Comex and other members of the iphone Dev-Team have released the newest iDevice Jailbreak.

JailbreakMe 2.0 Star is the name! – The userland jailbreak for iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, 3G on iOS 4 / 4.0.1, iPod touch on iOS 4, and iPad on iOS 3.2.1 is out !!. It is a browser based jailbreak, all you have to do is to browse to http://jailbreakme.com from your iOS device to jailbreak it.

Yes you read that right, no need to plug your device in to a computer, go ahead and jailbreak your phone while you wait in line at Starbucks!

Once the process completes (took about 3 minutes on my 15mbps wifi connection at home) you will have Cydia on your homescreen all ready to install your favorite jailbreak apps!

There is one warning floating around right now and that is to update your iPhone 4 to iOS 4.01 before jailbreaking to avoid Facetime and MMS issues.  And to play it extra safe, restore your iphone from a backup in itunes once you have finished the jailbreak.

Here is a full list of supported devices:

iPod 1G on 3.1.2
iPod 1G on 3.1.3
iPod 2G on 3.1.2
iPod 2G on 3.1.3
iPod 2G on 4.0
iPod 3G on 3.1.2
iPod 3G on 3.1.3
iPod 3G on 4.0
iPad on 3.2
iPad on 3.2.1
iPhone 3G on 3.1.2
iPhone 3G on 3.1.3
iPhone 3G on 4.0
iPhone 3G on 4.0.1
iPhone 3G[S] on 3.1.2
iPhone 3G[S] on 3.1.3
iPhone 3G[S] on 4.0
iPhone 3G[S] on 4.0.1
iPhone 4 on 4.0
iPhone 4 on 4.0.1

Step by Step Instructions:

Step 1: Start iTunes and backup everything from Contacts, Calendars, Photos, Videos and Apps.

Step 2: Update your iPhone 4, 3GS or iPhone 3G on the latest iOS 4.0.1 firmware with iTunes. Download links for the firmware and iTunes 9.2.1 can be found below.

Step 3: Once you are done with the update, make sure you are connected to a WiFi network. I haven’t tested it on 3G so I recommend using it on a reliable WiFi network.

Step 4: Open Safari on your iPhone 4, 3GS or 3G and navigate to http://jailbreakme.com.

Step 5: “Slide to Jailbreak” to begin the jailbreak process.

Step 6: Wait till the jailbreak tool download the required files.

Step 7: Once the download is completed, it will automatically start the jailbreak process. Just don’t do anything silly at this point. Wait till the jailbreak process is completed.

Step 8: Once done, you will be greeted with the following message: Cydia has been added to your home screen. Have fun!

Step 9: Close the browser and look for Cydia. You should now have it on your phone!

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

3DTVs are useless without content and while to some sports is the killer app for 3D, others prefer movies. When it comes to new movies, there’s Avatar and then there’s everything else — most movies are converted to 3D instead of using 3D cameras. The company In-Three originally formed with the intent of converting classics like Star Wars to 3D — yes Lucas says he wants to do all six — but with all the money 3D movies are making in theaters today, In-Three is spending their time working with producers on new movies like Alice in Wonderland.

Anyone who saw both Alice and Clash of the Titans will tell you that all dimensionalization isn’t created equal. While most didn’t realize Alice wasn’t actually shot in 3D, reviews of Clash were titled like “the first film to actually be made worse by being in 3D.” While the dimensionalization of Alice took four to six months, Clash was done in eight to ten weeks — as well as being converted by different companies. We can’t blame ‘em for trying though, as In-Three tells 3DCineCast blog it uses four to six hundred people while wearing 3D glasses 50 to 75 percent of the day, and costs about 80 to 100 thousand dollars per minute to do dimensionalization properly. Which is just crazy as well as makes us wonder how that’s cheaper than just using 3D cameras. The good part about doing it in post processing though is it gives the creators more artistic control as the dimensionalization is done by hand, frame by frame. Of course the concern is that people will see movies like Clash of the Titans in 3D and write off the dimensionalization process all together, or worse 3D entirely.

What it takes to properly convert a 2D movie to 3D originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Apr 2010 11:47:00 EST.
Go to Source

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

Building a 50 channel DVR system, I could not fit in my house.

Things like this make me want to abandom my Media Center platform and go BeyondTV!

The gist:

• 50 Simultaneous Channel Recording
• 100 Terabytes of shared storage

Read the rest of the post from Spanstream’s Blog!

If you’ve read any of our previous articles on our monster DVR systems, you know we have a knack for throwing together skunkworks DVRs that can record a lot of TV. In the past, these have been done in the wee hours of the morning with parts we’ve scavenged from other systems.

