To jailbreak your iPhone, visit http://www.jailbreakme.com and you can literally slide a UI control in safari and it will jailbreak your phone by taking advantage of an PDF exploit in iOS.  This method works as long as you haven’t upgraded to iOS 4.0.2 since Apple patched the hole in that release.

Note: Jailbreakme.com is currently showing a placeholder page on their homescreen. Navigate on your iPhone to http://www.jailbreakme.com/_/ and you can manually download the PDF that matches your device and iOS version.  Once you click the PDF, it’ll pause for a few seconds, then you’ll see UI that informs you your iPhone is being jailbroken.

After jailbreaking, the obvious question is “Now what?”.  I was on the hunt to find the best apps to uninstlal to take advantage of my new found freedom away from Apple’s maniacal clutches.

Browsing through Cydia is a painful process – there are no “Top 10” lists or anything to really help you figure out what to install, and even worse, the load time on the details pages for each app is slow as molassess.  Instead, I started doing some web searches to find which apps to try out first.

Here’s the list of apps I ended up installing, and I even paid for a few of them:

1. InfiniFolder – allow unlimited apps in iPhone folders.  So instead of creating folders named “Games 1”, “Games 2”, etc, this allows you to have as many apps in a folder as you want and lets you vertically scroll.
2. MultiIconMover – From the department of “Why didn’t apple think of this?”.  When you move app icons around, it lets you multi select and move multiple apps at the same time.
3. IntelliScreen – This was my favorite jailbreak app of everything I installed.  It adds widgets to your lock screen like calendar, latest SMS and news and ironically makes it more like Windows Mobile. This screenshot shows news and weather, but I’ve configured mine to show my calendar also.
4. Action Menu and Action Menu Plus Pack – Awesome addons that puts the “action menu” on steroids (the action menu is the menu that appears when you do a single tap in a text field. Normally this only shows “copy”, “cut” and “paste).  This adds things like a clipboard history, send to twitter and create tinyURLs.
5. SBSettings and Serious SBSettings HD Theme – Solves a major gripe with the iPhone – “Why the heck does it take so many clicks to change settings???”.  In a single click you get a menu that slides down an dwill let you toggle wifi, 3g, etc in single clicks!  Make sure you get the Apple Congruency addon, which make it look more like native iPhone UI. Update (8/26): Thanks to Todd in the comments, I discovered the "Serious SBSettings HD Theme" which supports the iPhone 4 Retina display and looks better than the Apple Congurency theme.
6. My3G – removes the restrictions on apps that prevent them from using data on 3G like FaceTime, and iTunes downloads over 20MB.
7. Tlert (added 8/26) – Great system wide change to improve SMS. When you get an SMS while in another app, you can respond without leaving the app!

Any other ones I’m missing?

Related Posts

1. I wub the Apple iPhone
2. iPhone, I wub you not?
3. Problems with the iPhone 3G

Facebook’s documentation is definitely in it’s early stages because it’s very sparse in some areas, and lacks good cross-links to make the content easy to dig through.  Most of their documentation doesn’t even include a link to their Application center which is required to even get some of the social plugins to work since they require you to have an AppID.

Here’s a quick guide on what I did to get this running for the Like and Comments plugins for my photo blog. For wordpress, it was far easier since there are plugins for it.  I ended up using the FBLike plugin.

Create an AppID

Create an “application” for your site at http://developers.facebook.com/setup/.  Most of the settings can be left at their default, as we really only care about the AppID.

Asynchronously load the Facebook Javascript SDK

You have a couple of options for integration, using either iframes or their XFMBL based on their Javascript SDK. I opted for their javascript SDK as it gave more flexibility.  Just put this anywhere in your <body>.

The only change you have to make to the above is to insert your AppID where it says “your app id”.

Add the Like Button

The Like Button is definitely going to be the most popular of all the social plugins and is the one I started with first. You can use their code generator to spit out the XFMBL code you need or just use this format:

<fb:like href="http://your-page-goes-here.com" layout="standard" show_faces="true" width="450" action="like" colorscheme="light" />

The key part of this is to have “http://your-page-goes-here.com” match the actual URL that the Like button will appear on. This is the URL that is shared and should be unique on your site.  For my photoblog, I used built in functions in PixelPost  to generate the URLs dynamically (e.g. the token <SITE_URL><IMAGE_ID> results in http://www.trevinchowphotography.com/blog/index.php?showimages=88).  If you’re using WordPress, you can use the function get_permalink() if you opt not to use a plugin to generate the Like button.

