Cody Taylor

Soon your computer and electronic gadgets could be much smaller, faster, cheaper, more reliable and even greener thanks to a new form of computer memory technology called racetrack.

“To me, this proposed acquisition totally redefines the industry,” wrote Jonathan Schwartz this morning to Sun’s employees in a company-wide email announcing the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Now Even The New York Times Is Entering The URL Shortening Arena … Kinda

644bd346996 writes “Newsweek has an article about the latest weapons in the US military’s arsenal. The iPod Touch and the iPhone are being adapted as general purpose handhelds for soldiers in the field. ‘Apple gadgets are proving to be surprisingly versatile. Software developers and the US Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a “ballistics calculator” called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight’s Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Karim Y. writes “The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create what will effectively be Europe’s largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! ‘The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome’s Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I got an error tonight that read “The iphone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found.”
Of course, having had almost all my gadgets die on me many times before I jumped to the though of just reinstalling the original firmware for my iphone 3G. But I did some research first on the sync error and why it can’t find the required disk.

My initial assumption was that the “required disk” was the iphone drive itself and I’m very glad that I was wrong.
This sync error was happening on my iphone due to trying to sync the iphone with a ringtone that was on a network drive that I recently reformatted and reorganized. Disabling the files that were on the network drive in itunes completely solved my problem. So if you ever read “The iphone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found.” Make sure that all the files that you are trying to sync are actually accessible.

It has become really easy lately to change your boot logo on the iphone. Before If you wanted to get rid of that silly apple or odd pineapple then you would have to recompile your firmware and use quickpwn to reinstall. That is because, on the iphone and I would imagine ipod touch also, this image is stored in the boot loader. So it’s not as easy as just using scp to upload a new image to a certain directory.

Luckily an app has been released that allows you to replace the boot image on the iphone with any image you like. The iphone and ipod touch seem to like png images so I would recommend exporting your image as one.

The screen on the iphone is 320 by 480 pixels and your image can use every pixel. The iphone will not play animations during boot yet though.

So how to do it. As long as your phone is jailbroken and you have cydia installed on your iphone or ipod touch then you can just load up cydia and touch the sections button at the bottom.
After the list shows up scroll down to find the LogoMe entry. Touch it and then install it.

Once the application has been installed on your iphone or ipod touch then launch it from the springboard. You will be given the option of adding an image for the boot logo from either the web by providing a url or from the pictures that you have locally on your iphone. I used the web option and provided www.codytaylor.org/iphone/grumpy_ninja_iphone.png
Which looks like this:

ninja boot logo for iphone

Check the preview to make sure it looks good before you set it as the default boot logo for your iphone or ipod touch. After you’re satisfied that it looks good then hit the install button and wait. It took a bit for it to flash my iphone with the new image and hopefully it won’t take much longer on the ipod touch.
After the install process finishes then reboot and check it out.

I also put this one together:

ninja iphone boot logo