This is pretty amusing, and also shows that – quite frankly – Lloyd’s hasn’t the barest clue how electronic banking should work.

A number of you have wondered if you can use the same instructions that are on the “Unlock Your iPhone” page to jailbreak their iPod Touches.

Um, no.

Sadly, the firmware isn’t the same, so trying to restore that custom iPhone OS to your Touch will fail, and miserably. But, in the spirit of going “above and beyond” I have coded up a jailbroken firmware package for the iPod Touch, and you can use the same super-easy instructions to get your Touch wrangled and into line. Download this file by either control-clicking (Apple users) or right-clicking (Windows users) on this link:

iPod1,1_2.0.1_5B108_GeekboyDotCa_Restore.ipsw

and save the file in a convenient spot. Then just follow steps 2 through 6 on this page here, making sure you use the file you downloaded above for your restore. Your iPod will be fully up to 2.0 snuff, but still be packing Installer and Cydia,

Don’t say I never did anything for ya.

So here is a dude who is not a self-centred prick (Carl Lewis, come on down!) and instead is the kind of guy that everyone can get behind and cheer for, and then the IOC does something inane like this. Take a pill, Rogge, you miserable son of a bitch.

The massive overload of television advertising time allocated to Bell’s new logo and branding has managed to drive home three very interesting points;

1: Two weeks later, the logo and commercials still suck, but now in a much more annoying way. They have gone from “what the fuck is that?” to “fuck, not this shit again” in less than a fortnight.

2: This is a complete turnaround for Bell, who hit a huge home run with their last branding effort featuring the talking beavers, Gordon and Frank. People stopped skipping ahead on their PVR and went back to watch those ads. They went from having a couple of beloved national icons to having blue and white and forgettable dreck.

3: The people at Bell would do well to sit down and watch Nike’s latest effort. This is branding done to perfection – you understand the company, you understand what they want to do, and you want to be a part of it.

I sat down and worked at it, but as hard as I try I just can’t think of anyone who would want to be a part of an ugly blue logo.

A quick note about the newly-offered iPhone update from Apple: If you have unlocked your phone using this method, you can take this upgrade with no problems or issues. Your phone will continue to operate free from corporate shackles.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away …

Er, wait. Wrong post.

Ahem. Some time ago I mentioned that reruns of the “original” Josie And The Pussycats were one of the touchstones of my childhood. Oddly enough, despite my deep and abiding love for all things Pussycat, I never really realized at the time just how cool the music actually was. While their corporate cousins The Archies were saddled with more-or-less vapid bubblegum pop (thank you, Andy Kim) the Pussycats were hitched up to some surprisingly mature R&B, a sound that was a tasty mix of Muscle Shoals vocal stylings and classic Motown sound structure.

Sadly, the chances of finding any of these recordings now are pretty much zero. You would think that someone would preserve or offer them somewhere, if only just for the novelty value of Cheryl Ladd as Melody (consider that your useless fact of the day, right there), but this is not the case. These songs have become the audio equivalent of abandonware, with copyrights held by some unknown party and the songs themselves shut off from the light – and the ears – of day.

And so, with a bit of a rebellious spirit and probably some fairly dicey legal standing I am going to do something that I pretty much never ever do here – host and offer a copyrighted work for your listening and downloading pleasure. Every Beat Of My Heart was the Pussycats’ first single, and remains my favourite song. Sorry about the sound quality, but sometimes you have to take whatever crumbs you can get.

And if anyone can come up with a copy of Stop, Look, and Listen, I’ll happily host that too. There are some times when you just have to stand up and stick it to The Man.

After the previous discussion about using PCF files and the contents therein to set up your Cisco VPN on the iPhone, someone posted a comment asking “how you gonna access your ms share?”

Talk about missing the point – the idea is that you can work within your network as if you were right there: Manage servers, manage your network, hit workstations and other data points regardless of where you are. This is know in the IT biz as “getting shit done”. Whether or not you can hit some file share somewhere is immaterial, since that is not the definition of “getting shit done”. We are talking about doing work here, not getting some lame spreadsheet file off of some ghetto file server.

