Archive for September, 2007

How to disable the iPhone shutter camera sound

September 25th, 2007

Earlier this year when I had my Motorola Q I posted this entry about how to disable the shutter sound of that phone. Now that I have the iPhone, I was trying to figure out how to do the same thing since the shutter sound effect is loud and annoying.

As long as you have iBrickr (Win) or Breezy (Mac) it’s very easy. Just install the Mobile Finder app through the Installer.app. The Finder app allows you to browse all of the folders and files on your iPhone, just like you can do on your Mac or PC.

The solution is to find the offending sound file and rename it so when the iPhone’s OS looks for the file it can’t find it. It still takes the picture without failure.

Before you continue, note that using any 3rd party app or modifying any system file can cause problems with your iPhone, so if you bust your phone while messing around with it, don’t go crying at me. Just restore your iPhone using the restore feature in iTunes if you screw something up.

Navigate to the folder /System/Library/Audio/UISounds. There you will find all of your system’s user interface sound files. Scroll down to the “photoShutter.caf” file and double-tap it to view its file properties. Now tap once on the Filename, then rename it to something else. I renamed mine to “photoShutter-old.caf”.

Now exit the Mobile Finder.app and take a picture. Now sound will be heard!

Now before you ask, I do not know how to change these sound files to something else, but if you know, please post a comment!


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Move over AIBO, I-Sobot thinks he can dance

September 20th, 2007

It’s amazing after all these years of goofy robot toy development the latest masterpiece from Tomy is this hunkajunk called the I-Sobot.  I think I saw some smooth “Bobby Brown Rock Witcha Pushups” in there somewhere. Nice.

Seriously… 6.5 inches of gyrating plastic for $299?  And it doesn’t even fetch the paper…

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Don’t mess with this baby

September 19th, 2007

Mike sent this one to me earlier today and it’s sad that I didn’t have time to look at it until now. This is pretty funny, especially if you have kids… check it out.

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iPhone Leopard theme rocks

September 19th, 2007

I’m totally digging on this new Leopard theme that was released today for Summerboard. I especially love the rounded corners at the top.

If you haven’t already, go get iBrickr (Windows) or Breezy (Mac) and then install the Installer app. Once you have that puppy installed, you can install a ton of third-party apps, games, and themes for your iPhone over the air!

And yes, that’s a Pirate app there toward the bottom… figured I’d mess with it since it is, after all, International Talk Like A Pirate Day!


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Donkey Kong on the iPhone

September 19th, 2007

photo.jpgMy favorite all-time game, on the iPhone using the NES emulator. Controls aren’t the best but it works!

In order to make this happen you need iBrickr (Windows) or Breezy (Mac) and then the NES app. You can also install this “over the air” using the Installer app if you have that installed.

If you need games for the Nintendo emulator, just head on over to this ROM download site — there are over 900 of them.  Some of them work well with the iPhone NES emulator, while some of them are unplayable.  I’ve had good luck with Donkey Kong, Galaga, Galaxian, Pacman, Space Invaders, Super Mario Brothers, and Dig Dug.

I have loved playing Donkey Kong since I was a kid playing the original coin-op version. One day I have to convince my wife to get me the original coin-op for Christhis (er, Christmas).

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Hank

September 19th, 2007

This post is for Hank, my awesome brother-in-law, who was just down here in August on vacation with my sister and their two kids.

Get well soon bro! We love you and are thinking of you…

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Syncing Google Calendar with iPhone

September 17th, 2007

When it comes to the Apple iPhone and Windows iTunes, you can synchronize your bookmarks with Internet Explorer or Windows Safari, and contacts from Outlook or Yahoo! but when it comes to synchronizing your calendar you are severely limited, unless all you use is Outlook, because that’s all you can directly sync with at the moment.

I was an Outlook user for years until I gave Microsoft the (thunder) Bird. The biggest problem with making the change from Outlook to Thunderbird was the loss of my synchronization between my iPhone and my calendar, because I don’t use Outlook anymore. I do use Google Calendar (GCal) because it allows me to access my calendar from anywhere (like Gmail) and share calendars between my family.

So how do you sync the iPhone with Google Calendar?

Well, you can’t. But through some sneaky workarounds, it is possible. Since the iPhone only knows how to sync with Outlook, the trick is to get your GCal appointments synced with Outlook.

This is possible with some commercial (pay) services such as ScheduleWorld and SyncMyCal, however the route I went after trying his free trial was David Levinson’s gSyncit. It’s a whole 10 bucks and it works great. After throwin’ down $10 via PayPal and instantly getting the registration code by email, it got rid of the nags, enabled automatic synchronization, and allowed me to add the other 3 GCal calendars that I needed to sync with Outlook. Plus, you don’t need to touch GCal and copy ICAL URLs. Just supply gSyncit with your GCal username and password, then it gives you a list of Google Calendars to sync with.

