Testing Wordpress version 2.0. Hopefully it works well with my blog.

The creator of the Geek and Poke cartoon series is Oliver Widder.

You got to like it.

SOD grieves with the families who lost loved ones in the tragic and senseless shootings at Fort Hood.  Without devaluing the sacrifices of service men and women who have perished in war zones, these cold blooded murders are especially heinous.  Our prayers today are with the bereaved families and friends of those killed.

We also cannot help but wonder about the motivations of the man at the heart of this carnage.  Was it his religion that caused him to betray his country and his fellow service members or did this psychiatrist suffer a mental breakdown himself?  We hope the Army, and government at large, have the courage to look honestly at this incident and report all the facts to the American people.

How many times have I said that to my Dad or someone else older who is asking me a question that could have easily been answered with a Google search.  Especially when what I was going to have to do to answer the question was Google it.  Well now it turns out that’s not a facetious remark.

A study at UCLA says that searching the internet for answers to questions is an easy way to jump start cognition and brain activity in older adults.  One of the researchers, Teena D. Moody said,”The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.”

Here’s your link to the Fox News Article.

Here’s your link to the story at the UCLA Newsroom if you are following Obama’s lead and boycotting Fox.

With the release of blackra1n, it’s back to jailbreak for me. Download from blackra1n.com. It takes all of 30 seconds to work. I’m tempted to say it’s so easy a caveman could do it, but that would probably infringe someone’s intellectual property.

I’m glad to have adblock and winterboard back. As a side note, this post, including editing the iPhone screenshot, was done completely on the iPhone.

Did you hear the one about a Democrat who gets elected President and 11 days after his inauguration is nominated for a Nobel Prize? Its even better than that because the punch line is that he wins after less than 9 months in office. Truly the Nobel Peace prize has become nothing more than a reward for thinking or speaking in ways the political left approves. Accomplishments or personal sacrifice that promote peace obviously mean nothing.

Don’t believe me? Lets look at the some winners from the last 10 years.

• 2007 – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore – need I say more?
• 2005 – The International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed el Baradei – If anyone or anything can be said to have done little to keep the peace it is the IAEA and Baradei.
• 2003 – Shirin Ebadi – kook who thinks AIDS is a biological weapon
• 2002 – Jimmy Carter – arguably the worst President of the United States until Barack Obama.
• 2001 – The United Nations and Kofi Annan – Mentioning the UN and peace in the same sentence is an oxymoron.

And a few other notables:

• 1994 – Yassar Arafat – Are you kidding me? This man was dedicated to exterminating Jews and wiping out the nation of Isreael.
• 1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev – The ideological heir of Stalin, gets the prize for not blowing up the world and the man and woman who stopped him (Regan and Thatcher) get bupkis.

Along the way there have been a few good picks, Lech Walesca and Mother Teresa come to mind. But by and large, the formula for becoming a Nobel Peace laureate appears to be some combination of:

• Be a communist or at least a Democrat.
• Be a bureaucrat for a giant international agency that sucks up tax dollars (and demands more) but does nothing substantive unless it actually impedes peace.
• Be a mass murderer or at least someone who kowtows to dictators.
• Be opposed to American ideals of individual liberty and opportunity.

For those of you who consider me a tech support resource, I thought I’d post this to give you an insight into my methodology.  You might try it yourself sometime. 

It was just a matter of time, given who I am, that I would be unable to resist the lure to tinker with my iPhone.  This weekend I took the plunge and my phone is now well and truly Jailbroken.

I couldn’t ever find a site that told me, all at one go, what it means to Jailbreak a phone.  The answer is simple in concept (not necessarily in execution).  First there is an exploit, a way to get the iPhone to let you load random software to it.  This exploit is encapsulated in some sort of software, like the one I used Redsn0w.

Then there has to be something to load with the exploit.  So in addition to housing the exploit, Redsn0w takes a stock version of the iPhone restore file and patches the kernel it contains so that it will make the phone behave differently than the original software Apple installs.  Then Redsn0w uses the exploit to load the patched kernel and a program loader, like Cydia or Icy.

These software loaders are no more or less than iPhone versions of Debian’s apt-get.  These connect to various repositories and load the additional software Apple doesn’t want you to load, like software to run programs in the background and ways to pimp your phone’s appearance.

So, as you can see from the screenshot, you can do some interesting things, like put five icons in your dock and have a background picture on your “desktop”.  Here are some of the useful features I have found.

1. Adblock for Mobile Safari – This is shareware software by Cocoamug and by far the most useful aspect of the Jailbreak.  In fact this one aspect probably justifies jailbreaking.  You’ve got limited bandwidth and screen real estate, why give up any of that to ads?
2. Backgrounder – A free app that lets you run any application in the background.  This is helpful with apps like Pandora.  You can set it to play in the background and read with Kindle while the music plays. 
3. Winterboard – A replacement for the iPhone app Springboard which is responsible for displaying the desktop and icons.  This lets you full theme/skin the phone and do other things like the 5 apps in the dock.

I also tried Categories which purports to let you put icons in categories, which it does, but it is a very poorly done app.  Not yet tried are the app that lets you turn an iPhone into a WiFi hot spot, an ssh server, and a file manager.

The question I have is what about these apps is so horrible, especially the three I am actually using, that Apple won’t let them in the App Store?

Downloaded the most recent beta version (3.0.195.4) of Google Chrome today just to take it for a spin.  Its supposed to be the fastest thing ever for viewing web pages, yada, yada yada.  I was able to get Adsweep working with a minor amount of head scratching, and it actually blocks ads.

But it is not as slick as Adblock+, and it does not block ads instantly.  The first time you go to a page during a session, the ads load and then they go away.  Annoying.  I was also sad to note that the developer has abandoned the project for lack of technical support from his users.  Sad to lose the project.

Other than that I was not blown away by Chrome.  It does not “seem” any faster to me than Firefox, and the ad blocking experience is not nearly as good.  For now, I’m still sticking with Firefox.