Monday, June 1, 2009

Jailbreaking and Calendar Making

Technology planning for our world tour continues unabated as our departure date looms closer and closer. I'm happy to report some progress and successes have been made during the past few days with my old iPhone and the World Tour calendar.

First and foremost I was able to get my jailbroken iPhone to work on T-mobile's network. I received a PrePaid sim card that worked with little fanfare. That's right, I am no longer a captive prisoner held back by ridiculous contracts and code. This is an important development because I now know that I can use this phone with third party GSM sim cards from around the world during our world tour.

For anyone who is interested in learning more about how to jailbreak your iPhone here is the set of resources that I used. It was pretty straightforward, the heavy lifting has been done by others.

Please note that there are risks inherent in this process and I cannot vouch that it will work on your phone nor can I guarantee that it won't have negative long term impact on your device. In other words, do this at your own risk.

The most helpful resource that I discovered was the iPhone Blog. Here you can find step by step instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone using the Pwnage tool. Make sure to read all the the instructions once over before you attempt to jailbreak your iPhone. I believe there is little risks of permanent damage. However, you may end up having to do it several times as I was forced to.

Another helpful resource is the modmyi.com's wiki Pwnage 2.x Guide page. This resource also features step by step instructions on how to jailbreak your iPhone. However, I think the instructions featured here only work if you have previously jailbroken your iPhone using Pwnage (they differ in only one way from the instructions on the iPhone Blog, which did work for me).

The second area in which I have been making some progress is on the official tour calendar. I've set this up using google calendar and it includes all locations, flights, and dates from our trip. I've also created a second calendar with logistical information for Lauren and me (e.g. hotel names, wedding even schedules, etc). The purpose of this calendar is to serve as a planning and sharing tool. Here is a link to the latest and greatest version:



Here is my next steps for this week:
  • Identify capture and publishing solutions for audio, video, images, and text on iPhone.
  • Create blog and test out the publishing solutions.
  • Develop list of additional technology requirements such as cameras, book readers.

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