Ryan Westafer

NOTE: the following is a correct procedure to access the disk image, but I was unable to recover any media from before the factory reset.  I’m not sure whether this is due to a deletion/erasure technicality with Apple’s implementation of flash storage media, the fuse filesystem, etc.

The AT&T store factory reset our iPhone 3Gs, and all the photos, etc. were deleted. Unfortunately, iTunes had not been syncing any of the photos since Dec. 2009! So, we had to run a recovery operation.
You can readily find tutorials for jailbreaking & downloading the disk image of an iPhone. Once you have the disk image, you can use photorec, part of the testdisk suite, to recover photos, etc. from the disk image… assuming they resided in areas of the filesystem which were never overwritten… just deleted.
A key command, which is often cited for other phones, and not the 3Gs, is:
dd if=/dev/rdisk0 bs=4096KB | ssh -C YourRemoteUserName@Your.Remote.IP.Address 'dd of=iphone-dump.img' bs=4096KB

If you have an Amazon Kindle, or if you just like to capture and store your readings on Wikipedia, take note.  You can now easily collect your reading material on Wikipedia and save it to PDF format.  Next, send it to your Kindle, and you can read it anywhere, without having to pull out your laptop or netbook.

Wikipedia Book Creator

To be determined:

How well does the PDF render and scale on the Kindle?
Does this work well for Google Patents or Google Books?
If you try these things I’d love to know how it goes.  These would boost my interest in the Kindle.

I use EverNote to sink much of the digital disorder in my life (in a retrievable way).

Aside from emailing mobile phone snapshots to EverNote, I use an AceCAD DigiMemo L2 notepad to digitize my notes and sketches.  The notepad is slim and basically just a clipboard, and it’s thankfully lighter than a tablet PC.  I can write in real ink with a comfortable pen with decent ballpoint tips and on any paper I like.  The vector graphic output of the thing is just amazing, when you convert to PDF… you can enlarge sketches to poster-size, without loss of quality.  Evernote has outstanding text and handwriting recognition – it does surprisingly well with my technical notes.

There’s a problem, however.  EverNote only digitizes handwriting in images.  EverNote 3.x no longer supports import of .DHW files (digital handwriting), so some people from Germany wrote a great PERL script (link to the files: dhw2ps).  I needed to convert to an image format, and PNG is quite efficient.  So, I fixed the script accordingly and verified it runs on Linux Mint / Ubuntu with appropriate packages (like perl and ghostscript) installed.  You can download the script below:

dhw2png PERL script

NB:  You can quite easily modify the script to call pstoedit if you want to convert DHW to .svg, .ai (Illustrator), or another vector format.

Yahoo’s Geocities.com is being converted / taken offline (it will no longer be the Geocities we’ve known since the mid-nineties).

A friend asked me how to save Geocities sites (she has 51 sites!).  Do the following for each site.

Preparing for the Download

First, go into the GeoCities file manager, and rename the index.html files to index2.html.  (Check the box beside index.html and press the “Rename” button at the top.)  This way the server will show the “Index Of” page when you go to the site: http://www.geocities.com/mysite

There should be no Yahoo sidebars, not banners, no pop-ups, nothing to confuse the downloading program.

Performing the Download

Using linux, it’s easy.  First be sure you have the “wget” utility installed.  On Debian (lenny), I just typed:

apt-get install wget

Then, I changed to an empty directory and issued the wget command:

wget --continue --recursive --tries=inf --limit-rate=0.8k --convert-links --html-extension --no-clobber \
-P ./mysite http://geocities.com/mysite

This will be agonizingly slow, but I find the transfer quota (typically~4MB per hour for a free user) can be prohibitive.  Exceeding the hourly transfer limitation causes the script to download the same error page for all subsequent files.  Remove the “–limit-rate=0.8k” part if you pay for sufficient hourly transfer.

Automating the Download

I wrote a script accepting a commandline argument specifying the name of the geocities site.

Invocation for http://www.geocities.com/mysite:

./geodownload.sh mysite

Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
wdir=`pwd`
wget --continue --recursive --tries=inf --limit-rate=0.8k --convert-links --html-extension -P ./$1 http://geocities.com/$1
mv $wdir/$1/geocities.com/$1/index.html $wdir/$1/geocities.com/$1/index.html.bak
mv $wdir/$1/geocities.com/$1/index2.html $wdir/$1/geocities.com/$1/index.html

At last, I have a data plan and can administer machines from my Blackberry.  It’s probably only worthwhile in a pinch, for rebooting, etc., but just the capability is comforting.  As usual, there was a challenge – installing the application.

If you have problems downloading and installing the SSH client midlet, particularly the “907″ error I received, use the OTA (over the air) link below:

http://ota.deltatech.com.mx/

For more information, check out the forums:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/aftermarket-software/152316-custom-build-midpssh-blackberries.html

Oh, and one last thing: Google Mobile Applications are a must.  Just go to google.com on the phone and download the application.  You’ll probably have to install Google Maps separately (I did), but their software facilitates installing each of the offerings.  Google Maps is amazing.  I didn’t receive any GPS satelites inside my house (according to the Blackberry advanced settings), but Google Maps triangulated my position to less than 100 feet, apparently without GPS signal.  While that’ s unlikely, what I appreciate most is that it just works.  I’m amazed; as long as I stay off Twitter, Facebook, etc. this will be a huge improvement!

UPDATE: I started receiving email on my phone, and this was a bad idea.  I couldn’t distinguish between text and email notifications, and the email just started coming at me.  If only Blackberry wasn’t so “push”y.  I tried to turn off email notifications, and preferably, I’d like to do all phone email on-demand rather than automatic delivery.  For that, I figure one can just use the clunky web browser.

iPhone Comparison: Kristin got an iPhone, and there is just no comparison of the user interface, web browsability & rendering, or usability.  There is no question Apple has the music player thing figured out.  The Blackberry on the other hand, just isn’t as convenient, and it’s not because of Apple’s iTunes; I’m just talking about the phone software.  The Blackberry interface does excel, however, at typing.  I found the Pearl’s doubled-up QWERTY keyboard works well and the custom dictionary and predictive text are good.  I’m sure it’s much easier to text while driving or riding a bike, but how would I know anything about that?  I’ve also heard friends who migrated say they preferred the tactile button layout for its navigability.