Monthly Archives: August 2010

August 30, 2010

Download images in Safari 5 that Flickr disables

By Dave M.

flickr_logo.png

The following appeared on an OS X hints site, but was apparently censored by the host probably because they were afraid of the concequences of the article. I, on the other hand, am not. :)

Flickr gives users the ability to ‘disable’ downloads of images, but they do it by merely placing a transparent HTML object or image file over the desired image.

By installing the AdBlock for Safari extension, you can easily disable the formatting that prevents you from easily drag-and-dropping the image on your desktop or right clicking it.

There is a Flickr specific method and a more general method presented below. The short way (only good for Flickr.com):

Apparently, this also works with AdBlock Plus for Firefox as well.

  • Bring up the Adblock Plus Preferences dialog
  • Click “Add filter…”
  • Copy “www.flickr.com##DIV[class="spaceball"]” and paste it into the edit field
  • Click “Add filter…” again
  • Copy “www.flickr.com##SPAN[class="facade-of-protection"]” and paste it inot the edit field
  • Click the Apply button

To try out either fix, locate an image that you normally wouldn’t be able to download (disabling the Adblock Plus lines will help if you are using AdBlock Plus, I would suspect that AdBlock for Safari has a similar feature, then re-enable the lines and refresh the page. You should be able to right-click on the image and save it like any other image. You can also now drag the image to any folder in the finder as well.

Update (8/30/10 7:05pm): Surprise, surprise. I have been asked to remove the link to the image that was being used as an example of this trick. Unlike the other website that was to scared to leave the post up, I’m not going to remove the post. As with any hack to remove a protection of sorts, it’s up to the person using the hack’s conscious to decide whether to use it or not.

The image that was being used as an example image to test with was just that and certainly nothing to write home about. The artist appears to be going from site to site that has been publicizing this hack, making sure that the link to their image is removed at least. It almost sounds like they want the entire post removed. I’m not going to do that. If they want better protection for their “art”, I would suggest they write to Flickr.com and have their developers fix the blatant hole in their “security”.

18 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Tips & Tricks

August 26, 2010

Jailbreaking review

By Dave M.

So it’s been just about a month now since I “jailbroke” my iPhone 4. There are days where I think “How in the world did I ever live without it?” Then there are days where I curse jailbreaking and threaten to restore my iPhone back to factory default and leave jailbreaking behind forever.

Starting with the cursing; recently, I have been having issues with my Home button not working correctly. I’m having to “respring” the phone several times a day. It’s really weird. The button works somewhat. If I double press it, I get the multitasking/fast app switching list just fine. However, if I’m in an application, when I press the Home button, I can’t get back to the home screens.

For the longest time, I wasn’t having any problems with the Home button, so I have to assume that a recent update has caused this problem. There is a package called “Activator” that controls all the buttons as well as many gestures to do things like if you swipe the Status Bar you will activate SBSettings. I’m assuming that Activator has broken something that is causing the Home button to not work correctly. Looking at Activator’s Changelog, it states “Fix Single Press Home Button at lock screen”. It sounds like they fixed a bug somewhere, but the might have accidentally have broken the functionality of the Home button when it’s not assigned to something in that package.

Either way, it’s a problem that is really getting frustrating.

Another thing that has been happening frequently is that in application sound stops working. Now to be fair, I have been downloading packages that are supposed to adjust the sound profile so that I don’t have to keep going into settings every night to turn off certain sound settings and in the morning to re-enable the sounds later. I’m going to have to remove the packages to see if that fixes the sound issues. None of the sound profile tools really work with iOS 4.x, so I really have no need to have them installed for now.

Now for the “How in the world did I ever live without it?” part. I own a WiFi based iPad and it turns out that it’s pretty useless when I go out into the world unless there is free WiFi available. Well, there is a package called MyWi 4.0 which allows me to create a WiFi hotspot in my iPhone. It sells for $19.95 and has a 14 day free trial. It’s a WEP secured hotspot that you can configure the amount of output power to help conserve iPhone battery. MyWi will definitely eat battery power, so it’s pretty important to keep the power as low as possible. Also, secure the hotspot signal! You don’t want anyone in the immediate area to access your 3G hotspot.

I’m currently using the free 2 week demo, but I have to say that I’m very impressed with the way MyWi works.

IMG_0001_TM.png

IMG_0002_TM.png

I haven’t actually tried it out in the wild, but I enabled MyWi on my phone and selected the MyWi SSID on my iPad and low and behold, I was up and browsing with my phone as the hotspot. Then later that day, my ISP died and I lost my broadband access to the internet. Right in the middle of a City Story session. City Story requires a connection to their servers to play. So, I fired up MyWi on my iPhone and connected to it on my iPad where I play City Story from and I was then able to complete my game session. That was awesome!

Now, did I have to complete my session at that exact moment? No, not really. However, since I have MyWi, I thought I would give it a try to see if it would work and it did a great job! I was able to check email and even browse the web while my ISP was out.

