I know, I know, everyone and their brother posted late last week about the ruling making the practice of jailbreaking your phone for “educational purposes” legal here in the US. (You can read the news story here.)
Personally I’m not going to rehash all of the stories that were written but I would suggest that if you have been living under a rock during the last week that you check out the post at ars technica and at Mashable.
Now, in the past I have jailbroken my iPhone and while I did test a recent jailbreak I have to say I’m not sure if I want to keep it jailbroken. When the 3.1.3 update came out I updated my phone which relocked it and while I was sorry to see some of the functionality I was using go away I’ve managed to function just fine without it for the last few months.
Would it be nice to have those features back? Sure, but the major one for me, multitasking, is now included in the OS. All the other “bells and whistles” like the Winterboard themes and easy access to turning on and off Wi-Fi are nice to haves – I can function just fine without them.
I’m thinking this has to do with simplifying things and making my life easier – if I keep my iPhone “locked down” there’s less for me to worry about and fewer applications for me to browse (of course I do have a Droid for work but that’s another story) which helps me stay more on track.
So, my question to you, my kind reader, now that it’s legal in the US to jailbreak – will you?
There’s a great blog I read – Lifehacker.com – which covers all kinds of interesting items from do it yourself projects to computer hacking/tweaking (windows, mac and linux) and I’m always being amazed at some of the projects I see worked on which then leads to the thought, “now why didn’t I think of that?”
The answer is quite simple, to lifehack you need to think outside of the box. You need to look at now what something is but rather what it is used for and is there a way to put a new spin or twist on it.
I had one of those “a-ha” moments this past winter and put the solution into practice a second time this spring when the power went out at the house again (luckily only a few hours not two days like it did last time).
Enter the seemingly everywhere solar powered walkway light.
An iPhone picture from Scot Newbury
For most folks these just light their walkways but in times of a power outage you can take and bring them inside to give you some wonderful light. What is really nice is that because these are essentially battery powered I can hand one to each of the kids and not worry about them carrying it around the house.
The best part? Put them back outside in the morning and they recharge for another eventing of fun (if you need them).
If you’re like me you’re always searching for something in your archives, and for me one of the biggest is Evernote which does have a really good search tool but sometimes you just want to shortcut it.
For those that prefer the browser interface, the folks at Evernote did a quick video and blog post about adding the ability to search Evernote to Google Chrome.
But wait a minute you said I could search Evernote with Launchy and you can by adding the same search parameters to Launchy.
Open Launchy, right click and select Options
Click on Plug-ins
Click Weby
Click the ‘+’ button
Under name enter Evernote
For the URL enter – http://www.evernote.com/search?q=%1
Click ‘Ok’
Now you can bring up Launchy, type Evernote, hit the tab key and whatever you would like to search for.
An important note – if you have multiple words in your search term be sure to place the entire string in quotes or the search will one look for the first term.
I should also note that in both cases your results are pulled and shown in the web client – if you’re logged out you’ll be prompted to log in to see the results.
