It’s Just Poison…

I’m chillin in my hotel (a nice Marriott), and I signed in for the free wireless. When I did it, I had to choose from Basic Internet, Just Email, and Internet with VPN. So I chose the VPN one thinking it be the least restricted (ports wise).

Wrong!

The kicker is that it’s signed my computer under that plan for 48 hours… Crap! Now I’m stuck with crappy Internet service for 2 days!

Solution, spoof your MAC address!

Here’s the command for Leopard:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr DE:AD:DE:FA:CE:D0

(put in whatever MAC address you want)

then just restart the wifi card and bam! You are a new computer to the network and you can pick the better service =)

Later!

.: Adam

I find the arrows irritating as hell, and you used to be able to implement a hack to have them point to the albums in your library. iTunes v8 broke that…

to just remove them completely, run this in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Just switch FALSE to TRUE to turn them back on.

i want you to read this twice because that’s how i lived it, and then in turn experienced it. There are three levels here, but only the first two are apparent. The third, which to me is even more terrifying wasn’t discovered until it was over.

i accomplished a mission. I saw stuff, and I had a completely horrible experience (for the most part).

I was expecting something, but not this. This was… intense.

I took the whole thing this time. The bigger one at that. Everything started out like before. Just laughing my ass off about everything and all around craziness.

i then saw it. And i dont’ mean “saw it”. I read a text message and my phone was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. I started to see prisms in the light. I got a text form someone to meet me at a bar down the road. Quick walk to the place really. Maybe 8 or 9 blocks.

i was on cloud 9 and feeling pretty adventurous! I put on a couple jackets (it’s december) and headed outside. As I was walking to the park I saw the prisms even more, and they were mesmerizing. As if NYC isn’t enough, this was NYC on x-mas. So there were lights everywhere and I was having a blast and laughing my ass off. Good times. It was part, “i’m finally seeing something” and the other, which was more overwhelming, was the sheer experience. You can’t see these things unless your there. There’s no special effect or funny glasses that give you this.

i was in another world, and loving it!

I think i was on 5th and A… maybe 4th. Not sure really. But I was sure that the mural painted on the gates of the closed building was freaking me out. That’s when it hit me…”the fear”. It was a physical entity, not a feeling.

i remember thinking, should i continue on to the bar, or go home. thank god i hailed a cab.

i made the cabbie stop at 6th and C and threw my money at him. i think i paid somewhere around $10 for a $4 cab ride. didn’t matter. The Fear was getting larger, and more surrounding.

i kept telling myself that all i needed to do was get home. i can do this… 3 blocks…. i can do this.

i got to 7th st. and realized i couldn’t make it. What put me over the edge was that i was across the street from a police station and i’m tripping balls with no ID and the that’s when it happened. The Fear had morphed into what I now know of as Pure Evil. And it didn’t morph into a different entity, it became me. I was Pure Evil. It didn’t get to my core, but it had definitely gotten under my skin. It made sure that I wasn’t wearing it, but that I had become it, and it was just getting deeper. It was going for the bone. For the core.

I was convinced that i was going to curl up in a ball on the street and totally loose my shit. I was breathing fear, and harboring evil. Right now I’m pissed of at these words… not what I’m writing, but the actual letters and words. They cannot describe the intensity that I was feeling.

i summoned up all that i had, and new it was my only shot, so i had to make it work. i called my roommate. thank god she picked up the phone. i kept her on the phone and she guided me back to the apartment. our friend Robb also helped out by coming to meet me on the street.

i got inside and Pure Evil took over. I was scared shitless. I have never been so afraid of anything in my life. Death is easier to accept than to take on this… thing. This thing that was on … in me.

i went to my couch, and that’s when it hit me. I’m pretty sure I knew all along, but admitting it made it real. I can cope with real.

i was wearing black leather pants, and a black leather jacket and black shirt. I was hot as hell. The sweat coming out of me was the fear being pushed out by Pure Evil.

i knew what i had to do. i took off my jacket, my pants, and my shirt. (thankfully i was wearing grey boxers).