However, if you are in a situation where your company is so lo-tech and backwards that they do depend of Windows-based servers for mission critical data, then you could just SSH into the thing from your phone like you would any other unix-fired machine. That is, of course, provided that terms like “unix” and “SSH” are not beyond you, which is a distinct possibility if you are in fact a Windows user.

Just saying.

I have been a fan of “Last FM” for some time now. Unlike most “social networking” offerings, it constrains the data to a narrow enough niche to be useful. I don’t care if you are pooping or not, but I might actually be interested in your current musical choices if history shows that we share a similar taste palette in this particular area.

In the past, the only gap in the Last FM experience was that it culled your musical history from iTunes only, and didn’t know what the hell you were listening to on your iPod when you were not actually tethered to your desk. This has been solved with the shiny new iPhone (and iPod Touch, obviously) version of the Last FM client. It does all of the reporting functions of the regular Last FM client, but adds the ability to stream back to your phone song choices that come from the collective consciousness based on your listening history. If you get tired of your own library, you can ask Last FM to shoot you some aural goodness and you are pretty much guaranteed to like it.

In a nice touch, they have also given you the ability to disable your song history feeds until you are actually connected via WiFi – in that case, anything you do while you are out and about on Edge (or not connected at all) is cached and then updated when you actually do get into range of some sort of networking that will not result in Ted Rogers raping your wallet. Again.

This one gets another top recommendation. Go get it, and have fun.

It is probably worth pointing out that – if nothing else – Bell has been consistent in thier general lameness here. Much like their web site, the new television ads look like someone’s semi-professional attempt to “look like Apple”. That wouldn’t be any sort of ultimate sin, except that instead of highlighting or featuring their products the ads are built around their new logo … a logo which is, by anyone’s most forgiving definition, pretty fucking lame.

The Twitter maniacs remain out in full force, convinced deep in their heart of hearts that Twitter is the new email, web, and coffee all rolled up into one.

Whatever.

My complete and utter lukewarm feelings about Twitter have been discussed in this space numerous times in the past. However, hope springs eternal and once in a while I go back to it, wondering if I might find that spark that seems to have eluded me so far. With that in mind I grabbed Twinkle, a free Twitter client for the iPhone that includes some rather dubious enhancements. It does all of the regular Twitter stuff, but also adds geolocation and photo tagging. The first feature means that not only can your friends find out what you are doing, but so can random mopes in your neighbourhood. I am not sure how that is any sort of improvement.

As for the second feature, well, the less said the better. Certainly it give a frightening new twist to dismal scenarios like the one described here.

On the plus side, free really does mean free here – I have seen a lot of Twitter packages that are “ad supported” and the like, usually in a fairly intrusive way. There are no such caveats here, but that said .. I’ll pass. But if you are a Twitterhead, well, go crazy.

4: The percentage of university students graduating in the United States that have Engineering degrees.

Even at this late date, when the pipeline of “unofficial” applications available for the iPhone has dried up to literally nothing, there are still people who are refusing to upgrade to version 2.x of the iPhone firmware just because they will lose access to that once-rich wellspring of code. That would be all well and fine if those applications were uniformly good, or even uniformly average. The sad fact, however, is that the vast majority of the stuff that was available via “Installer” had one – and only one- redeeming quality: They were free. Beyond that, for every application that was even remotely useful, there were a heaping double handful of apps that were stupid, broken, and often downright dangerous.

However, free seems to mean the world to some people, and in that spirit I hereby present a week’s worth of free applications that are available legally through the iTunes store for those people who do upgrade to 2.x and wonder where they can go from there.

Today’s entry is quite possibly the most useful thing you can add to the built-in VNC functionality of the iPhone’s networking package. It’s Mocha’s VNC Lite package, and it is extremely sweet. It gives you pretty much all of the functionality of any desktop VNC client, and seems to run a damn sight faster than a lot of them. It works exactly as you would expect, and has a very clever method for seamlessly switching back an forth from “mouse control” to “panning the screen”.

The only thing you might need that is not included here is a way to fire off a Control-Alt-Delete. In that case, you can upgrade to the “full” version for $5.99 … but until you actually need that ability, there is no real point in spending the money. Get the excellent free version, and if you ever do run up against a need for that key combination, grab the upgrade on the fly.

Highest rating.

