Not Quite a Blog

Sheesh.

Upgrading the firmware in an unlocked, jailbroken iPhone is not easy and definitely nerve-racking.

Here's what I just had to do to upgrade from 2.2 to 2.2.1:

1. Wrote down all the Cydia apps I had installed. (they're blasted out of existence each time you upgrade)
2. Allowed iTunes to update my phone to 2.2.1. Also made a copy of the 2.2.1 ipsw (firmware file).
3. Installed the backwards-downgrade of the USB kernel extensions for Mac OS 10.5.5 so that the iPhone's DFU mode (firmware update mode) isn't broken. Rebooted. (see "Fixing DFU Mode on 10.5.6" here)
4. Used QuickPwn to do whatever it does to the firmware, etc. Also, used quickpwn to get the bastard into DFU mode.^*
5. Power it off and back on again.
6. Then let iTunes restore from freakin' backup and re-sync. (takes a long time)
7. Re-install all the Cydia apps, one-by-one, from the list made above.
8. Restore the 10.5.6 USB kernel extensions and reboot so that you get 10.5.6 USB back. (Note: my MacBook Pro would not go to sleep with the old USB code; it would write its memory to disk for a few seconds and then immediately wake. Reinstalling the 10.5.6 USB code fixed that.)
9. If you've purchased Snapture (a phone app), you'll probably have to download SBSettings from the iPhone and reset the user directory permissions on your phone (more here).
10. You should change the passwords on the root and mobile users from the defaults of alpine and dottie. Recall that passwd mobile will change the password for the user mobile. You'll also have to update any stored SSH keys on machines your iphone interacts with.
11. If you've setup Cycorder to save videos to a directory in your Air Sharing directory tree (e.g., a la this post), you'll have to re-establish that symbolic link. (Tip: make sure the target directory exits and is chowned to mobile:mobile.)

^* BTW, getting into DFU mode can be tricky for some dorky reason... seems that you have to do the following: 1) plug the iphone into your computer via USB, 2) turn the iphone off, 3) hold down the power and home keys on the iphone for exactly 10 seconds, 4) release the power key but continue to hold the home key for 10 more seconds. If you fuck this up, you'll just be in regular recovery mode and not DFU mode and you'll be in for a world of hurt. In that case, you'll probably want to QuickPwn again.

If you have an iPhone and a WiFi router at home, please do the following:

1. Go to:
2. Submit your address and then enter the MAC address (?) of your router and your email address. Submit this information to Skyhook.

Why? Because the iPhone also uses WiFi router signals to improve the quality of its location-based services. By submitting your router's information, you are helping to make the iPhone's services more accurate.

If you're a complete idiot like me, you read the news at the iPhone Dev Team blog and was excited that you could upgrade your 2G iPhone to the new 2.2 firmware with no extra tricks... and you just did it.

If you're also an idiot, you probably did not "unhide" applications that you had previously hidden using Cydia's BossPrefs, Poof or Categories. Also, you probably hid BossPrefs and Cydia, which means you couldn't "unhide" jack squat nor install something like Poof which would allow you to do the same thing.

If you're an extra idiot, you didn't read the comments on the iPhone Dev Team blog post and see the pointer from Gibbles to BigBoss' advice on what to do if applications are missing:

Issue #2: iPhone backup works fine. But now you only have a few icons. Cydia is missing. What can you do where did all your icons go?

First, to address issue #2, missing icons. This occurs because you had installed categories and moved a bunch of files into folders. When you restore, your springboard plist will be restore and that contains a bunch of hidden icons. Here are your options

1) Prevent this situation by unhiding icons and/or deleting your folders before you do yoru final backup before you upgrade

2) After your jailbreak ends, before you restore your backup, install some things that will help you such as: openssh, poof, bossprefs (any of these you did not have installed before would be great). Here is a prioritized list of options:

a) Install Poof if BossPrefs was hidden install BossPrefs if Poof was hidden. Either of these can completely unhide all your apps. If both were used and hidden then move to B.

b) If settings is available, run that. Enable restrictions, disable restrictions. All your apps will be visible. If settings was hidden, move to C.

c) SSH into the iPhone with scp or ssh. If you don’t know how, use this guide. Navigate yourself over to /var/mobile/Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.springboard.plist. Respring your iPhone by typing “killall SpringBoard” into SSH or, if you don’t know how to do that, just reboot. All your hidden apps will be visible.

So, you probably didn't realize that you could go into "Settings" -> "General" -> "Restrictions" and simply turn on and then off Restrictions... which unhides all apps.