The other options such as show_faces, and color scheme are described on the code generator page.  I couldn’t figure out how to right justify the text in the Like Plugin. That’s why the layout looks so hokey on myphoto blog with it not correctly aligned to the right of the images.

Comments Plugin

The comments plugin allows you to embed a comments widget on your pages to allow people to Like as well as add and view comments about the item.  The syntax is:

<fb:comments xid="<ID>" numposts="10" width="420" />

where xid the ID that uniquely identifies your page, numposts controls the # of comments a user can see in your widget, and width is, well, the width.

This ended up being the biggest pain in the butt because Facebook didn’t give complete information in their documentation. It seems that xid can only contains numbers, letters and underscores, despite their code generator taking in any character. What’s worse is that xid can be left blank and it defaults to the page’s current URL, so I’m assuming the FB Javascript SDK does some sort of encoding.

When xid is set to an invalid value, there is no visible error string/code thrown — the comment module just doesn’t display. You’re better off just omitting xid and leaving it to the default unless you have some specific reason to override it with your own unique ID.

Note: The comments plugin doesn’t have the same display customizations the Like button has. For example, there is no color scheme support. I ended up changing the background colors on the comments field to better accommodate their lighter colors UI.

Adding Open Graph properties to your pages

While it doesn’t seem like it’s required, Facebook’s documentation stats that you need to add meta data to your pages to “turn them into Open Graph objects”.  This is done  using <meta> tags.

The basic ones I included on every page are:

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Trevin Chow"/>

<meta property="og:locality" content="Seattle"/>

<meta property="og:region" content="WA"/>

<meta property="og:type" content="blog" />

<meta property="og:country-name" content="USA"/>

<meta property="fb:admins" content="trevin"/>

<meta property="fb:app_id" content="1234"/>

Change 1234 to your actual AppID, fb:admins is your Facebook username/ID and “blog” can be changed to any of their supported types.

There are a set of other Open Graph properties with values that will be based on the pages they are describing.

<meta property="og:title" content=" FOO"/>

<meta property="og:url" content="URL"/>

<meta property="og:image" content="IMAGE_URL"/>

The above property values need to be dynamically generated based on your content.  This blog is based on WordPress and I tried to find a plugin that would inject the properties for me, but I couldn’t find anything yet.  So I manually added this to the section of the header.php file:

<?php if ( is_single() ) {
echo '<meta property="og:title" content="' . get_the_title(get_the_ID()) . '" />';
echo '<meta property="og:url" content="' . get_permalink() . '" />';
}
?>

All the above code does is identify where it’s a single post page, then set the title and URL Open Graph properties to right values by calling into the wordpress functions.

For my photo blog, I added the “image” property, which is what is used for the content sharing back to facebook (instead of facebook guessing which image to use).  The code you’ll use will vary, but since I use PixelPost, this is what I ended up using:

<meta property="og:image" content="<SITE_URL>images/<IMAGE_NAME>"/>

That’s it!

That’s all you need to do to get up and running.  You’ll spend more time on formatting and integrating it into your site’s theme.  Facebook current offers 6 other social plugins that you can integrate as easily as the Like and Comments plugins.

Related Posts

1. The beauty of tags…
2. Banishing “Nofollow” for user content
3. Fix for WordPress “Allowed memory size exhausted” fatal error

The photographs are being projected digitally on a huge screen that overlooks their dining area with 3 minute transitions between each photo.  This provides a unique viewing experience than previous shows since in the past, I’ve worked with much smaller canvas sizes.

In addition to being my first show done digitally, it is also the first one I’ve done entirely in black and white.  Being primarily a color photography, it was quite the learning experience.  Photographs that looks fantastic in color can look completely dull when you convert to black and white.   There is truly an art to picking the photographs that have sufficient contrast.