Now, I have to say that using MyWi instead of paying for tethering through AT&T is probably illegal and definitely against AT&T’s terms of service, so if they catch you doing this they can drop you from their service and probably charge you for early service termination. So, if you use MyWi on your jailbroken iPhone, make sure you use it sparingly so that AT&T doesn’t suspect that you are using tethering.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Jailbreaking, Review

August 7, 2010

Jailbreaking the iPhone 4

By Dave M.

For the longest time, I never considered the possibility of jailbreaking my iPhones. I have owned the original iPhone 1G 4GB’s, the 3G 8GB’s and currently the 4 with 16GB’s.

At first, I was concerned about the entire process. I had concerns that if something went wrong, I wouldn’t be able to get my phone back to it’s factory defaults. Later I was concerned about the process of jailbreaking. Mind you, I’m a programmer so hacking a phone shouldn’t have bothered me as much as some of the processes of jailbreaking that were out there.

Nothing out in the jailbreaking software community really interested me enough to draw me in. Until now. I have a WiFi iPad and when I go out into the world with my iPad, I have to find a free WiFi hotspot in order to use it. This is not easy when my destination is a family member.

I recently read about an app called MyWi. This application will allow you to tether a computer or phone via USB, Bluetooth, and most importantly WiFi. I haven’t purchased the app just yet because I’m still seeing if I’m going to stick with my iPhone 4 being
jailbroken.

I currently have Cydia, Rock, Infinidock, Infinifolders, LockInfo, Notified Pro, PkgBackup, SBOrganizer, SBSettings, ToneFXs, WinterBoard, and Auto Silent installed. (Sorry about the sites that those links go to, some were designed for iPhone and some apps just don’t have web pages.)

The above screen shots from left to right:

  • LockInfo (two screen shots merged together to show all the info I have configured in my LockInfo settings)
  • Infinidock (notice the 5 icons on the dock? I actually have 6 icons, one is off the screen on the left. It’s the Cydia icon)
  • Infinifolders (notice that there are more than 12 icons in the Photography folder)
  • SBSettings

Apple needs to take a serious look at some of the apps that the Jailbreak community have come up with. LockInfo is pretty much a “must have” for anyone using a smart phone. Mind you, Android has the ability to display configurable widgets on there lock screen as well as their version of SpringBoard. So they have had the ability to display useful info from day one. I’m not sure why Apple is so resistant to giving users the ability to display more info on the iPhone’s lock screen other than the time and date.

Another very important feature available to Jailbreakers is the ability to log Notifications. Notified Pro and LockInfo both allow you to see all the notifications that have been displayed. iOS 4 has improved in this area, but there are still times that notifications come in and get overwritten by other notifications and are lost forever.

One thing that really surprised me with the iPhone was the lack of ability to configure the phone’s sounds and wallpaper. iOS 4 finally allowed users to put a wallpaper behind the home screens. However we still can’t configure notification sounds. I want to be able to set my incoming SMS sound to something other than the 6 sounds they give us. Apple doesn’t even give us the ability to change the sounds for new mail, calendar reminders, new voicemail, etc… Does Apple think it’s users are so stupid that they can’t figure out how to change sounds on their phone?

Something that is on just about every cell phone other than the iPhone is Sound Profiles. The ability to have a Meeting, Outside, Nighttime, and Normal profile is very important. Every night, I have to turn off Calendar Alerts, New Mail, New Text Messages, and turn all Notifications Off, then in the morning, I have to restore those settings. Auto Silent allows you to configure Sound Profiles for specific times of a week to what ever profile you want. This app currently doesn’t work with the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. Hopefully the developers will get this app working with the new phone and OS real soon.

The last thing that really confuses me about the iPhone iOS is the lack of icon space in SpringBoard. iOS 4 finally gives us folders which gives us the ability to put more than 148 icons or 180 with 3.x. I just can’t understand why Apple put the page limit at 11. Really? 11?! There is plenty of room for 15 pages (dots between main icons and dock icons). In fact, there is enough room for 17 dots and the Spotlight icon down there. Infinidock and Inifinifolders gives Jailbreakers the ability to really configure our home screens the way we want.

I can see why Apple doesn’t want the home screen icons to scroll, other than horizontally. Keeping the SpringBoard as simple as possible makes sense. However, give us the ability to configure the SpringBoard to do what we want it to.

I can see that Apple will never change the OS to do all the things I have changed on my phone, but to be competitive with Android, giving us widgets or the ability to display more info on the lock screen is going to be a must. I would also like to see Apple give us the ability to modify the sound scape of our phones would also be really useful. Finally, sound profiles are a must.

Overall, I am really liking the new apps I have installed thanks to the Jailbreaking community. I have had a few issues with the operation of my phone since Jailbreaking. I’ve only had one crash of the OS because of an app that I had to uninstall. Every once and a while icons reappear that I have configured to be invisible, but a “Respring” restores everything back to normal. Respring-ing is kind of like restarting the Finder in OS X. It’s not a full reboot, but it restarts SpringBoard.

So I’m going to say that my Jailbreaking experience has been a very positive one. Jailbreaking is definitely not for everyone, but if you want the ability to do some of the things I have done, it’s definitely worth considering.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in iPhone/iPod touch

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