You probably dinked around with past customized firmwares for a few hours, wasting your precious time. Don't do that again.

(as is the case with many of my blog posts, this one is for me... so you might not find it all that interesting)

In writing my very long post yesterday about OVL incident reports, I had to do a series of replacements. For example, I had a set of text like this:

[12345]
[21345]
[13245]
[12435]
...

and I needed each line to look like this (a Markdown anchor):

[12345]: http://foo.bar/do?id=12345
...

Obviously, I could do this by hand, but that would be silly and hurt my hands. Of course, my thoughts instantly turned to Emacs' replace-regexp command which will run search on a regular expression and replace that text with text of your choosing.

In this case, I hit M-x replace-regexp and entered this as the search string:

\[\([0-9]\{5\}\)\]

Which says, "look for any series of 5 numbers within square brackets, and save the 5 numbers for the replacement operation". After hitting return, I construct the replace text like so:

[\1]: http://foo.bar/do?id=\1

The \1 tells Emacs to replace this string with what it found in the search part of the operation between parentheses (although note that the parentheses have to be escaped in the search target above: \( and \)).

You can use the parenthesis trick in replace-regexp to do all sorts of neat stuff... check the Emacs manual for the specific syntax for Emacs regular expressions.

This is my variation of Cook's Illustrated "Almost No-knead Bread"... which, in turn, is a variation of Bittman's "No-knead Bread". I'm going to rebel and just call it Simple Bread. It's so easy, you can't frak it up... especially if you have all the right materials and ingredients.

Simple Bread

Makes one round loaf

Materials

• 1c., 1/4 c., tbsp and tsp measures
• Large bowl
• Wire whisk
• Rubber spatula
• Plastic wrap
• No-stick spray
• Parchment paper
• 10" skillet or large shallow bowl
• Bread or pizza stone
• Dutch oven
• Instant-read thermometer

Ingredients:

• 3 c. bread flour (King Arthur's)
• 1/4 tsp. rapid rise or instant yeast (not active dry)
• 1 1/4 tsp. table salt (not kosher)
• 3/4 c. + 3 tbsp. water
• 1/4 c. + 3 tbsp. beer (light lager)
• 1 tbsp. white vinegar

Directions:

1. Measure flour, yeast and salt into a large bowl. Whisk them to evenly distribute the yeast and salt. Pour in the wet ingredients and then mix with rubber spatula to form shaggy doughball. If there isn't enough cohesion to form a shaggy dougball, add water 1 tbsp. at a time. If it is too wet, add flour 1 tbsp. at a time. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise 8-18 hours.

2. About two hours before you plan to put it in the oven, place a large piece of parchment in the skillet and spray the top with non-stick spray. Take the doughball out of the plastic-wrapped bowl and turn onto a lightly floured surface. Knead dough 10-15 times adding flour as needed. Pick the dough up with your hands and form into a rough doughball by pulling the dough away from itself and turning while forming a squat ball. Turn and pinch the seam more until the seam slightly closes. Place the dougball seam-side down on the parchment in the skillet. Spray non-stick spray on the top and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let rise for two hours.

3. About one hour later, place your bread or pizza stone on the lowest shelf in your oven and turn it to 425° F (220° C). Place the next shelf on the next level up and place covered dutch oven in the oven.

4. When doughball has risen for two hours, remove plastic wrap. Dust top lightly with flour and cut a large 1/2"-deep slit into top of dough. Remove dutch oven from the oven and remove top. Using sides of the parchment as a sling, place doughball in the dutch oven and replace cover. Place in oven for 25 minutes. Remove cover and bake for an additional 15 minutes. Check temperature and heat in 2-3 minute intervals until center reads 210° F (98° C). Remove bread from oven and place on wire rack. Let cool for 2 hours.

To go with my dough recipe -- which I believe is close to perfect -- comes this sauce recipe. It's a combination of a fast-cooked red sauce and the uber-raw red sauce of Peter Reinhart. It's great when the sauce is reduced to where it just starts to stand on the spoon. Cooking it down slightly allows the flavors to blend and mellow a bit while removing some of the water from the tomatoes.

Joe's Pizza Sauce

(makes plenty of sauce for 3 14" thin pies.)

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 28oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• a pinch of sugar
• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar
• salt and black pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Heat oil and garlic on medium heat in saucepan.
2. When garlic starts to sizzle, add tomatoes.
3. Simmer, uncovered, until sauce is thick enough to mound or "stand" on the sauce spoon, about 15-20 minutes.
4. Add basil, oregano, sugar and vinegar. Season to taste.
5. Let cool at room temp and then refrigerate.

