100,000 iPhone Apps, but you can only fit 144

Now here's a dilemna. The iPhone boasts the fact that they have 100,000 apps in their app store, but it's not like you can fit all of them on your phone at once. It was brought to my attention that you can only fit a total of 144 apps on 9 panels (16 per panel) at one time. Keep in mind, this is on a standard iPhone, not one that has been jailbroken. Indeed, you are still able to buy as many apps as you want, but you would need to swap out your existing ones via iTunes to use your other apps if you've reached the 144 limit.

Ofcourse, nobody's going to buy all the apps on the market, but with so many apps, I'm sure there are people who would hit over the 144 mark. The standard built in apps already takes 1 panel and 2 icons as well. This is more a less an inconvenience, as Apple should be able to upgrade this in the future.

The android obviously does not have any app limitations, but it is limited by the physical disk space (unless you root it and do apps2sd). Until they come up with a higher than 512MB ROM phone, the android will also be limited.

DOA Sprint HTC Hero

Ouch, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end. I have to say, at least the G1 and MT3G packaging is much better than the Sprint HTC Hero. And I thought T-Mobile was cheap.

Collecting old rare games for unpopular video game systems

I just made $175.00 off my old Panzer Dragoon Saga Sega Saturn (yea remember that system?) game on ebay, before closing fees. This was a great game by the way, nothing like FFVII, but it's way up there for RPGs during its time (10 yrs ago). Makes me wonder, is it possible to make a profit on collecting video games, especially ones for dying systems? The PS3 is looking like the Sega Saturn of this generation of video games console, losing to Nintendo and Microsoft. Without the ability to hack the PS3, make backups, and no on-demand service like the Xbox 360, the games will prove to be quite rare in the near distant future. Time to stock up on some exclusive PS3 games.

PS3 Sweet Price Drop $299.99

Sony has finally done it, what we've been waiting for. It has hit the sweet spot of $299.99. The $299.99 price drop will take effect immediately. They also launched a new slim model for the same price. It's slimmer, but also wider, taking more of a squarish look. Out September 1st.

Video Games | PlayStation 3 | GC 09: PS3 Price Drop Announcement

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Video Games | PlayStation 3 | GC 09: PS3 Slim Debut

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Google Opt Out Feature

You know, I don't want to say it, but maybe opting out is a bad idea.

Visual Voicemail for Tmobile Android Users

Tmobile is finally offering visual voicemail for G1 users. They concurrently launched it with the new myTouch 3G last Tuesday. Just follow these simple instructions:

1. Call T-Mobile customer support (611) and request Visual Voicemail for your Android phone.
2. Download T-Mobile Visual Voicemail from the Android Market.
3. Launch the application and allow it to synchronize your voice mails.

You can activate your visual voicemail online through Tmobile, but there's a catch. If you have the $24.99 plan, you are given the option of choosing either 400 text messages or visual voicemail. If you call Tmobile directly, you'll get to keep both. Happy visualizing your voicemail!

Fix a broken DS caused by water

I was tasked to fix a broken Nintendo DS caused by water damage. Water had entered on the right side of the DS and it had ceased to turn on. With the warranty expired, I had no choice but to take matters into my own hands. Fortunately, it wasn't a difficult task.

At first, I thought all hope was lost. But a post on saving electronics from spilled liquid on lifehacker.com about made me realize there was still a chance. There was nothing to lose, so hey, why not give it a try. I found a really good tutorial on the web on how to open the DS. Once opened, found there was some white dried water streaks on the circuit board. I used a really small flat screwdriver to scrape off the water streaks. Then I connected the battery and it was working again. There's going to be one very happy little kid.

Join the Google Wave Beta

You can now sign up to be the first 100,000 users to test Google Wave beta. Sign up here.

Just head over to the Google Wave's sign up for updates page, enter in your email address, and select the Enlist me! option (you should be willing to actually report bugs and give feedback if you select this option) and sign up. (It's the same signup-for-notifications page that's been available since Wave was first announced, but Google now officially stated that invites would be sent to these users.)

Yes, let Google take over the way you use your email, oh wait, they already have.

Google Voice + MyFaves = Unlimited Calling?

