Jeff's Place

In the immortal words of Larry The Cable Guy, “I don’t care who you are, that’s some funny stuff.”

This an oldie but a goodie:

Five surgeons from big cities are discussing who makes the best patient to operate on.

The first surgeon, from New York , says, “I like to see accountants on
my operating table because when you open them up, everything inside is
numbered..”

The second, from Chicago , responds, “Yeah, but you should try
electricians! Everything inside them is color coded.”

The third surgeon, from Dallas , says, “No, I really think librarians
are the best, everything inside them is in alphabetical order”

The fourth surgeon, from Los Angeles chimes in: “You know, I
like construction workers… Those guys always understand
when you have a few parts left over.”

But the fifth surgeon, from Washington DC, shut them all up when he
observed: “You’re all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on.
There’s no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains, and no spine. Plus, the
head and the ass are interchangeable

I haven’t posted a photo gallery in a while, so here you go people.  Thanks to my Aunt for sending me these.

Your Kung fu is weak…

When I bought my first iPhone I was enamored with it’s simplicity, ease of use, and elegance.  After a while, I grew to wish I could customize it more than the Steve Jobs thought that I should be allowed to.  The only way to do achieve this is to jailbreak your phone.  Jailbreaking is the completely legal and accepted practice of gaining root access to your iPhone so that you can run applications, extensions and themes from sources other than the Apple iTunes store.  I never would have thought of jailbreaking my phone if it wasn’t for a friend that showed me all the cool things you could do afterwards.  Things such as customizing the lock screen, allowing more icons, on each page, or in each folder, and any number of things are possible when your phone is released from the control of Apple.

Jailbreaking is not without risks, however, and should only be undertaken by those that are thoroughly comfortable with the task.  Most of the time, things go smoothly, but there’s always the chance of screwing things up.  There is always the possibility, however rare, of completely bricking your phone.  Most problems encountered in jailbraking are repairable but you do need to be aware of the potential for problems.  One other issue you need to be aware of is that, once jailbroken, you can no longer update the operating system on your phone at will.  To do so will “unjailbreak” it.  Every time the folks in Redmond upgrade iOS, they typically repair whatever exploit was used to jailbreak it.  This doesn’t mean you’re out of luck, it just means that you need to wait for the jailbreak folks to come up with a new exploit to use.  I waited for many months to update my iPhone to iOS 5.0.1 because Apple made it much harder to jailbreak this time around.  Keep in mind, like I said before, it’s not illegal to do this, it’s just that Apple doesn’t LIKE you to do it.  A few days ago, a jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 became available so all is right with the world again.

This blog entry is not intended as a guide to jailbreaking, rather, I just want to highlight a few of the apps and tweaks that really make me glad that I decided to do it.  A complete guide to the process can be found on countless other sites.  A few minutes on Google will help out there.

Most apps, themes, extensions and other items for jailbroken phones are found in the Cydia store which can be accessed via an app that is installed on your phone during the jailbreaking process.

So let’s get on with it then:  One of the things that I desired most when I decided to jailbreak my phone was a more functional and informative lock screen.  The stock iPhone lock screen is pretty spartan.  All you get is the time, date and a battery meter (and now, with iOS 5, a button to switch to the camera).  One of my all-time favorite apps is LockInfo.  LockInfo allows you to add gobs of information to your lock screen.  Imagine being able to view, not only the time and date, but the weather, your favorite contacts, calendar entries, twitter feeds, email, stock quotes, notifications, and more.  This means that you can quickly view your important information without having to go through the process of unlocking the phone and switching to the appropriate app.  This is a huge time saver.  Click on the image to the right to see my current lockscreen.  Keep in mind that it scrolls down to show even more items.  LockInfo costs $7.99 and is worth every penny.

Many jailbreak apps are created to customize your iPhone’s Springboard.  The Springboard is the Home Screen on your iPhone.  Up till a few days ago, I was using a bunch of different apps to customize my iPhone’s Springboard to my liking.  Recently, however, I discovered a single app that did all the things those other apps did, plus dozens of other tweaks.  Springtomize 2 is the end all, be all of Springboard tweaking.  With Springtomize 2 I was able to increase the number of icons on my home screen as well as the dock and folders.  It also allowed me to shrink the size of the icons and icon labels.  I also used it to disable Spotlight Search and rename the cell network on the status bar.  These tweaks barely even scratch the surface of what this app can do.  Springtomize 2 is a bargain at just $2.99.  Check out the video below to see just what this app can do:

The final app that I want to highlight today is called BiteSMS.  Most of you that use an iPhone are aware of just how anemic the iPhone’s SMS app is.  BiteSMS fixes all of these shortcomings and then just keeps on going.  My biggest complaint with text messaging on the iPhone was that every time I’d get a text while I was using another app, I’d have to exit what I was currently doing and activate the messaging app to reply.  Among other things, BiteSMS allows you to view, compose and reply to text messages without ever having to exit what you’re working on at the time.  BiteSMS is a stand-alone app and can be used as such, but it can also completely replace the default iPhone SMS app if desired.  You can even have it change it’s icon to the Apple version so that you don’t have to stare at the atrocious pink one that is standard.  BiteSMS can be used for free, however, after a 14 day trial period, ads will be displayed.  You can purchase it for $9.99 and the ads will be removed.

There are many more apps and tweaks that I’d love to cover, but it’s already 3:30AM on New Year’s day and I really need to get to bed so they’ll have to wait for another post.

Happy New Year everyone!