But… what would happen if we set out to make the World’s Largest DVR? And not from scrap parts, but with shiny new hardware and a real (gasp) budget?  And while we’re at it, let’s not just go from 12 tuners to 13. Let’s blow the doors off of television recording. Putting on my infomercial voice here, we’re not doing 10, not 20, not 35, but 50…. Yes, FIFTY (50) TV channels at once.

And while we’re at it, let’s make a storage system to sit behind it that lets you keep all of those shows. Forever. Well, forever as long as you’re willing to buy the drives to plug into the system. In total, the storage capacity is equivalent to 326 TiVo Premier boxes. But that might take up a little more space than our rack has, though.

Well, for the past little while we’ve been working on adding clustering capabilities to our TV recording and search software… technology that would enable us to go beyond the 10 TV tuners that we could put on a single PC motherboard.  After planting the seeds for this new architecture last year, we’ve been working hard on getting this new version of SnapStream completed.

Well, spring has sprung and that seed sprouted into a 25U half rack packed to the gills with the most monster of DVRs ever created.

And we can’t wait to introduce it at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas next week (April 12-15).  If you’ll be there, come check it out in person! (we’ll be in the South Upper Hall in booth #2707)

The juicy details:

TV Source: You plug it in with one simple coax cable feed from your local cable company.

In that regard, it’s pretty normal. Of course, do you know of other DVRs that need two 15amp power plugs and a 10GB Ethernet (or up to 8 bonded 1GB ports) uplink?

Tuners and Storage: It has a grand total of 50 analog TV tuners recording to 125+TB of storage. (10 tuners and 18TB of storage per 3U chassis or 10 tuners and 30TB storage of 4U chassis).  As a demo, this system shows both of our 3U and 4U chassis sizes. Depending on the storage requirements, one could do all 4U or all 3U boxes.

Note: Due to the higher bitrates, if you were to do this with digital recording sources like QAM or ATSC, each server would only do 5 shows per box. You’d just need more boxes to get to 50 channels.

Clustering: The magic behind building a TV search engine like this one is our new clustering technology.  With this setup, one SnapStream node is designated as the master and other SnapStream nodes which can then be designated to performed a narrow or broad set of functions (see diagram at the left).  Then the “master” doles out work to be done to the various nodes it has at its disposal and balancing resources appropriately.  For example, when using the SnapStream Link software to playback shows, each Link Client will request (under the hood, of course) the video in question directly from the server that houses the video file to prevent any duplicate network traffic.

Networking: Because this is a “distributed” DVR, the networking between the nodes is important — this network meshes the nodes together, allowing them to talk to one another, use each others storage, etc.  The interconnect on this SnapStream Cluster is via an HP Procurve 2910 switch, with two 1GB copper Ethernet ports bonded via LACP per server.

Storage allocation: Using drive pooling, all of the storage shows up as one giant video folder… all 102TB of it!  As a result of this, each system can record to either itself or other machines on the network as space allows.  Our software handles all the magic of distributing recordings across the various logical storage volumes.

TV Search: And, of course, this giant SnapStream DVR cluster can not only record shows, but it makes them all searchable as well, using our powerful TV search technology.  This is the same TV seach technology that shows like The Soup (on E!) and The Daily Show use to find their TV clips. With our clustering technology, there’s one unified search interface all the recordings. With the storage capacity on this SnapStream, this means the ability to search about 115,200 hours of recorded TV… or about 13 years worth of TV recordings!

And then it gets even cooler….

Distributed Transcoding: For the uninitiated, ShowSqueeze is our built-in transcoding feature — the feature that allows you to take recordings that are natively made in MPEG-2 and convert them automatically to H.264 or Windows Media.  In the older architecture, each server could only ShowSqueeze up to the limit of the local CPU.

Anyhow, being limited to the CPU on one computer won’t do for such a massive system, so in addition to scalable recordings and storage across nodes, we added scalable ShowSqueeze across nodes as well.

The base unit is a 1U dual-processor quad-core Nehalem Xeon server (8 physical, 8 logical cores) with a ton of ram.  On the price to performance curve in a 1U space, this box is theperfect choice.  It can do more than one ShowSqueeze from HD to HD h.264 in real time or can take eight analog shows at once and squeeze to an archival quality file.  Under the hood, we have all of the software knobs to turn and buttons to push so you can optimize the performance of the box to the task at hand.