While driving, I was thinking... what if you could add your google voice account to your myfaves/friends and family (verizon)? You would have unlimited free calls! In theory, this works great, since techinically google voice calls your mobile #, then connects you to the caller. So I did a little googling to see if this topic was ever brought up with Grand Central (the company google bought to turn into Google Voice), and of course, there have been discussions about this already. So after checking out a few sites and this forum, the conclusion is, Tmobile hasn't taken any action yet, but according to the terms of service for MyFaves

*Your five numbers must be US domestic numbers and must not include 411, voicemail, toll-free, 900, calling card, and customers' own numbers; and single numbers allowing access to 500 or more persons.

Your google voice number is your own number, but how would they know? I have not tried this personally, and do not condone others to do so (disclaimer: I am not held responsible for the consequences of this hack). For those that have, does this actually work and has Tmo taken action on anyone? I'm guessing Tmo will crack down on Google Voice numbers in the future somehow by getting a list of all the Google Voice #s and comparing it to people's MyFaves. Only time will tell...

Edit: Just checked in Twitter, it has been done.

I got my Google Voice account, finally!

Google has finally sent me my google voice invite, and I admit this is pretty cool. Besides having my own new personal number for life, I can now manage my incoming calls and voicemails through google voice. The only problem is getting my current contacts to convert to my google voice number, but that will be a long process in the making. For you Google phone owners out there, the market has an app called GV that you can use to interface with your google voice account. You can read here on how to transition to your google voice number or go to google voice to sign up for an account. I love these features so far:

• awesome custom greetings for your contacts
• directing incoming calls to voicemail for contacts you don't want to talk to
• visual voicemail on my g1
  

Dead Fantasy III in HD

It's out people. Monty Oum's Dead Fantasy III in HD @ GameTrailers. It's nothing new, since this was shown a while ago, but you get to enjoy it in HDness. This is the fight between Hitomi and Tifa, after being teleported from episode II. Enjoy!

Edit: Correction, there is some new material, at the very end. Watch it and see!

Video Games | Monty Oum | Dead Fantasy III

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

The Real Cost of Electronics

Companies are willing to take a cut in their products in hopes of sales via other outlets (software, accessories). But some products are just down right ripping us off. iSuppli dissected some of the most popular gadgets out there, and broke it down the price, piece by piece.

Apple iPod Touch (First Generation)

Apple.com

Date: September, 2007
Retail price: $299 (8GB), $399 (16GB)
Cost of components: $147 (8GB), $179 (16GB)

Be a frugal electronics consumer and resist away from products that are just released. They are bound to drop to a more reasonable price.

Why WEP is so unsecure

Everybody who has a home network should already have their encryption set to WPA instead of WEP. Why? Because it is so insecure a 5 year old can crack into it. No I'm not kidding! This WEP network hack tutorial posted on lifehacker is a good reason why you should switch to WPA if you aren't already using it. This is for education purposes only, so don't think about stealing. I have a feeling this may come in handy someday...

Free upgrade to Windows 7 for new Vista Buyers

Microsoft has officially announced they will provide free upgrades to Windows 7 from Vista. Consumers who buy Vista, either preinstalled or the standalone software, will get a free upgrade to Windows 7. Current XP users will also get a discounted upgrade to Windows 7. Microsoft is pretty confident this will become the new XP replacement. Now is the time to buy a new laptop or PC prepackaged with Windows. Read the details over at Lifehacker.

Cost of Living Calculator [USA only]

Did you ever wonder what your salary would be in another city/state? Over at CNN, they have a cost of living calculator where you can put in your current salary, where you live, the city you want to compare with, and you will see what you "could" be earning over in the other city.

Money's calculator pulls data on the cost of health care, groceries, utilities, and other necessities from the last four quarters available from The Council for Community and Economic Research

I could be making $30k more in San Francisco! Of course, the cost of living would be such a bitch!

Get your Google Voice Invites

Google is starting the Google Voice beta, and will be sending invites out soon. I've signed up for mines a month ago, but have yet to receive it. In case you didn't know, Google Voice gives you one phone number to consolidate all the phone numbers in your life. When someone calls your google number, you can decide which phone you want it to forward to (home, cell, work, etc), and it will ring all at the same time. You can also decide to have the caller go directly to your voicemail instead. Did I mention your voicemails will also be transcribed? Check it out.

