Jailbreaking provides MASSIVE increase in iPhone battery life
Just one more benefit to Jailbreaking the iPhone. Check out this incredibly messed up battery charge sensor amazing increase in battery life one lucky jailbreaker is experiencing on his iPhone!
If that’s LOW battery, odds are this dude’s iPhone can now power Connecticut, or at least Rhode Island.
Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader Rich for the link!
[via imageshack]
When restoring (UN-jailbreaking) doesn’t restore everything
As much as I loved having a jailbroken iPhone, I decided to UN-jailbreak my phone in anticipation of the new 3.0 software update. I also had been experiencing some increasingly frequent crashes to the springboard, as well as what I perceived to be a general slowness to the phone, and figured maybe a factory restore would set things right.
In order to undo the Jailbreak, I figured all I needed to do was hit the “restore” button in iTunes, and then restore the iPhone from a previous backup. However, once the iPhone had completed its cycle, I noticed three odd things:
Apparently three of my customization options held through a restore: Erica Sadun’s Make It Mine (which let’s you change the carrier name from AT&T or what have you), and my numeric Wi-Fi strength and numeric battery level indicators ( I think I used Big Boss Prefs for those, although it was so long ago I don’t remember).
I’m not sure how those hacks went about making their changes to the iPhone’s OS, but for some reason I assumed a full restore would overwrite those changes. Probably somewhere in their documentation they said “Remember to undo us BEFORE your unjailbreak”, but I of course never read such things, as I assume many of you don’t either, so I figured I would just post this as an FYI for anyone else who will be un-jailbreaking. It will be interesting to see if any of these preferences hold through the 3.0 update next week (actually I believe Apple is enabling a numeric battery on their own. So maybe I will have two…) 
Save the “B”’s! New MacBook can’t spell its name
Engadget reader Mark got a bit of a surprise when he opened his new MacBook, or, should we say, MacMook?
Looks like Apple got a good deal on “M”’s. Actually, now that I look at it, it looks like it is even a little more screwed up than it looks at first. They didn’t just replace the “N” with an “M”, they pushed the “N” down as well eliminating the “B” completely. I had actually heard that the “B”’s were in danger, but I hadn’t realized it had gotten this far.
No way she worked on MobileMe
Dan Lyons recently wrote about a mysterious blog posting he came across which appeared to detail the internal corporate aftermath of the MobileMe rollout/fiasco/debacle.
The mystery blogger, known only as Ethlite, laid out a scenario that could easily be interpreted as coming from Cupertino’s MobileMe HQ about 2 months ago:
“The predictable fallout ensued, with a dressing down by our CEO, followed by the usual finger pointing and finally ending in removal/demotion of some members of the senior management team. “
Lyons went so far as to contact Apple and confirm that Ethlite did indeed work on the MobileMe team, and was given the affirmative. Since his posting, all traces of Ethlite on the web have disappeared. flickr, myspace, blogspot, friendfeed, facebook… she seems to be trying to erase any online link to her true identity, although at this point we’d wager it is a little too late for that.
However despite Lyons’ apparent “confirmation” that Ethlite was an Apple employee, we have our doubts. Mac site theapplelounge has re-posted the Ethlite’s full blog posting (which had been deleted) in its entirety, and we must say, from the first opening lines it’s pretty obvious she isn’t talking about MobileMe:
“About two months ago, the group I work for suffered one of the worst product launch failures in its history. In fact, not just the group, but for the company. A very high profile product failed to launch on the day and then continued to fail for an agonizing week afterwards.”
You see? Right there! She said “agonizing week afterwards”. Week. Single. Everyone knows MobileMe’s rollout sucked for about 3 weeks. Case closed. She’s obviously talking about the rollout of some sort of cigarettes marketed towards children with Asthma or something. So let’s end all the speculation.
Got Chrome envy? Try CrossOver Chromium
Google’s new Chrome browser may be Windows-only at the moment, but Mac users suffering from Chrome envy now have a way to get a taste of Chrome thanks to CodeWeavers. CrossOver Chromium is their attempt to port the open source Chromium web browser (the basis for Google’s Chrome web browser) to the Mac and Linux. The port is accomplished using Wine, the Win32 API Compatibility layer that sits atop Mac OS X and Linux and can run many Windows applications.
Hmmm… well 2 of my 4 sites load…
So far in our tests, CrossOver Chromium is less than stable. Actually, it’s less than less than stable. CodeWeavers acknowledges Chromium’s early beta status and cautions against anyone thinking Chromium is ready to take the place of Safari or Firefox just yet.
“This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do. Chromium itself is just beginning. As the Chromium project progresses, they will be providing more compelling support for Mac OS and Linux, particularly with process security and memory management. Those future versions from Chromium will be better suited for daily use than this version.”
Macenstein? Not so much.
Only 2 of our 4 sites actually loaded, both Macenstein and Son Of Macenstein crashed the browser repeatedly, although I am sure that is in part due to sloppy coding on our part that more mature browsers are able to ignore. CNN loaded just fine.
SUCCESS! A page that loads!
The initial install takes about 3-5 minutes (at least on a MacBook) as the app configures your system to run the Wine environment. If you would like to download the 125 MB CrossOver Chromium and see for yourself what the latest Safari-killer will look like, you can download Chromium here.
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