Assuming one box isn’t enough, one could just add more SnapStream ShowSqueeze nodes.  As additional ShowSqueeze boxes come online, the master SnapStream node will dole out any available tasks to them.  And if a ShowSqueeze node is taken back offline and the master node automatically adjusts by moving ShowSqueeze tasks to the remaining nodes!

HD-SDI playout: To finish out our rack, we also threw in one of our HD-SDI playout nodes.  (Once again, one can add as many as needed for your workflow.)  For our traditional television customers like NBC, The Soup (E!), The Daily Show and MTV, being able to get SnapStream recorded shows to their HD-SDI video router is important.

Stats Quick View (Maximum Configuration):

*Assuming a recording quality of 2mbit/s.

Help us name the World’s Largest DVR… and win an iPad:

We need a really cool name for this thing and we want your help!  And the winning submission will get an Apple iPad – 16GB + Apple’s iPad case/cover.  Check back here on our blog for more details on the contest.

And, as mentioned above, you can come see this thing live at the National Association of Broadcaster’s (NAB 2010) show in Las Vegas.  We’ll be showcasing it in the South Upper Hall, #SU2707.

And, finally, some more pics:

(see them all on Flickr here)

“

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

• I played with it for a few days.
• I tested it with friends.
• I couldn’t find a purpose for it.
• I have not logged in to it in well over a month.
• I do not miss it.

I am not sure what problem Google was trying to solve with Wave. Perhaps they invented a problem, which no one really has and then developed a solution for that invented problem. Either way I am declaring Google Wave useless for the majority of Internet users.

Email is still communication king and will most likely remain that way, until we all have 2 way video communicators built in to our watches and phones.

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

Say what you will but in my opinion the iPhone beats the droid is every way (save some minor coverage differences in Cleveland, OH).

Regardless of the stellar savings offered by Verizon Wireless the devices have been returned and our remaining numbers on big red have now been ported over to AT&T.

After talking to a business rep we are now getting a 10% discount on service, and we have devices which are business usable!

Oh Well Android OS,  maybe next time.

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

iPhones are great, but as a techie it was time to try something new!

Initially everything was looking very promising:

The phone was fast, I mean really fast.  People have been comparing it to the iPhone 3Gs but I don’t have a 3Gs I only have a 3G.  I will say the difference in speed between the 3G and the Droid is staggering!

It only took me about 15 minutes to get completely comfortable with the Droid’s UI and pull out keyboard and maybe another 10 minutes to fully customize the phone to my liking. At this point I decided it was time to setup my email account on the Droid.

This process was painless and simple.  I quickly got the Droid connected my to Exchange 2007 server and it began syncing email, contacts and my calendar.

So far this was going very well, fast and functional! Or so I thought.

Upon completion of the sync with my Exchange 2007 server, I opened up the Email app on the Droid.

Wow was this ugly. Gray on Gray background made it hard notice a difference between read and unread messages(The picture below does not convey this well). There was no preview of the email body like on the iPhone, and I could not find a single setting to change any of this.

After further inspection of the lack of options in this regard, I began doing a thorough testing of the most basic day to day email tasks.

1. Replying to email:

Fail. While I will say that the Droid does in fact send a reply email, you would never know by glancing at your inbox.  There is no change to the message listed in your inbox, no reply arrow or “badge” showing you that something was done with this email. During a long work day dealing with many emails this gets very confusing.

2. Forwarding email:

Double Fail. First it fails for the same reason as the reply fails.  No indication that you have forwarded the message is displayed in the inbox.  However this goes one step beyond to be a double fail when dealing with attachments on the Droid.  Exchange 2007/Droid users seem to be completely unable to forward emails with attachments from the phone properly.  While the recipient does get an email, there is no message body, just an attachment message.eml.  Now this would be ok if you could open the attachment, but it is junk on the receiving end.

I thought I was crazy and that I missed something in the setup, but I did not.

As a techie I could not let this go, and began the hunt for fixes. First to the Android Market, where I downloaded a trial of Touchdown.  This apparently was the end all be all application for Exchange users on the Droid.  It however had the same issues with indicating a message had been replied to and thus was a no go for me especially at the price of $20. Touchdown had its other weaknesses but that will be for another post (maybe). This then brought me to alldroid.org. An Android development community.  There I was greated by many other incredible tech savvy people, who were also not content with their Droids for various reasons. Surely there would be answers here…..

After reading many posts I downloaded a few “Custom Roms” for the Droid and went to work flashing them to the phone and testing them out one by one hoping there would be a fix for the email deficiency. (Learn how to root your Android Phone, and Flash Custom Roms Here) Unfortunately there were no fixes for the email issues! I could make the phone faster with an overclock, I could replace the stock applications for the Gallery, Music, Launcher and more with versions from the newest Android device the Nexus One, but nothing was there to upgrade/fix the email application.