Qik for Android

Qik (alpha version) has been released for the Android. It allows the user to quickly use their phone as a web cam and broadcast live on to Qik. It is pretty useful for sharing/reporting news on the go. I say it's great for webcaming on the go, when the other person watching the video has access to a computer. You can read about it here or go to Qik and can currently be downloaded in the Android Market.

Google Wave

@ the Google I/O 2009, day 2, Google unveiled it's latest new web app, the Google Wave. It's basically Facebook, but with an added touch of real timeness, live editing collaboration. Did I mention it has a built in spell checker, which they affectionately named it "Spelly"? It is definitely faster and more fluid than Facebook. It supports drag and drop! Right now it is still under development, but I can see in the future, this will replace organizing events in gmail. There are a bunch of neat gadgets/extensions under development (aka apps in Facebook). See for yourself.

The reason why the Wii is #1

So is there really any reason to doubt the Wii's success in the video console market? I know... it doesn't have next gen graphics, and third party games suck. But come on, Nintendo systems are totally hackable, in a user friendly kind of way. Someone has figured out how to back up and play Wii games from an external hard drive, without soldering or even taking your Wii apart. Need I say more? Go do it now!

Jing - Video Capturing for Free

Here's one I didn't freeload off lifehacker.com. Jing is a free video web capture program for your video capturing needs. There is a lite and pro version, but the lite version should be sufficient. The only difference is lite records the videos into a .swf file, while the pro is in mpeg. That won't matter since we can always find a way to convert it.

Show Document makes web collaboration easy

Want to collaborate with your classmates or colleagues via the net for free? Show Document makes it easy for you to work on a whiteboard, document, even share a browser session. I love productivity web apps. = )

Unrooted G1 to Rooted with Cupcake

Here's a guide from Android and Me that will take your unrooted G1 all the way to the Cupcake update (plus root it along the way). I decided earlier to use the Haykuro's HTC dream build, but I later found JesusFreke already had a custom 1.5 build. The JFupdater app couldn't have made it any easier. On screen keyboard and video recording here I come!

The nifty thing about the update is that the mountd.conf no longer exists and the init.rc has been modified. Here are the contents of init.rc

on system
mount cramfs loop@/system/modules/modules.cramfs /system/modules ro
mount cramfs loop@/system/xbin/xbin.cramfs /system/xbin ro

To my surprise, my SD card's ext2 partition was automatically mounted. The apps on my SD loaded without any problems. The initial boot after you update to cupcake may take a long while, so don't fret.

Oh by the way, don't forget to update the cupcake radio image!

Android HTC Hero Build

What is this HTC Hero build you ask? Good question. I just learned about it myself, but it seems to be the same build they are using for the HTC magic. The cool thing about it is, you can port it to your G1. This HTC build has the android 1.5 cupcake update, and much more. Looks like I will need to do some modding on my phone once again. I will update once I get a chance to update my phone.

Wolfram Alpha

This is an interesting search engine. At Wolfram Alpha, you can search for computational answers rather than search links. Whether it's mathematical, scientific, historical, or geographical info, this website can compute it. You can read more about it at lifehacker.com. This site would have been helpful during my high school/college years.

Installing Apps to your SD Card on G1 Android

I've needed to do this twice now... so I figured it's important enough that these steps get reiterated, and clarified! Over at tmonews.com, you can find the instructions on how to install your g1 apps directly to your SD card (that's right, your phone's disk space won't be full anymore and you can install all the apps you want!). This of course, requires you to have root access and to have your sd card partitioned with an ext2 partition (resources on these topics here). But anyways, here are the same instructions, except I'm adding an extra step so that future readers won't run into the same issue I did. If you do not do this step, not only will your ext2 partition will not mount. Good luck!

Addendum to instructions:

- after step 6, open up the init.rc file in notepad, and change the last line from

mount ext2 /dev/mmcblk0p2 /sd noatime nodiratime

to

mount ext2 /dev/mmcblk0p2 /system/sd noatime nodiratime

- also, the attached file aforementioned can be downloaded here

Source: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=468959

Prerequisites:

1. Rooted g1 with jesus freak version 1.30 or 1.31.

2. Have "adb" from the android sdk installed on your desktop machine.

Sdcard preparation:

Divide your sdcard into 2 partitions. The first partition should be FAT, the second partition should be EXT2. This can be most easily accomplished using a linux or mac machine. For windows, you can use "paragon partition manager 9" to do this. It will allow you to partition your sdcard and format the 2nd partition to ext2 fs. It is very important that the 2nd partition be formatted as EXT2 or the rest of the procedure will NOT work. The 2nd ext2 partition will be used to store your installed apps.

