shiv.me

And now you’ve done it!! Bah! I thought it was so cool that I could plot of heat map of my location for a full year. With all the cribbing around the internets about how the iphone is not secure because it stores data (ie a cache of your location data), Apple has decided to squash this wonderful “easter egg”. 

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
ceases backing up this cache, and
deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Wouldn’t it be cool, if someone actually wrote an app that does the exact same thing? I bet it would sell like crazy! I’d buy it.

A few days ago, I returned the Ipod touch that I had for exactly 11 days, coz Apple chose to charge me $20. Apart from me being a cheap bas***d, I had this queasy feeling in my gut, about apple products. I felt an unexplainable rage towards Apple, Jobs and the fanboys. I am usually a very moderate person, and it really surprised me that I could harbor such crazy extremism and frustration. I could never place a finger on the source, until I read this article on Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood.

He hits the nail on the head with this one:

So let’s be completely clear: when you buy a new Mac, you’re buying a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X software.

and goes on to state something, that threw the spotlight on that source that I was trying to find within myself

Maybe I’m a hypocrite. Maybe the issue cuts philosophically deeper than mere dongles. Maybe it’s not only about the freedom to run your operating system on whatever hardware you wish, but also the freedom to run whatever software you want for whatever purpose you need, in perpetuity. That’s Freedom Zero:

There are two kinds of us: those who put conviction above convenience, and those who don’t. There is nothing right or wrong about being on either of the sides. All that matters is that, one needs to understand, which “club” one belongs to. Through all this, I realized one thing – I will never be content with a Mac, until I convince myself to give up expecting my computer to do everything I want it to do. Do I want to do that? I have no idea. Do I want an ipod touch that allows me to run linux on it? I sure as hell do.

I hope, for the sake of computing, that Apple realizes that it has a platform in the Ipod Touch, get off its proud ass,  and open-up the touch to third party. However, with Apple, I just know that it will never happen. Why? It takes genius to build something like the iPhone or the iPod and a vision to make that into a platform.

My ipod touch was upgraded to 1.1.3, after connecting to my computer, and I wanted to downgrade to 1.1.1, so I could jailbreak it and put any app I want on it.

ipodtouchmaster found a way to downgrade it using iPhuc.

This website, now supports a special interface for viewing using  ipod touch/iphone. I’m using the iWPhone plugin at contentrobot.com