actually the whole purpose of this was…
actually the whole purpose of this was…
actually the whole purpose of this was…
actually the whole purpose of this was…
…

you see, I got an iPhone.

In exchange for some work. It’s only a 2G, original, 8gb, but…

The first thing I did of course was jailbreak it. And having a choice in the matter, decided on pwnage tool, mainly for the excellent command line stuff. It took all of a few minutes to work out how to do this, courtesy their unlock wizard (which I think makes a mockery of the whole ‘iPhone is a walled garden stifling the true 8-bit 1980s era of computer hackery and creativity’), and having never done this before, was quite impressed with it finishing, syncing with iTunes immediately and enjoying the pleasure of my usual SIM card shortly after.

And then into the wonderful world of iOS hackery and places I’d never heard of before. Lucky my years of schlepping around the similar fringes in Mac OS have given me some familiarity with this side of town. The biggest realisation was this is not just an iPod with a phone attached, or even a consumer media device; it’s an entire operating system and hardware, or to put it in cruder terms, it’s a computer.

It makes me want to play with the iPad also, because I think in all this – the tacit approval of the jailbreaking and hacking community by Apple, the introduction within the native operating system on a user-accessible of things which Cydia and other repositories have had for years, e.g wi-fi syncing, folders, multitasking – it is a conceptually different approach to computers and interfaces.

Or more succinctly, I can do most of what I do on my laptop now on my iPhone. A distinction between can and enjoy is necessary, and further elaborates on my desire to play with an iPad, as the smallness and slowness of the process is tiring, like going back to dial-up. I can do remote server administration with SSH, VNC, FTP, either using graphic interfaces in a variety of apps, or command line in mobile Terminal. I can pass files around and edit them using the same protocols or BlueTooth, Wi-Fi, even making a mountable USB disk. I can read all the blogs in my RSS feeds, and keep them synched with my laptop, the same for Mail, Address Book, iTunes, Calendar – all so elegantly done I don’t even consider that it is being done. Things is equally smooth

Then there’s the stuff I used to invent cludges for between my laptop and phone for when I’d be out – BVG timetables, maps of Berlin, offline route-finding, other excitement like translation dictionaries, my entire library database so now when I wander into a bookshop I know what I might want to buy, a guide to knots, an interactive star map…

The camera though is terrible. Even my old K750c with its broken camera was better. It’s actually embarrassing and Apple should have done a better job earlier because it truly does suck. SMS is also crappy with the default app – speaking of which, many of these I either replaced or hid, though I’d prefer just to delete the atrocious Stocks app, I mean really whose wanker idea was that?

But this isn’t the post on jailbreaking I kept thinking I’d write. This is more about an idea I had, a moment of “… uuhh… … awesome!!!…” when I thought, “if I do this, then that, and it should work, then I’ll be able to do that!”

So… On my iPhone I installed Veency, the VNC server, along with OpenSSH, because there’s nothing like ssh-ing into anywhere to make a smile, and finished off with ISSH. Then I wondered why things weren’t working.

I could get into my phone from my laptop using JollysFastVNC, but not the reverse. Oh, I forgot to turn on Remote Login and Management in System Preferences. So then over on my iPhone, I SSH’d into my laptop, screensharing all around…

MacBook Pro screenshares into iPhone, screensharing into MacBook Pro, screensharing into iPhone, screensharing into MacBook Pro, screensharing into iPhone, screensharing into… yes, the whole point of all this was that I can do this.

(I could have uploaded the files with AirSharing, then shifted them around my iPhone perhaps with iFile and uploaded from there via FTP with FTP On The Go just to prove it was possible, ah but… Oh and it’s a game of Buzkashi, yes, that’s a calf, ohne Kopf.) (And yes, my carrier is the Beast.)