You can sync both ways, too… from GCal to Outlook, and vice-versa. I am currently only syncing one-way (from GCal to Outlook) so I can’t comment on how well it works the other way.

After configuring gSyncit and clicking the Sync button on my Outlook toolbar, I was able to sync my iPhone through iTunes with ease. Now all my Google appointments are on my iPhone!

…now if I could just figure out a way to get the Chargers to beat the Patriots…

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Hey kids look it’s time to eat Mickey Mouse

September 14th, 2007

We’re going to a friend’s house this evening to celebrate their son’s 2nd birthday (Luke). Luke loves Mickey Mouse, so my lovely wife got a cake pan and went to town. Several hours later… BAM! Instant Mickey eatable… she’s a pro!

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Apple OK with iPhone hacking

September 11th, 2007

Interesting stuff:

“In an interview given to Gearlog, Apple VP of Hardware Product Marketing Greg Joswiak confirmed that the iPhone and iPod Touch run the same software, and said that Apple is not bothered by the flood of native, third party software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Joswiak defined the Apple stance as neutral, and while they will not intentionally break the apps with firmware updates, they will not go out of their way to prevent updates from breaking apps either. So iPhone coders, rejoice, you’ll live to hack another day.” – Gizmodo

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iChris: How many iPods do you need?

September 11th, 2007

Well, my new Nano arrived today directly from Shenzhen, China, a day early. I ordered it Sept 5th, the day Apple announced their new line-up of iPods. I’m glad I skipped the 2nd gen iPod Nano because it wasn’t much different than the first gen model. The 3rd gen model, however, is crazy different… shorter, wider, does video and games, and if you can believe this… it’s thinner than its predecessor.

Featured is my 8GB iPhone, 1 GB iPod Nano (1st gen), and 8GB iPod Nano (3rd gen).

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Tether your iPhone

September 10th, 2007

My Dad was asking me this morning if you can tether the iPhone yet.  I said not yet, but I’m sure some developer will figure it out any day now.  Looks like they already did!

Go to cre.ations.net for the instructions.  AT&T’s EDGE network is tolerable on my iPhone… I can’t imagine it being tolerable tethered to my laptop, however.  Still, if that’s the only way to get online then it’s better than nothing!

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Adobe AIR

September 5th, 2007

I’m glad to have a social network otherwise I’d miss out on some great tips. Adobe has published a new development environment for building desktop apps. In their words:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.”

I used to build desktop apps through Visual Basic back in “the day” but since the web came out I have been developing 100% for the web… until recently when I had to build some cross-platform desktop widgets. For that I turned to the Yahoo! Widget Engine. But it is very limited.

Since AIR uses technologies I’m already developing in, this sounds very interesting. I can’t wait to have some time to learn more about this. It says that it’s cross-platform, but I wonder how cross-platform it is? Obviously Windows and Mac are supported, but what about Ubuntu? If all three are supported (Mac, Windows, Linux), then I’m sold! It looks like, however, only Mac and Windows are supported by the look of their runtime download page.

AIR home page
AIR runtime

I installed the Windows runtime, and it was a very fast download and super quick install. I then installed the snitter AIR app for Twitter and it works really well.

Thanks Chris Harrison for the tip!

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Shuffleboard Sunset

September 5th, 2007

I know it sounds a bit odd, but at Truckblog in the members only area we have monthly photo challenges. What does photography have to do with a pickup truck site? Nothing, really, except there’s a bunch of amateur photographers there that like to improve their skills through the photography forum and these challenges.

I entered this photo and it won the the latest challenge with 39% of the votes! The challenge was called “the waning sun” and the goal was to enter a photo captured during the setting sun.

The good thing about these challenges is that you can enter any photo of yours, even from the past.  So that’s what I did… this was a shot I took from a Disney cruise down to Mexico in August 2005 at sunset.

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Review: Web hosted cron job schedulers

September 3rd, 2007

I use DreamHost to host my blog and while it’s a great and fairly inexpensive service, there are some limitations. One is that you cannot run cron jobs without a shell account, which I do not have. A cron job is a frequently executed task, mainly used for running scripts on a frequent basis for website maintenance. While I already do this on my Windows server and I could use it for my needs here at chrisTHIS.com, I wanted to see if there was another way to schedule a cron job for the average Joe Blogger.

I set out looking for web-based cron services and found a few. Here are my reviews of each. None of these are affiliate links, nor am I associated with any of these services. I am providing my honest personal opinions. If you know of more, please let me know!

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