I (heart) terminals! When something bad happens in a GUI, terminal often offers an easy way out. Something went awry with one of the repos on Cydia this morning. Bad data got passed, and Cydia was sent into a crash loop. After the first crash, and subsequent “sad iPhone” (that never puts me in my happy place), rebooting the phone didn’t help, so I figured it wasn’t just me and went a-googling. In looking for a solution, I saw ominous things like, “restore your firmware” and “re-jailbreak your phone,” and I thought, “Oh, HELL, no!” Waaaay too lazy for that–Christ, I just got around to updating to 3.12 and re-jailbreaking last week–I kept looking for a better way. I came across references to SSHing in and deleting sources lists, which would have been do-able, but then I found magic. Terminal magic. Wonderful, beautiful terminal magic. The solution was not to restore the phone and re-jailbreak. I didn’t even have to SSH in…all I had to do was fire up my trusty terminal, login as root and type a single, very familiar command: apt-get update. Cydia, after all, is just a fancy frontend for apt, and running an update from terminal to get the non-corrupt data gave me the good stuff, and Cydia no longer stuck in a crash loop. Smoochies to terminals everywhere–love you little text-based command line guys! <3