The Life and Times of Chris Carson

Late Friday night with the help of Jeremy I jailbroke my iPhone, and for the past 2 days I’ve been loving it. So, if you have an iPhone (or an iTouch) and you think it’s missing a couple features, read on. First, I’ll tell you about 4 apps that I think are worth crossing over for, and then, just incase I convinced you, I’ll tell you how to do it.

Ok, so, why should you jailbreak. Apple has a crazy lock down on their devices, which can be a really good thing, but when the device is missing something that you really want, that makes for irratation. So, here’s what you can get that might make you want to liberate your phone.

Qik: This is a video app that let’s you not only take video, but upload it to the tubes on the internet at the same time. Awesome. This overcomes the lack of video taking capabilities as well as the demelia about what to do with the video once you have it. You can even hook your twitter account up to it so that once you start taking video you tweet that you are as well as a link to what you’re tweeting, which means that your twitter buddies can be watching what you’re doing in almost real-time. If you’ve got an iTouch, then this probably isn’t a big deal since your lacking a camera to begin with, but if you’ve got an iPhone then this is the money-app.

Backgrounder: Do you hate that you can’t run apps in the background? I did. Ha. But sersiouly, I did. Backgrounder changes all that. This app will let you run the apps that you really like without taking away the other parts of your phone that you can’t use while you’re using that one particular app. For me, the best part about this app is that I can run a chat app (Fring) in the background.

Pushr: This is another one that is useless if you’ve got an iTouch, but if you don’t this solves the problem of what to do with your pictures on your phone. Sure, some of them go to Facebook Mobile albums and other go to BrightKite, but there are those that you don’t really like spending the time emailing, but you’d like to have on the web somewhere. Also, if you’re like me, you don’t sync you iPhone with your computer much, so you don’t really access those pictures much on the computer. This app let’s you (only when your on WiFi) upload your photos to Flickr. That’s easy to do with email or something else if it’s only one picture, but when you’ve got 70 something it’s a pain. Pushr changes that, and let’s you connect with Flickr in a really easy way.

Categories: I had like 30 game apps installed on my phone, but is was annoying to try to find a place to put all those since I rarely used them. There were also apps that I used very rarely, but I really liked having installed on my phone so they were easy to access at those rare occassions. It’s annoying though to keep having to rearrange those apps to make room for new more important apps, but categories solves that. Instead of 3 screens getting filled up with game apps, now I’ve got one icon that’s like a normal folder icon that lets you keep all those apps in one small place.

So, maybe that didn’t convince you, but maybe it did. If it did, go download QuickPwn and have your i-whatever jailbroken in like 40 seconds. The first time I tried I didn’t use QuickPwn and the thing froze and I thought I bricked my phone. Fortunately it was fine, and then I found QuickPwn and now things are great. The instructions are simple, and they tell you how to do everything step by step including putting the phone in DFU mode. And remember, if at anytime you are unhappy with your jailbreaking, you can restore the phone to its original factory settings with just the click of a button in iTunes. Just make sure that if you do jailbreak that you don’t update you phone to a new firmware without either restoring first or waiting until the jailbroken version of that firmware is out. Also, if you’re looking to unlock your phone so you can use a different carrier, then you’ll have to talk to someone else. I use AT&T.

Let me know if you’ve done it and you’ve got some great apps that I missed.

Update: I figured I should add a picture of my second page screen with some jailbroken apps running on it. Here it is…

I recently stumbled across a great cultural site called GOOD Magazine: http://good.is. I was first intrigued by their great design sense, and then a really interesting story about required reading for English classes, and the script of Freaks and Geeks was on their list. I thought that was awesome. Then today I saw that they were letting you name your own price (down to a dollar) to recieve their mag in the mail. That was a great offer I couldn’t pass up. I really don’t know much about the mag, but I think if you’ve got a dollar to spare this could be a good gamble.

If Radiohead Can Do It, So Can We by Good

I realized that I don’t have the feed published anywhere. So, here it is: http://wikicarson.com/feed. Consider that a temporary fix until I have time to put that somewhere on the site. The feed won’t change though.

Copying off an idea that we used for culture. ish., I decided to start posting some of my favorite things. The first is the blog Lifehacker. I absolutely love this site. While some of the stuff they post have nothing to do with anything connected to my life, often times they’ll post links or ideas that are downright genius. Currently, I don’t look forward to anything more in Google Reader than new posts from Lifehacker.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. If you’ve already seen it, but didn’t follow it, try it again. If you’re an avid reader like me, comment and explain what you like about it so much.

The new home of Chris Carson is under some serious construction. More coming really soon. Peace.