It is not any sort of great secret that I am – and will always be – a massive Go-Gos fan. By both extension and practical application I am also a huge – nay, massively huge – fan of Kathy Valentine, mostly because I learned to play bass (some might say that this is a process which never really came to any sort of fruition) by listening to her play on Beauty and the Beat, Vacation, and (especially) Talk Show.

What is not usually public knowledge is that I have maintained my rabid fandom for the delightful Ms. Valentine, through her annoyingly unappreciated work with both The Dephines and The BlueBonnets, and into her current – and long-overdue – phase as a bona fide solo artist. And while most people know the Go-Gos as purveyors of a blend of pop-tinged old-school L.A. new wave, they might be startled to find that the tall and kicky redhead on bass has a deft touch with roots rock, working some basic lyrical themes into a very tasty mix of stripped-down three-chord goodness and a good old fashioned flirty-girl west Texas growl. Think Josie Cotton meets Lucinda Williams and you get some idea of where this is headed.

The result is Light Years, a collection that is honest and vibrant and is the kind of stuff that was hinted at in The Textones (you might have to look that one up) … it is gratifying to see it resurface in this latest project. It’s available on iTunes and – as is right and proper – it’s DRM free.

Ten bucks, twelve songs, two thumbs up.

30: The percentage of university students graduating in India and China that have Engineering degrees.

With very little fanfare, the folks at Bell Canada today launched a complete re-branding of themselves – new logo, new web presence, new everything. They apparently spent months on this, burning the midnight oil and driving their staff with whips and hot pokers to get it done.

What a waste of time. Not to mention midnight oil.

You could probably sit for most of the day and dissect what a creative and functional disaster this whole thing actually is. But most of us don’t have all day for these sorts of things, so let’s boil it down to the three or four most vexing things.

The Logo: Bell’s old “Orbiting Head Of Doom” logo wasn’t the best thing out there, but it was worlds and solar systems better than this. The best thing that you can say about the new logo is “forgettable”. It is kind of like the guy who plays right-wing on the fourth line of the Atlanta Thrashers – a complete non-entity, someone so faceless that even when he gets in the game you don’t notice that he is there. It’s just … nothing.

Web Design: I struggled for a couple of hours to come up with a way to categorize and describe the creative disaster they have going on with the new website. Luckily, I was released from my torment by my friend Amanda who summed it up perfectly: “It looks like they hired a 14-year old with no design skills and told them to make something that ‘looks like Apple’.”

Web Functionality: Someone should tell the folks at Bell Canada that there is this amazing new technology called the “cellular phone” and that some of these newfangled devices might actually have web browsers and that any company that wants to reach the best possible audience should maybe make their web presence work with the average mobile browser. Apparently this leap of logic eluded these guys, because they have a huge chunk of Flash making up the bulk of the content on the landing page. This means that the average mope hitting this site from a smartphone gets … nada. A nice big blank in the middle of the page, a grunt of disgust, and no reason to ever bother coming back. Rule Of Thumb, losers: Never ever put flash on your landing page unless you trap for mobile browsers. Of course, trapping for mobile browsers is also something that seems to be beyond the skills of these morons.

The worst part of the whole exercise is that Bell Canada once had one of the best logotypes in the world – the 1960s and 70s branding was awesome, with a big solid presence that said “here we are, you can count on us”. Instead of drawing on that history they have instead worked out something that vacillates between wishy-washy and totally useless, with a nice shiny veneer of “blah”.

Way to go.

If you have ever moved, purchased new furniture, or just found yourself tired of the way things are arranged in your home you know the whole “standing around with your hands on your hips staring at the space and trying to visualize how it would look if the couch was over here” routine. Sometimes you get industrious and haul out the graph paper and cardboard, or if you are more of a geek you bust out InDesign or Illustrator and draw some boxes, but it never really gives you the space-filling feedback you need.

If this is you, and you have been wanting to find a better way, then take a peek at Sweet Home 3D. It’s a platform independent java-driven application that lets you sketch out the walls and shit in your room, and then drop in chunks of furniture and the like so you can see the resulting space in a 3D rendering. This, quite frankly, is the bomb. Big ups to Ginger Snaps for unearthing this one and sending it along.