After spending the last 3 weeks culling through photos, the resulting set of photographs is something I’m really proud of and would love you all to check it out.

The show starts today (April 9th) and runs for the next 3 months.  Stop in for a drink or a meal, check my photos out and let me know what you think.  (I highly recommend the cocktail named “Broken Spur #2”, it’s ridonkulously good).

Here is a sample of 2 photos from the show to wet your appetites:

The rest of my portfolio can be seen at http://www.trevinchowphotography.com and my daily photo blog is at http://www.trevinchowphotography.com/blog.

You can also subscribe to get my daily photos sent to you by email.  I don’t share your email addresses with anyone and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Related Posts

1. Turning on the Zumi Black & White Mode
2. New Photo Blog
3. Phil Holden photography show

So while I can launch Photoshop’s 32-bit instance, the Lightroom always launches the 64-bit version when you use the built-in “Edit with…” functionality. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how to get Lightroom to use the 32-bit instance of Photoshop instead. Hallelujah, I finally found a solution!

The solution requires a change to the Windows Registry. There is an unrelated Adobe’s Knowledge Base article that gives the location of the Photoshop registry keys, I was able to figure out how to get this to work finally.

Warning: Backup your registry before attempting this fix.

1. Open the Windows Registry editor by hitting <Windows Key>+R to bring up the Run box, and type in regedit.

2. Find the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\Photoshop.exe

3. There are 2 keys present with the following values (assuming you installed Photoshop to the default location):
(Default) C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe
(Path) C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\

4. We need to just change the path to the 32-bit version of Photoshop instead.  Double click on each one, and change the values to the following:
(Default) C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4\Photoshop.exe
(Path) C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS4

Now when you’re back in Lightroom, you should be able to use the “Edit in Photoshop” functionality and it will launch the 32-bit version of Photoshop.

Related Posts

1. Adobe releases DNG codec for Vista
2. Correcting date and time of photos with Exifer
3. Noise Ninja Profiles for Nikon D700

Related Posts

1. Following me on Twitter
2. I have a new RSS feed
3. Why are products more expensive on Microsoft Store?

Related Posts

No related posts.

Here’s a few of the recent photos I’ve posted:

Head on over to check it out, and feel free to subscribe to it by RSS or if you prefer, subscribe by email to get updates in your inbox every time I post something new. 

(I had a few issues at the beginning getting the blog layout right, so I republished photos several times over to accommodate different sizes.  So if you were an early subscriber, I apologize for the glut of updates in your RSS reader!)

Related Posts

1. Blast from the past — Photo of the day winner
2. Dreaming in Black and White
3. Photo in Schmapp Seattle

If you have firewire and shoot with a Compact Flash (CF) card, do yourself a favor and buy the Hoodman Firewire 400/800  CF card reader today.  This thing is a freakin’ speed demon!  I’m getting between 40-45 MB/s and downloading 175 RAW files from my Nikon D700 in less than a minute. 

To get the fastest speeds, you need to be using fast UDMA CF cards but it also supports non-UDMA cards as well.  Personally I use the SanDisk Extreme IV cards and highly recommend them.  I have never had one of their cards fail, and if their cards can survive explosions, they will put up with anything I throw at them

At first, I was hesitant to replace my Lexar USB card reader which is convenient due to supports both CF and SD.  However, since I shoot mostly with my DSLR, I opted to buy this additional card reader to sit side-by-side with my Lexar reader so I could save time.  I used to have to walk away from my PC while Lightroom imported my photos, but now I can see the files at freakishly amazing speeds.

Construction wise, it’s also built sturdy enough to both in your home office and on the road (assuming you have FW on your laptop) .  From the Amazon comments:

Almost immediately after I bought my reader, I dragged it across sub-Saharan Africa on some of the world’s bumpiest roads in 115° average afternoon temperature, under conditions where almost everything broke-down (cars, generators; hard-drives, computers; lenses etc.). The Hoodman CF Reader worked flawlessly… in fact, it still does, even in my air-conditioned office.

This was the best $80 I’ve spent in a really long time.

Related Posts

1. ReadyBoost on a Sony Vaio SZ notebook
2. How to improve in-car electronics
3. House Of Card by Radiohead

I found out that both Foobar2000 and MP3Tag both supports some limited command line operations, and with a tiny bit of legwork, you can add a right-click (context menu) way of making this process easier.

