4Hak3rs

Boy, that did not take long!

Using Spirit, I jailbroke my iPad in under 30 seconds.
Now I can do some really magical things.

Now that my iPod Touch has been jailbroken, it’s time to start doing things that I could not do before. One of those things, is to install ‘themes’, but before I can do that, there are some things I need to do first.

Install OpenSSH, I use this application because I want to be able to wirelessly access the file system of the iPod Touch. Using WinSCP on my PC and running OpenSSH as a service on my Ipod Touch, I am able to transfer files and make changes to files on my device.

Installing OpenSSH is quite simple, just use Cydia. From the ‘Home’ screen in Cydia, scroll down to ‘OpenSSH Access How-To‘

You can also do a search using Search icon in the toolbar, enter OpenSSH

Once you have installed it, be sure to also install Mobile Terminal, and use it to change your default password. Thousands of jailbroken devices have been ‘Rick-Rolled‘ because the default password was not changed. The instructions are available in the Cydia application.

From within ‘Cydia’, choose ‘Root Password How-To‘ and follow the instructions.

TakeAway:
Install OpenSSH for wireless access.
Change default password using Mobile Terminal.

There are alot of guides and videos available on how to jailbreak your iPod Touch or IPhone, I don’t really want to get into that here, what I want is to talk about What’s Next.

Before I get into that, let me just say, that at this time, even though firmware 3.1.3 is out, I am using 3.1.2 Maybe a jailbreak for 3.1.3 is out but I’m not using it. So when I went about jailbreaking my 8GB iPod touch, I had already downloaded the 3.1.2 firmware for my device, and when it was required by iTunes, I did a right-click on the ‘Restore’ button, and selected that file instead of letting iTunes install 3.1.3

Once the firmware was installed, it did restore most of my previous apps, but not all, obviously some apps I had previously installed were not part of the backup.

The next important step was to jailbreak it, so I used ‘blackra1n’
That went really well, once the application was on my iPod Touch, I configured the WiFi and ran the install.

Cydia was now installed.

I have hacked the LePhone RSS Theme so that it will display the Lifehacker feed in the proper location.

Give it a try if you are using the Teknologik Theme.

Download Lifehacker4Teknologik.zip

To read the feeds from your iPhone / Ipod Touch, visit this short url http://bit.ly/lifetek then click on the + at the bottom of your screen and choose ‘Add to Home Screen’

I even place the shortcut where it looks really cool.

Found a quick way of installing SqueezeBox, in case you want to add features like Music-On-Hold using it.

rpm -Uvh http://repos.slimdevices.com/yum/squeezecenter/squeezecenter-repo-1-6.noarch.rpm

yum install squeezeboxserver

Those two lines installed 7.5.0-1 for me.
Configure using the web interface. ie http://mypbiafserver:9000

Start using
service squeezeboxserver start

That did not take long.

It was probably already hacked before it came out because of the similarity to previous iPhone/iPod Touch OSes. I guess a few minor touches were made and when the time was right, BAMM. Good news for those that find the applications way to expensive. Now we can make our own.

Today I decided to check the status of the two NSLU2s I have and do a little testing.
The first one is flashed with unslung. I also ran the process ‘unsling’ which copies the OS to an external device, I am using either a USB key or a hard disk. The advantage of using the USB key is that you can use any USB hard disk even one that is formatted fat32 because the OS is on the USB key and not the hard disk, unfortunately,that is could lead to problems because the USB key has a limited number of ‘writes’ so it can wear out and you will wake up one day to find that your NSLU2 does not work any more. Using the hard disk instead of a USB key has the advantage that it does not wear out like a USB key, that you have the other USB port available, but this drive needs to be formatted ext3, so you can’t just plug it into your Windows box and copy files.

An interested note is that you can run the NSLU2 without any USB devices that have gone through the ‘unsling’ process, meaning that the OS is run from the internal memory of the NSLU2. You can still access any USB storage device you connect, but you cannot install any packages to the NSLU2 to add functionality. You need to ‘unsling’ to add optware package which add more features like upnp av, itunes, ccxstream etc…

The second NSLU2 I have, I just flashed with SlugOS, which does allow you to install packages to the internal memory.

Awhile ago, I came across an article on hacking the WD WorldBook. It’s simlar to all the other My Book devices, which are hard disk drives in an enclosure, only this version has an RJ-45 jack that connects the device to your network and allows you to stream content from the device to other devices on your network, like a PC. Pretty Cool.
However, once you start using one of these devices and transfer files using the USB port, you may discover that although you can stream content to your PC, you can’t copy a whole bunch of filetypes using the network connection. I guess WD decided to prevent you from copying videos, etc. Probably to try and prevent piracy, thinking that network access would make it to easy. Duh.

Anyways, the hackers got into this machine and changed things for the better. Now you can copy and stream anything.

Improving on this device, WD decided to create a device that can actually connect to your TV or sound system and play the content. Really Cool! Your media files are on it anyways, so why not connect it directly to your TV. One other major difference is that it is no long a USB enclosure, but just a player, not a bad thing because it does have two usb ports, so you can have your content separate from your device, and change the drive for a bigger one at any time. Another major difference is that the WDTV does not have an RJ-45 jack. So in the end, a pretty much completely different device.

The advantage of the WDTV is that it is a Media Player, and it plays alot of different codecs AND it is HD. Connects directly to your HDTV using HDMI.

The only thing that could make this device better is if it could connect to your network and stream content from another device or make content on the device available to computers on your network. If only… Ahh hackers, got to love ‘em.

Well now there are at least two different custom firmwares out there that promise to do just that.
WDLXTV and EXT3-boot will give you additional features. Try them out and add network support and more.

l8r.

Take a look at this article.
You can now run an application on your PC to manage the Wii DVD games on your external USB drive.

Download it directly from here.

You heard it right. Using only your Wii, you can now backup your Wii DVD games to a USB drive, then using the USB Loader homebrew app, you can scroll through the list and run the game from the USB drive directly.

I tested it, and it worked. The only game that would not run properly was Metroid Prime.

Thanks Waninkok, yet another great release.