Some Googling turned up results for the Android Google Code project bug tracking site, where these issues have been clearly logged by many people.  Google has been made aware of the problems with email and Exchange servers, but on their bug tracker they are listed as confirmed, or just sitting there opened.  Is anyone assigned to these bugs? Are they being worked on?

I was very frustrated at this point, mostly due to the fact that switching to Verizon would result in a huge monthly savings because of the 18% discount I get through mynpp.com, which unfortunately does not have an agreement in place with AT&T at this time.

So what does this mean for the business user? Apparently Google designed this device to work primarily with Gmail and its other Google Apps. Everything else was secondary or tertiary with only the most basic of functionality included.

So you just got your Droid and are in your 15 or 30 day window, depending on if you have a business account or not, and you are wondering what do I do now?

If you have never owned a smart phone before you may not notice these issues and the phone will be a great performer, which seems to be the case based on the adoption rate of the Motorola Droid and the million+ handsets sold thus far. So make up your own mind.

However if you have ever used a Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile or iPhone for business, I am pretty sure you will be mostly disappointed.

I do see great potential for the Android OS and hope that as development and adoption rate continues these major design flaws are worked out and I can try out the next iteration of “Droid”

© 2010, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

Deciding that Windows was just not going to do the job for various reasons, I used a great open source solution FreeNAS to get the job done.

Everything was going great until OS X got involved.

5 Users in the office are Mac users, which typically is no problem and actually way less of a support issue.

This time, however, things were not going well.  My Mac users were creating folders and files on the server in shares set with permissions for all authenticated users, but the folders being created on the Macs were not writable to other users.

I double checked the user accounts and the permissions in FreeNAS to no avail.

After researching Samba parameters for the better part of an hour I came across something that seemed interesting.

A Samba configuration setting of  “unix extensions = no” seems to ignore the permissions OS X is overriding on the server when it is creating files and folders. By setting this variable in the smb.conf file in the global settings section, folders created by OS X users were writable by the Windows users.

So if you are planning on using a Unix/Linux file server in a mixed client environment, make sure to set “unix extensions = no” in the global section of smb.conf and restart Samba.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

Just press ”SELECT” on your remote when you see the Start Over prompt and you can restart a show already in progress. It’s easy and it’s free with your Digital Cable service.

• Start Over is available on select shows on designated channels.
  
• Fast-Forward and Recording features are not available in Start Over mode.

Start Over will appear on your screen in one of the following two ways, depending on where you live in our service area.

Your Start Over Experience May Look Like This;

When you see the Start Over prompt on screen, press the “SELECT” button on your remote. (Appears only on channels airing Start Over.)

Press the “SELECT” button again to Start Over that show or press the “C” button to Cancel and return to live TV

Or Like This;

When you see the Start Over prompt on screen, press the “SELECT” button on your remote. (Appears only on channels airing Start Over.)

Press the “SELECT” button again to Start Over that show or press the “C” button to Cancel and return to live TV

Start Over is available on select shows on designated channels.
Fast-Forward and Recording features are not available in Start Over mode.

No extra equipment is required. All you need is your remote and an existing Digital Cable set-top box.

• Programs can be restarted multiple times within the TV show’s live timeframe.
• You can Start Over a show anytime within its programming viewing window.
• If you change the channel, you can resume watching the first show where you left off as long as the show is still within its scheduled broadcast timeframe.

Channel Lineup (Standard Definition only)

• Arts and Entertainment
• Biography Channel
• History Channel
• History International
• Nick Toons
• Nick
• VH1
• Spike
• Comedy
• Cartoon
• Noggin
• MTV
• TV Land
• Nat Geo
• FX
• Food Network
• HGTV
• TBS
• TNT
• Disney Channel East

Channel Lineup (High Definition)

• HGTV
• TBS
• TNT
• Food Network

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

That being the case, I am hoping one of my blog readers has an extra invitation they can spare.

I would really love to use the application and blog about it and would also love to give away any invitations I would get away to my readers in the future.

Keep me posted!

