RyuKent on Life

Because it took me such a long time to work this out, I thought I should post. There didn’t seem to be any other posts about this on google or bing. Anyway on my Renault Clio dash, there is only 1 button and pressing and holding it resets the milometer.  What took me a long to to discover is that turning it left or right allows you to change the time on the clock. Actually it didn’t seem to work the first time and I had to turn it quite hard. Then when it flashed, pushing it quickly changes the hours and minutes. Hope this helps someone else.

This is a quick note to tell the world how much I appreciate good customer service and especially that offered by O2 broadband. Having previously suffered at the hands of Tiscali who have fittingly joined the evil that is Carphone Warehouse, I was presently surprised to be treated like a human by the O2 team.

Little things like receiving texts when you order is going through and being able to check the status online made all the difference. They checked that I was on the right package and genuinely seemed to care. This is a commodity that is becoming all too scarce in this country. People just simply don’t take pride in their jobs any more and don’t care about customer service.

Sure, everybody wants cheap, but at what cost? Having being conned into a terrible deal with Tiscali where by my 10 days cancellation period expired before my service was even connected (it took 2 weeks) I can safely say that I will never get involved in another year long contract with a company that doesn’t take customers seriously.

Which brings me ironically back to O2. Has anyone else noticed that at around 9am and 5pm, despite having great signal strength in the London Bridge area, it is simply impossible to use the 3G network? I mean yesterday it took me over half an hour to send a text. Checking train timetables on my iPhone just didn’t work. I’m not alone here and it is definitely not a handset issue as everywhere else is no problem.

Clearly O2 have overstretched their network. I’m n0t sure if they can do anything about it because of the limit in spectrum available, but I would seriously consider changing networks (when Orange and Vodafone become available) based on this. There’s no point in having a phone that you can’t use. Have emailed them and will await the reply. I look forward to posting it here.

Something that has always annoyed me is that there are so many video standards out there and that they are nearly all proprietary systems owned and pushed by one company or another and inevitably restricted in one way or another. Or worse, expensively licenced.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

It seems it is possible to synchronise your iPhone to more than one computer at a time, thus negating the need to erase all data if you are often moving your phone around, maybe using a work and home PC etc.

The process involves changing the Library Persistent ID so that both iTunes copies believe they are in fact running from the same library. You’ll need to get down and dirty, hacking the library.itl file using  hex editor, but as long as you take a back up, there will be no danger involved and I found the process quite enjoyable.

Full details can be found over at ismashphone.com

According to TechRadar, iPhones for official release in China are to have their WiFi facilities disabled. Apparently it is because the authorities would rather that people’s internet access is monitored and controlled through one centralised source. I think this is a shame.

Aside from my view on the monitoring and controlling, I really don’t think this makes technical sense. First because people already have access to iPhones that have been imported from other countries and there is no sign that these will become illegal. Secondly, access will still remain from other devices to the the WiFi hotspots that iPhone users will be denied. These hotspots will be connected to the internet through a normal Chinese ISP which will surely be running the same great firewall software that the authorities will want to run on the mobile network’s servers.

If you are the kind of person who needs to avoid this or don’t want to be tracked, surely you will opt for an imported iPhone without the WiFi disabled, or some of the numerous other mobiles that do have it and you can buy in China. Also, what extra do they really get from restricting people to the 3G internet? Will there be extra monitoring or restricted access? If so, won’t people just wait to go home or pop into a web cafe to post or access the data they cannot on their iPhone. Surely in this kind of restricted regime, you have to block all access or none. The people who need it, will always know of the easiest method to get access and use that anyway. In the mean time, the majority of normal users will suffer significant loss of functionality just to try and prevent what is ultimately impossible to restrict.

Finally I did it. I ran HelloOX after signing it using my certificate. It ran for over an hour. I almost gave up. Eventually, I thought enough was enough and after an hour and a half, I selected cancel. But, it worked! I can now install non-signed software on my E63.

Things to remember -

• Run SignSIS in XP compatibility mode, otherwise you can’t output signed files in Vista.
• Wait for HelloOX to do it’s thing. It can take a long time.
• I tested successfully with HelloOX 1.04
• I’m using SignSIS 1.1

I got HelloOX 1.04 from here.

I got SignSIS 1.1 from here.

I got my certificate by following the links in my previous post.

Please do not use this method for running pirate software on the Nokia E63. This should be used for testing purposes only or to run stuff that needs to be released without waiting to be signed or software Nokia don’t like. Software piracy is possibly illegal.

So I thought jailbreaking an iPhone was an annoyingly tedious task. Looks like the process for a Nakia e63 and symbian is even more tricky. Nokia have really locked down their system. But there is a hack. Only problem is getting it onto your phone in the first place.

If you just want to run uncertified software (you may be a developer or running tests), you’ll need to have a developer certificate. This will allow you to self sign your own applications and specifically the HelloOX. At the time of writing HelloOX 1.4 is the latest version. This will unlock your phone to unsigned apps.

In order to install HelloOX, you’ll need to get a certificate. At the moment there is a Chinese website which will give you 1 certificate for free. Certificates are based on IMEI. That means it will only work for your phone. There’s a great guide to using this site for people who don’t read Chinese here.

Once you’ve obtained the certificate, you’ll be able to sign stuff using the guide on this site. If you’re only going to install a few apps, you can sign them yourself, or download HelloOX to remove the need to sign.

Good luck!