Since Christmas morning, unless I am actually, physically asleep, my iPhone is probably at least in my hand, if not actually in use. No, I don’t call anyone that often; I’m just playing with cool features. God, this fucking thing is seriously awesome!

At first, I played with settings to see what everything did, and, “Hmmm…what happens if I…” Then, I roamed the App Store, looking for useful or interesting things, and a few just for the hell of it (do I really need Pocket Sounds? No, but it’s fun to make cow and chicken noises at P.!) Bought Bejeweled because I like it and it’s something I can play even if I’m distracted because I’m half-watching for something. I took the phone out to the DG course on…uh…Friday, and bless L.’s ever-patient, iPhone guru heart, he chatted with me on MSN via Fring (which he’d told me about in the first place) so I could test the connection at various points in the woods. Not just so I’ll have something to do besides listen to my iPod if the guys get boring, but for practical purposes, too; it may be winter now, but eventually, it’ll be summer again, and there are lots of bees and wasps, and potentially even a few venomous creatures out there. Part of the purpose of a mobile phone is (ostensibly) for phone service, especially in emergencies, no matter where you are. I’d hate to be out in the middle of the woods, get bitten or stung, start to react badly and discover, “Oops, I have zero bars…better scream loud!” I covered much of the west side, where I most often am when I go bug-hunting, and the worst I got was two bars, which was down in a creek bed surrounded by big trees. Not bad; I guess ATT wasn’t lying when they said they were working on improving their reception in this area, which had historically been nothing short of pathetic. Perhaps there’s a little good in even the lying, gouging bastards that represent US wireless companies. 😉

Before my iPhone guru told me about it, I didn’t know what it meant to “jailbreak” an iPhone. I knew it was some sort of hack because I’d read that in some article a while ago, but at the time, I didn’t have one and didn’t expect to get one, so I didn’t pay too much attention. Once I realised it was a way to have non-Apple-approved apps installed and more control over settings, I was all for it. Anything that allows me to say a little, “F-you!” to a corporation well known for lock-in and “You’ll do it the way we say,” I’m all for it. After I’d ascertained that even if I didn’t like the result, I could just restore the phone to factory with iTunes, I decided to give it a shot. Got a copy of QuickPWN 2.2 (Why, why, why do people still use Rapidshare and Megaupload? No, I’m not paying to download a 16MB file, and the free download makes you wait 45 seconds for barely better than dial-up speed!), ran it and carefully followed the instructions. It took just a few minutes, and everything appeared to have gone exactly according to plan. Well, with one tiny detail…I thought it had somehow killed sound to my external speaker. After a bit of frustrated, “Oh FFS, what did I do wrong?!” I discovered that the JB hadn’t done anything evil, and I hadn’t done anything wrong except for not noticing I’d hit the “silent” switch on the side when I reached up to hold down the power button. Problem solved, but I did feel pretty stupid.

Jailbroken iPhone in hand, I went off to explore the new stuff I had available. I remembered the names of a couple of things L. had told me I might want, like WinterBoard, and Boss Prefs (YAY and goodbye to that goddamned Stocks icon!), a Hello Kitty SMS theme (okay, so he hadn’t suggested that, but he did show it to me once, just for fun, and you bet I remembered it) and I also found Cycorder, which is a free app that allows the iPhone to take video clips. There are others, but this seemed like the best; decent quality video and audio, no time limit for clip length, not trialware. L. also gave me his “must-have” app list last night (he’s been soooooo much help!) and on that list was OpenSSH. I already knew what it is because that’s what I use to communicate between my laptop and desktop (unless the desktop is booted to XP–I just use Samba for that), and I wasn’t really certain for what purposes I might find it useful, but it’s small, and if there are people willing to devote 24MB to a Jonas Brothers wallpaper pack, I can devote a few MB to something powerful and potentially very useful.

I installed OpenSSH and Mobile Terminal, changed the password, and then decided to try using Nautilus over SSH, to have a look at what lives on the iPhone, as I do between computers. It worked, but just for the hell of it, I decided to see whether someone had come up with anything better, like a two-way sync. A quick Google turned up instructions for two-way wireless sync that works with almost any music app, and also with the ordinary file browser, using SSH. Cool! I needed a package called ipod-convenience, but that was as simple as a line in the terminal, and whilst it was installing, it asked for the IP of the phone (when I forget, I had to delete known_hosts from my .ssh folder before I could connect because the iPhone “stole” the laptop’s IP) and a mount point that I was supposed to leave at the default /media/ipod, but couldn’t because that’s where my iPod mounts, and don’t want Rhythmbox to get “confused”. It didn’t care that I created a new mountpoint at /media/iphone, though, so I guess telling people to leave the default was just to make it easier for n00bs.

Once I had that installed, I did have to plug in the iPhone’s USB cord, but that’s only for setup; afterwards, I can do it wireless. Then, all I had to do was fire up a terminal and type iphone-mount. It was supposed to take a while, but since I’d already set up SSH, it didn’t need to generate any keys, and took me right to a password prompt. Just iphone-mount, enter the password I set for the iPhone, and I was all set. The iPhone shows up under Devices in Rhythmbox, and even under Places in Nautilus. Since I can do it in Rhythmbox, I don’t need to boot to XP to sync the iPod, and I don’t even need the USB cable. YAY! There’s a way to set it so that you don’t have to enter the password twice, but I’m too lazy to do that ATM, and maybe never will. 🙂

My pretty screen, without boring black background, with five icons in the dock, and including a cute little Terminal icon that makes me look like I know what the hell I’m doing, even if I don’t at least 60% of the time. 😀

Nautilus with iPhone showing up in Places so I don’t even have to browse to /media/iphone

Rhythmbox playing a track on the iPhone. Look ma–no wires!

Now that I have a terminal, I can probably even figure out how to break something; I’m really quite good at that. 😛