With this approach, you can now right-click songs, select a context menu option and Foobar2000 will automatically apply ReplayGain at the track-level then MP3Tag will automatically open up and add the songs ready for you to apply the custom Action we previously created.

First, make sure you have Foobar2000 and MP3Tag installed.

Second, copy the following script and put it in a batch file and save it somewhere you can remember. I put mine in E:\Documents\ReplayGainScripts\ReplayGain.bat.  I’m on an x64 system, so notice the environment variables highlighted in red which will need to be changed to %PROGRAMFILES% if you are on x86 (32-bit).

@echo off
Echo Sending selected files to Foobar2000 to apply Track-level ReplayGain...
"%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\foobar2000\foobar2000.exe" /context_command:"Replaygain/Scan per-file track gain" %*
if not %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto :errorfoobar
Echo Sending direcotry to MP3Tag so you can apply the actions...
"%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Mp3tag\mp3tag.exe" /fp:%1
if not %ERRORLEVEL%==0 goto :errormp3tag
exit

:errorfoobar
echo Foobar2000 exited abnormally, ending script
pause
exit

:errormp3tag
echo MP3Tag exited abnormally, ending script
pause
exit

After you’ve saved the file, go to %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo, and create a new shortcut here by right-clicking, selecting New then Shortcut.  For the location, put the path where you saved the batch file.

Hit Next, then you’ll be prompted to enter a name for the shortcut. I used Apply ReplayGain:

Hit Finish and you’ll be returned back to the explorer Window and you’ll see your newly created shortcut:

You’re done! Now navigate to a directory containing the MP3 files you want to apply ReplayGain to, right click, select Send To then select Apply ReplayGain.  You’ll see Foobar2000 startup, automatically apply track-level ReplayGain, then when you finish, the batch file will start MP3Tag with the files ready for you to apply our ReplayGain action.  (Right-click on the songs, select Convert then Actions…).

Notes:

• This was tested on MP3Tag v2.45a and Foobar2000 v0.9.6.9 (which are the latest versions at the time I wrote this).
• Foobar2000 isn’t designed to be controlled entirely by command line which is why you can’t suppress the UI
• MP3Tag is extremely limited with only 2 command line options, so the scripts is limited to sending the entire directory to MP3Tag. This means 3 things:
• Even if you selected a subset of songs from a folder, Foobar2000 will correctly apply ReplayGain only to the subset of songs, but MP3Tag will load all the songs from the folder
• You can only work on a single folder at time. So do not select songs from multiple folders
• Currently, there is no way to get MP3Tag to auto-apply the action.
• I wrote this really quickly so there might be some bugs

Troubleshooting:

• Check the batch file output to see if Foobar2000 or MP3Tag are exiting abnormally. Most common causes will be because you’ve specified the wrong path to the EXE’s or you have a copy and paste problem somewhere

If you have any issues, drop me a line in the comments.

Related Posts

1. Getting MP3 songs to play at the same volume in iTunes and beyond
2. Deleting song in iTunes Library from within a Playlist
3. Create free iPhone ringtones from an MP3

1. Look at the song title
2. Type the song title into search box
3. In the search results, right click and delete the song

This was such a pain in the butt that I always wished there was an easier way to do this straight from the playlist.  Turns out there is!

I found this list of Windows shortcuts on Apple’s site which shows that Shift+Delete is the answer I’ve been looking for:

Shift-Delete

Delete the selected song from your library and all playlists

So when you’re in an iTunes playlist and want to remove the song from the playlist only, use Delete.  If you want to remove it from both the playlist AND your iTunes Library, use Shift+Delete !

(There is also another undocumented shortcut – CTRL + SHIFT + Delete which will do the same thing as Shift+Delete except it will add an extra confirmation for sending the file to the recycle bin. Since you already get one prompt using Shift+Delete, there’s no reason for this extra step)

Related Posts

1. Sync ratings between iTunes and Windows Media Player
2. Fix for MP3 songs not playing in iTunes
3. Getting MP3 songs to play at the same volume in iTunes and beyond