i needed to strip off the evil… i needed to get it off me so that i could then focus on the evil in side me.

i found a pair of white shorts, and a white shirt.

i honestly think that if i didn’t have them / find them, i would have just sat around in my boxers. but the grey was too close to black, so maybe not.

i’m wearing all white. i feel better. a wave of comfort comes over me. this is what i need. unfortunately i was sitting in my bedroom with a burned out light, so i was sitting in darkness. that comfort was being stripped away quickly.

i had to get out of the room.

i went into the living room. black couch, black floor, black paint. The Pure Evil was gaining strength. I moved farther to the kitchen. My WHITE kitchen. Better. From here out it gets hellishly intense dealing with the Pure Evil that’s taking over my mind and body.

i am a little cowering child, but cannot run away from it. This is me.

i then moved into the bathroom where it was even more white. i have a black shower curtain, but i let it stay. i just don’t look at it. Throughout all this my roommate is with me and telling me everything is ok.

i knew it was lame.

i knew where i was, was my home.

i didn’t give a fuck. i was scared out of my fucking skull. Scared of the evil. Please keep in mind that, although now (and somewhat while this was going on) i had a clue, this isn’t a metaphor for anything. This was exactly what i’m saying. Pure Evil.

I forced myself to vomit. A lot. I vomited until everything was clear. I was literally cleansing my body from the inside of the Evil.

i know it’s easy to see the self-preservation, and animal instinct acting on pure survival, and that this evil I’m referring to are the mushrooms i ate, and my body (not me) is doing what it knows to stay alive. I poisoned myself. My body said, “fuck you asshole” and came up with with great inventive way to get rid of the toxins. I even saw this connection while going through all of it, BUT it didn’t matter. Reality was gone… waaaaaay gone. I had succumb to this Evil, and I had to play along.

i also drank a shit ton of water. i needed to stay cool. i even dropped some onto my feet. i washed me feet at one point too. there was black fuzz from my socks on them, so obviously it had to go.

i also had the thought about my hair. having black hair also freaked me out. Not only that, but for some reason I decided…really just let myself grow a beard (what I can grow anyway). So i now have long black hair, and a beard-ish thing going on. i resolved this by keeping it back, not looking in a mirror, and always looking up. almost as if i was looking for help. i knew i wasn’t going to get anything, but looking up kept me a little bit more relaxed. umm… no. not relaxed… that doesn’t happen. just less terrified. that’s better.

I think looking up also helped with the fact that i have tattoos.

i’m not even going to think what i would have done if i saw them. they did freak me out though… i just pretended they didn’t exist. please keep in mind that my roommate is still with me the whole time. there were a couple instances where she left when we thought i was doing better.

i knew it was “childish” (that word is there for me to remember something else about tonight), but i needed her there to tell me it was ok, and that everything was normal. i think that if i was forced to have gone through this on my own, i may have literally snapped and never come back…

i went through more vomiting, and more water later, i’m starting to feel ok. and now cold.

i decided it was time to brave a lesser white room.

i left for the kitchen. not so bad really. a little disturbing… the Pure Evil was gone, but now The Fear had returned. He liked to remind me what was up.

i kept Him in check and grabbed a red blanket and headed downstairs.

i was doing good.

i was feeling slightly normal again.

i felt the fear… he was winnning.

i went back upstairs and into the bathroom to start the process all over. the red blanket wasn’t cutting it. Thankfully i had a white bathrobe on the door in the bathroom. YES! White AND warm. Perfect!

i hung out for a little while longer and tried my best to overcome The Fear.

i did it.

i left.

i went to the kitchen. heart beat rises slightly, but i reassure myself that it’s ok, and that I’m in control.

i go into the living room and don’t even LOOK into the darkness that is my bedroom.

i could almost hear the Evil that I shed in there screaming…writhing in agony. It wanted me.

i went downstairs.

i overcame The Fear.

i was warm.

i was calm. And a wise “little” woman looked me in the eyes and told me…

i am jesus.

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

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

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!

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!

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

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