having all your teeth covered in plastic.

Of course its taken a few days to learn to speak properly with them in – there’s less room in your moth to move your tongue around as you speak you see. So you have to open your mouth wider and pronounce esses, tees and and simlar sounds more with the teeth and less with the tongue.

I also had my first batch of stripping – removing a small amount of enamel between two teeth to create more space for them to move. This was a little hair-raising for the first minute, because it’s done with what looks like a mini grinder and a measuring tool you might recognize from tuning your spark plugs. The process is actually painless and pretty quick too.

My next set of aligners is due in a week, already I think I’m starting to see some improvement from this one.