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This weekend I had a chance to do a couple things. First I built a Hackintosh (osx86). I will talk about that in a later blog. I was also able to get a wireless bridge to connect my xbox by my TV to my network without having a crossover cable to my laptop.

I went down to Fry’s to see what kind of deals they had. I looked around a bit and found a couple wireless bridges that did exactly what I wanted to do but they were 65-120$. If you are cheap tech person like me you have in your mind what you think something should cost. I my mind I could not justifying paying more than $40 for a BRIDGE. So I found something that might work. It was a 802.11g Airlink Wireless Music Bridge.

Again if you are like me the first question you ask is, “why couldn’t you use this as a regular wireless bridge?” and that is exactly what I asked the guy at the Fry’s store. Of course they don’t pay people enough to know what they are actually selling. So he insisted on telling me it was for music only and insisted on grabbing the $96 one. I asked him if it was limited to only a certain audio protocol, he of course had no idea and after talking with me for a minute or two he gave up and left. I decided to get it.

It was a good call on my part that I did. I was able to set it up working over WEP, but not WPA-PSK. I messed with it for about 2 hours trying to get it to work and checking the error logs but it as just a no go. So I think it was worth the $30 I spent but it would have been nice to get the WPA to work. I guess I’ll just have to find other ways of securing my wifi.

So I actually did get my iPhone on Friday. I was in near perfect / brand new condition. I was very happy. In my last blog I mentioned that I had found a way to unlock and jailbreak the iPhone just by uploading hacked firmware. This did not work. So here is the way I actually did it.

First I downloaded QuickPWN from http://www.quickpwn.com/ . I then plugged in my iphone and started to walk through the steps. First I needed the firmware for my iPhone. Which I found http://www.quickpwn.com/2008/11/firmware-22-download-links.html. After browsing to the file that I needed to do the jailbreak / unlock it asked me for the two binary files 3.9 and 4.6 which I have hosted here and here.

After it ran through its whole process (took about 10-15 min) I tried the foreign SIM card. Well it threw and error. “Different SIM Detected” was my error. After some poking around I found out that there was a lockdown folder that need to be replaced. I took the SIM out and went into cydia and installed openssh-server. After that I found It’s IP on the wifi network and SSH’d to it using root and alpine. (You should change this password immediately after SSHing in for the first time.) I changed directories to

/private/var/root/Library/

Ok, I should have mentioned this earlier but you need to download a modified lockdown folder from here. After that you need to unzip it and SFTP it to your iPhone using your favorite sftp client (psftp, filezilla, etc.) I think I used filezilla because I could just drag and drop the entire lockdown folder to the iPhone. Don’t forget to backup the old lockdown folder. (I just changed the name) After that is installed I rebooted the iphone plugged the new (t-mobile and a different att) SIM into the phone and I worked.

Good work to the guys at QuickPWN and modmyi.com for making this such an easy task.

I won an iPhone on ebay the other and while I am wait for it to arrive I was searching around for was to unlock and jailbreak it. I have had an Ipod touch for about a year now but it has its limitations. I have done the jail break back when the firmware version was 1.1.2 through 1.1.4, but I haven’t dealt with the verson 2.0+ firmware. I ended up buying a non-3g 4gb iPhone. I have a 3g iPhone for work but I didn’t want to rely on that for doing unlocking projects. This method is not for the 3g model. It will not work because of some hardware differences. After searching around I found what looks like to be the easiest solution ever.

So basically Someone has created a firmware version that has already been jailbroken/unlocked so all you need to do is restore you phone with that firmware version. It’s a 250mb file so it is split into 3 chunks. Here are the links for the download.

http://rapidshare.com/files/166467277/iPhone1_1_2.2_5G77_Custom_Restore.part1.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/166469392/iPhone1_1_2.2_5G77_Custom_Restore.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/166470401/iPhone1_1_2.2_5G77_Custom_Restore.part3.rar

Once you have those files unrar them and you should have your firmware version. Now plug in your iPhone and try to restore it. When it gives you the “restore” button hold shift while clicking it and it will give you and option to specify the firmware version you would like to load. Select the one you just un-rared and let it install. After it’s done installing you should have a fully unlocked and jailbroken iPhone. I have not tried this since I do not have the phone yet but it seems pretty easy.

In the past couple years torrenting has become the craze for downloading everything from music to movies to any other type of file. I know that most of you probably used Napster back in the day and moved to kazaa, limewire, frost wire, and whatever other program you use to peer2peer. Now that torrenting has been the new way to get files it’s probably important to know who not to torrent from. I would rather not see people busted for torrenting.

If you are using windows, I would suggest Peergaurdian2 . I think it comes with one blocklist which other people have scanned through and found IP’s that could potentially track your download activity and get you in trouble if you are downloading copyrighted material. I have created my own second list which blocks even more IP’s I would suggest you do similar.

Just a heads up and hopefully it will keep you out of trouble when torrenting.

Yesterday I encountered a new package manager problem that I have never seen before. Basically I started with a .rpm package and wanted to create a .deb package with alien. The program was vmware-server. Long story short it failed and I ended up just downloading the tar ball and installing it that way and compiling some things. That worked. When I tried to then do something with apt-get it errored telling me that there was some package that needed to be reinstalled which was vmware-server. Since I had already deleted it from the server it could no longer be found. Here is a list of things I tried before using the technique I’m about to show you.

apt-get remove
apt-get remove -purge
dpkg --force-all -purge
dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq
First I would try those if you are having problems with a package. Now if it’s really hosed and you can’t get any of those option to work listed above then I do have a solution for you, which did take a me a bit to find.

Edit /var/lib/dpkg/status with your favorite editor. Now find the package that is giving you trouble. Mine started with the line

Package: vmware-server

After I found that there are two options. Delete that whole section, which I ended up doing. Or change the status to:

Status: install ok installed

Either one should get you back working. Just save the file and try using the package manager again, and you should be all set.