Awesome Techs

Today Computerworld reported, Apple has patched many of the critical flaws which was present in iPod Touch and iPhone.

The Patched flaws are:

• Playing a maliciously crafted mp4 audio file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
• Viewing a maliciously crafted TIFF image may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
• A person with physical access to a locked device may be able to access the user’s data
• Accessing a maliciously crafted FTP server could result in an unexpected application termination, information disclosure, or arbitrary code execution
• Mail may load remote audio and video content when remote image loading is disabled

According to Apple, the iPhone 3.1.3 update improves the accuracy of battery level.

iPhone and iPod Touch owners can wait out the update interval. iTunes will automatically check Apple’s update servers once a week or you can also retrieve iPhone 3.1.3 manually by selecting “Check for Update” under the iTunes Help menu and then docking the iPhone to a PC or Macintosh.

General Tips:

• If you’re scrolling through a long document/page in an application – if you tap the bar at the top of your screen containing the time and battery, the application will automatically scroll up to the top of the document/page.
• To take a screenshot of any screen of your iPod (including the lock screen), hold the power and home buttons and release them. A white flash will appear on screen and a screenshot will appear in your Photos application.
• If your iPod is frozen and will not respond, you can force reboot by holding the power and home buttons until your device turns off. Please note that this is not recommended and is the equivalent of pulling the cord out of your computer to turn it off.
• Need a spare cleaning cloth for your touch, or an extra cloth to rest your iPod touch on while at work or school? Just go to your local vision care store (or pharmacy) and get an eyeglass/sunglass “cleaning cloth”. Cheap and works great!
• If you wish to change your device’s root SFTP password, open Terminal and type ‘passwd’. You will then be prompted to change your password.

Tips and Tricks Regarding Media

• Double tapping the home button in any application, or with the screen off will bring up the music controls.
• When watching a video, tap to bring up the onscreen controls. When you are done watching a video make sure you press done so your progress will be saved.
• When listening to an audiobook, iTunes and your iPod create a new chapter list unrelated to the subject of the book. It’s accessible using the same control used for viewing audio tracks (upper right of screen).
• When playing media, press and hold the forward button to incrementally increase the speed of playback. When the media is paused, holding the fast forward button will make the media play slower.
• When listening to music, double tap the album artwork to have it flip over. You can then view the tracklisting of the album.
• If you pull your headphones out of the socket, any currently playing media will pause.
• If you would like to view the lyrics of a song (if you’ve added lyrics), by tapping the album art on the Now Playing screen.

Tips and Tricks Regarding Battery

• Turn off WiFi to save battery power when not in use.
• JB ONLY: Turn off SSH via SBSettings.
• Make sure to completely close apps when you are done with them to save battery power. This is accomplished by pressing and holding the home button for approximately five seconds. This boosts battery life big time if you run lots of different apps all the time.
• You can charge your iPod Touch from any fully powered USB 2.0 port. A PS2 does not have a fully powered USB 2.0 port. Ports that will work include a computer, printer, or a media centre. The device does not have to have iTunes installed to provide power to your iPod Touch.
• To improve battery life, turn down brightness through the Settings application.

Home Screen Tips and Tricks

• If you would like to rearrange your Home Screen icons, tap and hold an icon until they all start to wiggle. Drag the icons around to rearrange them, and when it is satisfactory, press the home button.
• Websites without an icon will just be a screenshot for webclips, for websites like this zoom into an area of the site you would like the webclip icon to look like… ex. zoom into the website logo and that will be the webclip icon.
• Press the home button while on the home screen, and it will return to the initial home screen.
• Instead of sliding across the page, tapping imediately left or right of the page dots on the Home Screen and Weather will move to the next page.

THEMES: JAILBREAK ONLY

• If you want to set a picture as a permanent background (and not only in the “wake” screen) Set the picture as a background in settings or directly from the picture gallery. Then, open Winterboard and tap User Wallpaper.

Tips and Tricks for Keyboard

• When typing a lot of text in Safari turn it to horizontal view. The keyboard will be bigger and you can get a better grip of the Touch while typing with two thumbs.
• When typing, if you press the space bar twice after a word it will insert a period and another space.
• When using the keyboard, if you hold the delete key down for about 3 seconds it will change from deleting letters to deleting words.
• Holding down letters on the keyboard will pop up the accents/symbols associated with those letters. Once it pops up, slide your finger over to the accent/symbol you like.
• When typing if you want to add something from the numbers keyboard just hold down the numbers and slide your finger to the number or symbol you want, and release. It will take you back to your letters keyboard. This way you dont have to tap numbers, tap your number, then tap numbers again to go back. This also applies for using the ’shift’ key to apply capital letters.
• Make a spelling mistake? Press and hold the word you spelt wrong and a magnifying glass will appear. Slide your finger back and forwth to move the cursor.

