It’s Just Poison…

If you have a jailbroken iPhone and add a new mail account, then try to sync your existing mail accounts from your computer, you’ll prolly see this message:

“Could not sync mail accounts to the iphone because the iphone cancelled the sync”

It’s just a permissions issue, and can be resolved by either SSH’ing into your phone as root or using MobileTerminal and su as root.

Navigate to: /var/mobile/Library
then: chmod -R 777 Mail/

That’ll fix the permissions, and then you can sync away =)

This fix was originally found at This Blog.

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X, Tech, iPhone by .: Adam
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This was a first for me, but today when I turned my computer on and opened up Mail, I received some error about the it being messed up and something had to be rebuilt. Don’t remember exactly, cuz I just hit OK and then Mail closed.

When I reopened Mail, all my “mail” was gone! Crap…

I checked the actual mail to see if it was still there: /Users/Me/Library/Mail, and it was all still there. So, Mail the program was messed up somewhere.

A little bit of messing around, and I figured it out.

There’s a file called “Envelope Index” I noticed that there was one a lot larger called “Envelope Index-1″, so I backed up the original and renamed “Envelope Index-1″ to “Envelope Index”. Started Mail back up, and all my mail was back =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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Last night I spent some time rewiring my entire sound system so that I could do something pretty awesome. I live in a duplex (2 story apartment) and I throw parties every once in a while at my place. Something that’s always bothered me was that I didn’t have a solid way to get the same music playing on both floors. I know I could just run speaker wire, but I have two separate stereos (1 for each floor). So how do I get them to play the same music in sync?

I ran across This Article on LifeHacker.com and it made my day. I was so giddy that I immediately started working on it when I got home from work.

In essence, it not only allows me to have the same music playing through both stereos, but I can also control the whole thing with my iPhone! How bad ass is that?! (oh, and I already had all the required pieces, so it cost me nothing =)

In the end, here’s what I did:

First I flashed my Linksys router with the Tomato firmware and set it up as a distributed wireless router (I also boosted the signal strength from 45mw to 100 =). Next, I found my Airport Express and configured that to link to my router. This stuff was pretty simple and worked the first time through.

To get the music to my stereo upstairs (where the airport express is), I was going to have my old Powerbook stream music through iTunes to the Airport Express router, which is hooked up to the stereo. iTunes allows you to connect to multiple “speakers”, so I streamed it, and I also plugged in a cable to the headphone jack of the laptop. This cord then connected to the stereo downstairs.

This took me a bit to get working (couple of hours), because the HDD on the Powerbook was fried and wouldn’t book. To get around this problem, I disassembled the casing of the laptop and disconnected the HDD. Put it all back together and then install OS X on an external HDD. BTW, to install OS X on an external HDD, it has to be connected via FireWire. USB will NOT work. I had an old 80gb external FireWire drive, so I just used that. Once OS X was installed I copied the contents of my iPod to the HDD so all my MP3’s were on the laptop. Should I want to upgrade later, all I have to do is copy over the OS to a new, larger FireWire HDD. Man I love OS X!

The last step was to hook my iPhone up to the iTunes on the Powerbook to control it wirelessly over the WLAN. Super easy with the Remote app.

That’s all there was to it! Now I can choose songs / playlists, skip through songs, control volume to both stereos with one fader… all from the phone in my pocket! ROCK!

Tags: Hacks, OS X, Tech by .: Adam
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And the hacking begins!

I finished off my day of work and headed to the airport to take off for Vegas for the weekend. On my lunch break I checked into my flight and expected to print out my boarding pass. The option was there, but there was another option. One that I’ve never seen before: Save to your mobile device. ?!

Hell yeah, I’m down to try this out. What it did was email a link to my iPhone. When you click on the link, the browser opens to a page that displays a barcode, and all my flight details (see the image below).

When I arrived at the security checkpoint, the little Indian man asked for my boarding pass and I showed him the webpage on my phone. He balked a little about needing a paper boarding pass with gate information, but I firmly insisted that this was all that was necessary… and he let me pass. Social Engineering Tactic #1: Success.

My next interaction was the security lady that was to check my boarding pass with my ID. When I showed her my phone, she smiled and told me how she’d heard about these but never got to scan one. I was her first. Awww. I hope she remembers me :). Anyway, after scanning my phone she didn’t even ask me for my ID. She just handed me my phone and said I could go through. I asked if she needed my ID and she said that it was verified through the scan. Ummm…what? I dunno if I’d call that an SE tactic, but definately got around security (without even trying). Success?

Next I as to strip down and walk through the metal detector. When I walked through, the security guard asked for my boarding pass. I told him thy it was on my phone. Deer in headlights. “let me see boarding pass”.
“Umm, I don’t have a paper one. I have an electronic one on my phone,” I said.
“you must carry boarding pass with you to give to me!”
“ok. Dude… It’s on my PHONE! I can’t carry a phone through the metal detector!”.
“oh. Ok. Go ahead”
?!
SE #3? Success I guess. (oh. Still no request for my ID.)

When I arrived at my gate they had just begin boarding first class. Great timing! Next they announced boarding for Elite Members. I’m not an elite member, but it’s a full flight to vegas and I’m sitting in the first row. This means I’m last to board and there will be no room for my bag and it’ll have to be cheked. Crap.

So I board :).

The ticket taker asks for my boarding pass and I handed him my phone. He looked back at me and told me that they were only boarding elite members right now. So I told him that I was an elite member, but that the status wasn’t on the phone pass thing.

I boarded.
SE #4… Success!

On to Vegas baby!

Tags: Browsers, Hacks, Tech, Travels by .: Adam
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Now that the new iPhone has been jailbroken, I’ve been messing around with all the images and icon, trying to customize the hell out of it. The first thing that I found out how to change was the background image for the dock (that metallic looking thing). The next thing that I learned was how to change individual application icons. (Within each app is a file ‘icon.png’, you just edit that)

Well, I came up with a new way to use the dock. I made all the app icons that are store in the dock blank PNG files (essentially no icon), and then made the background file one image with a bunch of stuff going on. All the notifications still appear where the icons were, and so do the text labels. For the text, I just made a black bar at the bottom faded out so that the text could be read.

Here’s a screen shot so you can see what I mean. My Apps at the bottom are: Phone, SMS, Safari, Mail.

I’m sure you could come up with a lot cooler ideas with this, but it should get the ball rolling =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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You know the little slider blocks with the arrows on them on the iPhone? The most common is the one you slide to unlock the phone. I’m going to show you how to make your own custom ones =).

PreReq: Jailbroken iPhone v2.0 (May work on older versions, no clue. I only have a 2.0 iPhone 3g)

PreReq: OpenSSH installed and setup (Use Cydia… has a great set of setup instructions once it’s installed)

Download This Slider PSD Template and use it to make your own sliders. There’s a couple layers in there to help you out for the sizes, tints, and such.

The one on the lock page is called: bottombarknobgray.png
The one on the lock page during Sync is: bottombarknobgreen.png
The one that’s used to turn off the phone is: bottombarknobred.png

When you save them, make sure you save them as 24-bit alpha PNG files. You can just do the Save For Web tool and select the preset.

Now you have to upload them to your phone via SSH here:
(You can get the IP from either the network setup in Settings, or what I do is open the Terminal app and run ‘ifconfig’ =)

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobgray.png
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobred.png
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/bottombarknobgreen.png

Reboot your phone (Hold Lock and Home buttons for around 10 sec to turn off / Hold Lock button to turn on).

You’re done and have some fancy new sliders =)

.: Adam

Tags: Hacks, OS X by .: Adam
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