Trevin Chow

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Jailbreaking your iPhone became legal under US copyright law as of July 26, 2010. What better way to celebrate than try to jailbreak my own iPhone 4?

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?

I just finished my initial integration with Facebook’s Open Graph Social plugins for both this blog based on wordpress and my photo blog which is based on PixelPost.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to announce that, starting today, my new photography exhibit is up at Spur Gastropub in Seattle.  The show is titled Dreaming in Black and White and consists of black and white photos of  urban settings to fit décor of Spur.  For those that have seen my previous work on display, you’ll see mostly new work with a few of my all time favorites mixed in.

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.

After getting a new desktop recently, I opted to install Windows 7 64-bit and haven’t looked back. Adobe Photoshop CS4 runs great in 64-bit, although I have a few plugins that aren’t 64-bit compatible.

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.

I’ll be at Mix10 this year in Las Vegas March 15th to 17th.  If you’ll be there, let me know, I’d love to meet up.