Tips and Tricks for Safari Browser

• When in Safari, if you are presented with a link, hold your finger over the link, and a bubble will appear showing the URL that the link is tied to.
• In Safari since you can’t open links in a new windows, you can open a new page, tap the bookmarks icon, tap the history folder and direct yourself to the last page you were just on and tap the link from there. You can also use a javascript bookmarklet called Tabulate.
• When you’re on a website that has a frame or an iframe with scrollbars in it, use two fingers on that frame to scroll that window and back to a single finger to scroll the whole page.
• If you would like to save an image from the web, simply tap and hold the image to save it.
• In Safari double tap to zoom in or out. You can also “pinch” (putting your thumb and index finger on the screen and pinching in and out) to zoom in Safari, Maps, and in Pictures.

Misc Tips and Tricks

• Whilst in Mail’s inbox view, sliding your finger from left to right on a message the ‘delete’ button will appear. This also applies in the list view of the Videos application. You can also delete Mail in bulk by tapping ‘edit’ and selecting the Mail you want to have deleted.

• In Google Maps, double tapping zooms in as expected, but single tapping with two fingers zooms out.

• The ‘Notes’ application is an easy way to draft mail. The ‘mail’ icon provides a link to iPhone’s Mail and saved contacts.

• To use a scientific calculator, simply enter the Calculator application, and turn the device sideways.

Credits: Google

A lot of people have been reporting issues with jailbreaking using the new blackra1n tool by George, specially iPod Touch 3G owners. Some of these issues have to do with the fact that this is a tethered jailbreak for iPod Touch 3G so far. This means that to boot your iPod Touch 3G, it must be plugged into your computer and you must run blackra1n again. For those stuck at a white screen or being unable to boot your device, here are a few important pointers to keep in mind during the process:

• Make sure you’ve updated to 3.1.2. This jailbreak is not for 3.0 or 3.1.
• Download the purplera1n tool to your desktop. Some users have reported issues of the application crashing or having issues with rights on Vista or 7. This should fix those issues. For more convenience. run it as an administrator.
• Make sure no other software is running when you jailbreak to avoid interference.
• If your device doesn’t boot for a long time, hold down the power and home buttons and restart it. If it tells you to connect to iTunes, something must have gone wrong and you might have to restart the process. I know this is annoying, but it has worked for some people after some tries. It does work.
• You won’t lose your data by jailbreaking. Only a fresh firmware restore could mean that your apps might go away, but they can be synced back using iTunes.
• If you have a white screen turn off the device by holding the power and home buttons for 10 seconds and boot it again.
• If iTunes keeps popping up, use CTRL + ALT + DELETE to go to the task manager and kill all iTunes processes which includes iTunesHelper.exe. This can cause interference with the process too.
• Strangely, doing the process on different computers has also worked for some people.

In the end, keep in mind that blackra1n really works. I tried it on my iPod Touch 2G 8GB, and it worked in the first try. It only got stuck when running Cydia for the first time. I had to reboot using the Power + Home buttons trick, but after that it has been really smooth.

Update: George Hotz has tweeted about an important issue that most people are facing. You’ll have to check if your iPod Touch 2G or 3G, 8GB model starts with MB or MC. For MC it won’t work, so you should restore it back to the old firmware. It works fine for the ones that start with MB. I guess that should answer most of the issues people are facing with blackra1n

Credits: ithinkdiff.com

First of all let me tell you, WHAT IS JAILBREAK???

jailbreaking an iphone means making your iphone ready to install thirdparty applications.

Iphone n Ipod touch only allows you to install applications approved by apple. All the other application cannot be installed on a stock Apple device. That means there is no way you can install a cracked/pirated version of an application. Also there are lot more cooler applications for these devices which are not being approved by Apple. i think you have heard about the Google Voice application which is not approved by Apple  at the first time it is submitted. The later is history, I’m not going to talk about it here.

For all these, there is one and only one solution is there, and it is called JAILBREAKING an IPhone or IPod Touch.

JAILBREAKING is totally different from UNLOCKING.

UNLOCKING means make the iphone usable in all carrier networks. In stock conditions almost all iphones are supposed to work with only one carrier. Because of this we cannot use iphone if we changed our country/ something like that.

So here in I’m talking about the latest JAILBREAKING utility called blackra1n. Geohot’s Blackra1n lets Windows users jailbreak the Iphone OS 3.1.2 on all Iphone and Ipod Touch models regardless of the hardware generation.

His blog says,

So, what is blackra1n? blackra1n is a 30 second ALL device 3.1.2 jailbreak. Even the ipt3, but the ipt3 is tethered. In order to boot it, just rerun blackra1n.

Warning 3g and 3gs unlockers, do not upgrade to 3.1.2 using iTunes if you want to keep your unlock. Baseband cannot be downgraded. Check out the dev team’s offerings. Also blackra1n doesn’t hacktivate.

All you need to do is plug in your Iphone or Ipod Touch using the standard USB sync cable and follow the instructions. It does not unlock the Iphone so that you can use it on another carrier and there are still some problems with Ipod Touch third generation devices, apparently.

Check Out the Home Page for this @ JAILBREAKING UTILITY HERE

The link To download is HERE

The MiLi Pro is a LCOS, LED-driven projector for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Simply pop your iPhone into it and it can put a screen up on your wall.

The whole thing is rechargeable and has VGA and RCA inputs as well as a dock connector. Look for it to drop in September. [PhoneSuit]