The doughnut wars (and indeed, the coffee wars) in Canada are long over. Tim Hortons is the undisputed king, looming over the nation’s landscape like some sort of (we hope) benevolent hydra, stretching it’s tentacles into every corner of the Great White North, and indeed into a number of bordering states. The “Timbit Nation” is slowly but surely becoming the “Timbit Continent”, with one company winning in the same sort of way that the Harlem Globetrotters win – decisively, and to the great delight of the majority of the paying customers.

That said, Tim’s is far from a monopoly, and there are other outfits that fight for the “Washington Generals” scraps (yes, I know, that was a fairly lame attempt to maintain the metaphor) in the realm of the “coffee also-rans”. One company that has always managed to hang in through thick and thin (and I think that there is a lot of thin) is Country Style. I have always liked them – they have far better coffee than Tim’s (not saying a lot there, that is akin to saying someone is less short than Gary Coleman, or perhaps less two-faced than Hillary Clinton) and they have always competed in this sector with some outright fervor, bringing lots of good ideas to the table in an effort to stem the tide of overall Tim-ness.

One of those good ideas is really good sandwiches. I mean, we are talking night and day to the sad little “meat on a bun” things that Horton’s is selling.

Another of those good ideas (and the point of this whole post) is free WiFi in a lot of their stores. You sign up once, for free, and off you go. None of this Starbucks or Second Cup “give Rogers more of your fucking money because it isn’t like they have enough” bullshit, it’s free, no catches, enjoy your coffee and maybe your nice sandwich and surf your head off.

So yeah, I like Country Style a lot.

I won’t bore you with prattling on about how awesome Mario Kart Wii is … suffice to say that is is awesome, and repeatedly so. It is pretty much the perfect pick-up-and-play game, the perfect party game, and the perfect game for hardcore game geeks. Again, awesome.

Just buy the damn thing.

However, what I will prattle on about is my Mario Kart license number. You wanna add me to your roster? Go for it – the digits are 4124-5420-0252.

Game on!

24.5: The percentage of bottled water purchased in 2007 by consumers in the United States that was “reprocessed” water from standard municipal water supplies.

For those that asked … both the iPhone firmware and the iTunes have seen minor updates over the weekend. The iTunes update is pretty trivial in scope, but the iPhone update is plenty awesome – it fixes stability problems with the WiFi connections, give speed boosts across the board, and takes care of any other pesky little issues that you may have. However, the update isn’t for everyone, so here is the low-down as to what you should and shouldn’t be upgrading:

If you are using an unlocked or jailbroken first-gen iPhone that is currently running version 2.0, you may upgrade to version 2.0.1 if you so desire. Remember, you have to have you phone unlocked at version 2.0 first (click on the “UNLOCK YOUR IPHONE” link in the “PAGES” box in the menu at the left for full details) and then you can upgrade to 2.0.1. Your up[graded phone will still be unlocked and fully useable. NOTE: You will lose the “jailbreak” status, which means that Cydia will not work and in fact it and all of the apps you load through it will be gone from your phone – but since there is little or nothing in that software chain, there is no great loss there. If for some reason you do need Cydia or any of the applications installed through it, do not upgrade.

If you have a 3G iPhone, you might want to wait on the upgrade if you plan on unlocking in the near future. If you aren’t planning on unlocking then by all means take the upgrade – there are some performance boosts that you will enjoy.

And all users of iTunes can happily upgrade to 7.71 regardless of their current iPhone ownership status. No biggie.

All clear? Good. Now, once you have decided to upgrade, be sure you press the “Upgrade” button in iTunes and not the “Restore” button. If you do a Restore from Apple’s servers, you will be pooched and have to do the entire unlocking process again. Remember: Upgrade = good, Restore = bad.

For all of you looking to upgrade your first-generation iPhone to an unlocked version of the 2.0 firmware, I have updated the “Unlock Your iPhone” page with latest instructions and firmware file. Feel free to pass the link around to anyone you know who might need the info to keep their phone up-to-date and free from provider tethering:

http://geekboy.ca/?page_id=1067

Remember, this only upgrades and unlocks first-generation phones to the 2.0 firmware. For now, the new 3G iPhones are still locked, but there should be some news on that front later this week. Stay tuned.