In the original thread, somebody mentioned a HP sdcard partition tool program, but I don't believe that will allow you to format the partition to EXT2 fs.

Procedure:

1. With the phone off, insert your newly partitioned sdcard into the g1.

2. Connect your g1 to your desktop via the usb cable and turn it on.

3. Backup your original mountd.conf and initrc.rc files from your g1 by running the following commands on your desktop from the cmd shell:

adb pull /system/etc/mountd.conf [dir]
adb pull /system/init.rc [dir]

4. Mount your g1's /system directory as writable via the desktop cmd shell:

adb remount

5. IMPORTANT! Create a /system/sd directory on your g1 via the desktop cmd shell:

adb shell mkdir /system/sd

adb shell ls /system and make sure that the directory has been created.

6. Download the attached modified mountd.conf and init.rc files to your PC.

7. Push the modified mountd.conf to your g1 via the desktop cmd shell:

adb push /[dir]/mountd.conf /system/etc/mountd.conf

8. Push the modified init.rc to your g1 via the desktop cmd shell:

adb push /[dir]/init.rc /system/init.rc

9. Reboot your Machine

10. Connect to the g1 shell via the desktop cmd shell:

adb remount
adb shell

11. Check to see that the ext2 partition has been created and mounted:

busybox df -h

You should see a line that looks similar to this:

/dev/mmcblk0p2 1.2G 9.1M 1.1G 1% /system/sd

If you don't see this line, you didn't partition your sdcard correctly. STOP! Go back and do that.

12. From the G1 shell run the following cmds to copy your app and app-private directories from the internal g1 storage to the sdcard.

busybox cp -a /data/app /system/sd
rm -r /data/app
ln -s /system/sd/app /data/app

busybox cp -a /data/app-private /system/sd/app-private
rm -r /data/app-private
ln -s /system/sd/app-private /data/app-private

13. Reboot, enjoy all the extra storage!

NOTE: This only moves the apk files to the sdcard. None of the app database or cache files are moved. They still reside in the internal storage. So the hacks that put the various cache directories to the sdcard would still apply and allow you to free up additional internal storage space.

http://modmygphone.com/wiki/index.php/Caches_To_SD_Card

Resource:
http://forums.tmonews.com/index.php?topic=7003.0

Appetizer Portable Launcher

Lifehacker has an interesting post recommending the Appetizer, an open source launcher that works for your windows apps as well as your portable apps on your usb drive. This will work great for my sandisk cruzer.

G1 Home, Call, and Screen Lock not functioning

Pooky's g1 (my significant other) out of the blue, just started malfunctioning all together. Aside from mysterious ringtone and volume changes, her home and call keys wouldn't work, and her screen did not lock after a set period of time. No new applications were installed recently. She mentioned that her phone did auto reboot after disconnecting it from her PC, and that's when this started happening. We went to Tmobile (why? it was close by, and we thought we would give it a shot), but all they could offer, was a number for the tmobile G1 tech. With the assumption that I would probably spend hours and hours on the phone with a tmobile tech, I decided to google it. Most people who had this problem basically just gave up and did a factory reset. But I did find something interesting on this forum post @ xda-developers.com.

I've had a very similar problem on a development image. If the phone thinks that it isn't activated, then it disables keylock, home, and the call button. The activation flag is stored in a database somewhere, but I forget where. Doing a factory reset and then activating again should fix it (if that's the problem).

The nandroid backup might actually replicate the problem, because the activation flag is stored in the /data partition along with all your apps..

This might not be the problem though!

But in fact, it was! I reset the google account on the phone by going to Settings->Applications->Manage applications->Google Apps and cleared the data. Afterwards, it asked me to sign in as if I factory reset the phone. After inputting her credentials, everything started to work. Sweet!

New Blog

I decided to move my blogging to blogger, since it is more convenient (the fact that it is already prebuilt and linked to google makes it a winner) and I haven't really had time to setup my old self built blog from applejay.com. With facebook and twitter, I will continue to update my daily statuses via those outlets, but will focus on more programming, computers, or basically anything that has to do with technology on this blog instead.