Yes, this is another shaving post. Deal with it.

Success. Today I had my first completely successful wetshave. It's a remarkable thing, really. To know that you don't have to buy Gillette or any other company's crappy products... to know that your shave will be comfortable and fun... to relish in doing things right... and to use high-quality products that feel good, smell good and make you feel good. That's a bit of what it's like to be able to pull off a good wetshave. Feels kind of like when I learned how to really drive a manual transmission; there's just no going back.

I'll describe what works for me in this post. First, the accoutrements:

• A lather mug. The mug should be pretty wide, a small bowl works too.
• Real shaving cream. I really like the Geo F. Trumper Violet and Rose creams... very good lather and amazing fragrance.
• A good safety razor with good blades. I use a Merkur Hefty Classic with Merur platinum-coated blades; they stay sharp and end up costing about 50 cents a pop.
• A badger's hair brush with a stand. Boar's hair apparently holds water well and you need the stand so that it can dry when you're done using it.

Here's my approach to a step-by-step wetshaving process. Nothing is very novel; it's just what works for me. The key is wet... you want it as much lather and water as you can possibly stand:

1. Shave after taking a hot shower. As they say, hot water opens up your pores. Don't dry your face; make sure it stays wet.
2. Run hot water (not scalding) in the sink and splash the hot water to rewet your face just in case any evaporation has happened.
3. Turn the water up to the hotest it will go and plug your drain. Douse the shaving brush in the water so that it gets very wet. Drop the brush into the water in the sink.
4. Put an inch-long cylinder of shaving cream in your mug.
5. Take brush out of the water and run under the running water again. Let the brush drain until the steady stream of water stops. Shake it gently once.
6. Put brush in mug and use circular motions (both ways) to work up a lather... you'll know your done when there's a good lather on the brush and the lather in the cup is starting to peak just a bit.
7. Apply lather to your face with the brush in up-and-down motions. It's amazing how precise you can be with a brush given enough time... you can get every millimeter of your face lathered and no millimeter of your face that you don't want lathered with practice.
8. Check your safety razor. Make sure that the blade is firmly screwed down onto the razor. If it is not, the edge of the blade can stick out a bit and you will cut yourself.
9. Put teeth of your razor at a ninety degree angle to your upper cheeck and tilt the blade up until you feel the razor catch. Slowly let the razor "fall" down your cheek, don't pull. Adjust angle such that you get a good shave. Only use large strokes if you don't have much growth.
10. Continue shaving going with the grain of your hair and washing off your razor in the pool of water after every few strokes. This is very important. With most men's faces, the grain points downward until about halfway down the neck, where it switches to growing upward. Shaving against the grain is for fools and can really hurt and cause other problems. Only shave each part of your face once, you can come back later if you need to.
11. After you're done with your first pass, check and see if you need another pass or need to touch anything up. If so, relather your face and do it again, paying attention to details this time.
12. Once you're done, let the water out of the sink. Run the water warm and rinse out your mug and brush. Make sure to gently open the brush to get into where soap can hide in the middle of the brush. Put brush back in drying stand. Use the now clean mug to rinse down the sides of the sink.
13. Run the water very cold. Cup your hands and splash very cold water onto your face and neck many times (4 or 5).
14. Dry off your face with a towel... don't rub but pat. Your face is very tender here and rubbing will only worsen it.
15. Apply aftershave of your choice. When your face is dry, apply a moisturizer of some sort.
16. Clean up the sink so that it doesn't look like a squirrel jumped in a blender.

UPDATE [2008-01-14T22:57:33]: I had said "boar's" hair above for the brush when, of course, I meant badger. If you've read this far, you must check out Mark's shaving videos on YouTube:

Well, it's probably no doubt a lingering influence from the very wonderful Mr. Burton's Sweeney Todd, but I recently decided to get a bit more serious about shaving.

After a bit of research, it turns out that you can get a better shave by just using a good brush and a decent shaving soap or cream (you can tell by the picture I'm using a Kingsley badger bristle brush and L'Occitane's Cade shaving cream). The concept of a wetshave is just that: the idea is to make sure your face is wet as possible with hot water before you apply warm shaving cream while making sure that you use more cream if you have to make another pass of the blade.

The end result is a smooth, close shave with no irritation whatsoever. I've even decided to discard my cartridge razor for a real safety razor. Shaving is now joy! Thanks goes to the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.