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

We knew good and well this thing was coming sometime in November, and now Verizon Wireless has made it official: the Motorola DROID will hit Big Red on November 6th for $199 on contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate). Naturally, the DROID itself is just the first of what could be many Android-laced phones coming to the carrier, and Verizon Wireless CMO John Stratton even stated that the phone “is wide open” — pretty big words from a company like VZW. Android 2.0 will be front and center, along with Visual Voicemail, a 3.7-inch display (854 x 480 resolution), 5 megapixel camera (with dual-LED flash), a bundled 16GB memory card and a beta version of Google Maps Navigation(!). For those wondering, yeah — the DROID is the first phone to offer that, which transforms Google Maps into a turn-by-turn routing system that’ll have your dedicated TomTom / Garmin trembling in fear. There’s also a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi, voice-activated search and over-the-air Amazon MP3 downloads. With all that, who needs the iPhone, right Ivan?

Continue reading Motorola DROID official on Verizon: $199 on contract, coming November 6th (video)

Motorola DROID official on Verizon: $199 on contract, coming November 6th (video) originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:23:00 EST.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

If you loved using the existing coax in your home to network your devices together at 110Mbps, then you’ll love MoCA 1.1 even more — testing has shown it can reach speeds of 175Mbps and up the number of participate devices to 16. The real challenge with MoCA right now though is that there aren’t many devices out there that support it and those that do cost a pretty penny — well worth it if you can’t run CAT5 cables though. Advanced Digital Broadcast, and Entropic made a little progress today however by getting the first MoCA 1.1 set-top-box certified, which we’re hoping is just the first of many devices to jump on the MoCA bandwagon. Because as cool as it sounds to have an Ethernet jack on the back of your HDTV or game console, it doesn’t do most any good because there’s only a coax cable running to their equipment.

First MoCA 1.1 cable set-top-box gets certified originally appeared on Engadget HD on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:18:00 EST.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

Face? Meet palm. Microsoft’s decided to pull out of its co-sponsoring of “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show” after execs attending the taping came to the sudden conclusion that Family Guy-caliber jokes were to be told, tackling such topics as “deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest.” We’re not sure how 10 years and over 120 episodes of offensive precedence bypassed Redmond’s radars, but man, that’s gotta be some strong personal bubble. A Microsoft representative said of the taping, “it became clear that the content was not a fit with the Windows brand.” The show will still air November 8th, pre-recorded Microsoft references in tow, but with a new as-of-yet unnamed sponsor. All we have of the now-doomed partnership is this brief video from the Windows “741″ student site — it’s after the break.

[Via The Raw Feed]

Continue reading Microsoft ditches Family Guy special… for being Family Guy

Filed under: Software

Microsoft ditches Family Guy special… for being Family Guy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:46:00 EST.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

If you already did jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch, you don’t need to use blackra1n again.

Jailbreak iPhone 3.1.2 with blackra1n RC2

Here is how you can jailbreak iPhone 3.1.2 firmware using blackra1n RC2.

1. Download blackra1n RC2 (Available for both Windows & Mac)

2. Follow the steps at my jailbreak iPhone 3.1.2 post.

blackra1n on Windows 7

I tried blackra1n on Windows 7, but it crashed when I first tried opening it. To get blackra1n to work on Windows 7, do the following:

1. Right-click the blackra1n icon and click properties.

2. Click the Compatibility tab.

3. Under compatibility mode click the box to enable it and select Windows XP (Service Pack 2). Click OK, and then run blackra1n.

I’ve only tried this on a Windows 7 32-bit setup, but it should work on a 64-bit setup as well.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

The only thing we love more than analysts and surveys is content providers bickering over each other’s ridiculous PR claims and none are as fun as when Comcast is involved. Avid readers are all too familiar with Comcast’s strategy to give up on the linear channel race and instead focus on VOD “options” no matter how silly it makes them look to those in the know. What really makes this particular situation interesting is that Comcast doesn’t appreciate it when another provider, like Verizon FiOS, gets in on the action when it recently claimed it offered 3 times as many VOD offerings a month as the nation’s largest provider. Comcast claims this is just not true and there are actually at least 17,000 VOD titles available in most markets. If that is news to you, then you aren’t the only one as Verizon blasts back with “I’m surprised that Comcast wouldn’t talk about these numbers in their PR and advertising. We make sure to let our customers know when we’re adding more to their service.” Too true, Verizon, too true. Honestly we couldn’t care less about VOD because we’re in the small group of CableCARD users, but there’s no way we could turn away from a train wreck like this.

Comcast has issues with Verizon’s FiOS VOD claims originally appeared on Engadget HD on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:07:00 EST.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.

You know Microsoft, when you setup a big Windows 7 booth across the street from the Japan Linux Symposium you’re just asking for trouble.

[Thanks, Mitch W.]

Linus Torvalds gives Windows 7 a big thumbs up originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:14:00 EST.

© 2009, Technoramblings of the digitally insane. All rights reserved.