Problem Solved
TTFN: iPhone 3.1 Jailbreak, Unlock and Downgrade
Sep 14th
This posting is part of Calpernia’s “Tech Tips for Nerds” series… if you are not a techie nerd, ignore this!
Ok kids, after a long day of searching every nook, cranny, blog and rumor mill following the iPhone software 3.1 upgrade released by Apple, here is the definitive finding:
If you upgraded your 3G or 3GS iPhone to 3.1, you cannot at present downgrade it to 3.0, jailbreak it or unlock it. There are some blogs out there saying you can, but that’s ONLY if you somehow upgraded the phone software to 3.0 but your baseband modem software remained not upgraded (which didn’t happen unless you were a developer who forced an upgrade of the phone software with a preview copy outside of the normal iTunes upgrade process).
To put it with ultimate clarity, if (as of Sept. 13, 2009) you upgraded your 3G or 3GS iPhone to 3.1 using iTunes, you cannot Jailbreak it, Unlock it or revert, restore or downgrade it to 3.0… yet. Use the Google search I put below to keep updated, I’m sure Saurik or someone will have this sorted out soon.
Oh, and [celebrities] [fancy costumes] [pop music] [sexy guys] for all my regular non-nerd readers. Mwah!
TTFN: Who Have I Blocked on Twitter?
Sep 10th
Calpernia on Twitter?
I recently discovered that while attempting to move a list of friends into a “group” with my iPhone Twitter app, I actually “blocked” them, which both unfollows them and blocks them from talking to me! Argh… so if you recently figured out that you were blocked by my Titter account, that’s what happened.
Once I figured out that this had happened, I needed to find a list of who I had blocked on Twitter, but there was no easy way to get this information. You have to go one-by-one and unblock/refollow the people, but how can you find them?
Thankfully, a member of the wonderful nerd community has created a super simple page using a new Twitter API to list the followers you have blocked. Just go here and connect to your Twitter account to see who you’ve blocked:
http://www.topify.com/whoiblock/
Find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/calpernia
TTFN: How to Make a Free iPhone Ringtone Using iTunes
Aug 27th
Tech Tips for Nerds (TTFN) is my series of blog posts where I share the information I obtained after laborious Google searching for some tech problem or other. Ignore these if you’re not nerdily inclined, I’m just archiving them here to help the next Google searcher.
TTFN: Working with MTS (AVCHD) Video Files on a Mac
Aug 21st
Todays TTFN (Tech Tip for Nerds) is about working with MTS video files (aka AVCHD) files on a Mac. I’m not going to go into ridonkulous technical specs here. Skip if you’re not looking for technical info!
FUNNY STORY: So yesterday I was shooting a parody of the already-notorious Eric Dane / Rebecca Gayheart / Kari Ann Peniche sex video (SFW-ish version) (NSFW version) (and much like the real one, there is no sex involved, but lots of funny!). Today I have to edit the video in Final Cut Pro. But it’s .MTS files on a Sony AVCHD HDR-SR1 camera! Ohhh No0es!
PROBLEM: A Sony HDR-SR1 HD AVCHD Handycam full of video files using the MTS extension located in the folder at /(the camera)/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM sits on my desk. I need to get the video off of this camera and onto my Mac Pro computer so that I can edit it with Final Cut Pro 6.
Click “More” to read the various things I tried, and the solutions I found. More >
Problem Solved: Tech Tips for Nerds
Aug 21st
As many Cal-pals know, I’m not only a Hollywood Bon Vivant/Sex Kitten who stalks the red carpets of countless high-glam events in the latest designer gowns by Jared Gold, Richard Bowman, Versace (pronounced /Ver-SAYSE/) with jewels by Tarina Tarantino and makeup by Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics.
I’m also a hunchbacked nerd who actually spends most of her days bio-ported into a bank of computers, doing everything from digital video/audio editing to graphic and web design to writing/editing in PHP/SQL/Javascript/AJAX (and HTML, if that even needs mentioning). Plus a whole slew of general tech and hardware troubleshooting and problem solving.
In the course of doing all those things, I routinely encounter snags and problems that I spend ages researching in order to find a solution or get enough information to come up with one of my own. Whenever I complete one of these tasks, I think afterward that I should post my findings online, so that the next person doesn’t encounter a vast wasteland of empty (or worse — junkyarded) Google results. But I never posted them, because I assumed my readers would not be in the least interested.
Well, I don’t know how well I’ll be able to keep this up, but I’m going to start posting these solutions under the category “Problem Solved” (I also considered “TTFN – Tech Tips for Nerds” ha ha). These postings will be utterly rarified and tech-intensive for most of my readers… just skip over them if so! Consider them little messages-in-bottles for my copatriots in the world of information technology… I’m two things in one! Kinda like how actress Hedy Lamarr was also the inventor of Frequency Hopping.
