Hasta La Gadget!

One of the Kindle’s sweetest features is Whispersync, which lets you put down one device and keep right on reading on another, just from where you left off. This means that you can read at home on the Kindle itself, but when you find yourself in a long queue at the store, you can keep reading on your iPhone. This idea of the “book” existing independent of the device is a rather forward thinking one. If you live in the United States.

Along with the crippled, half-baked international launch of the Kindle, Amazon has still not made the “Kindle for iPhone” application available for its overseas customers. The only place to find it is in the US app store. Since I used my iPod Touch almost exclusively to read books for the past year, this is pretty annoying. Perhaps there is a workaround?

It turns out there is. Thanks to the iTunes Store option to choose “none” as a payment method, you can sign up for a US iTunes account with nothing more than an e-mail address (not the one you normally use), a real address and a cellphone number. Any free applications are then available to download, and best of all, when you hook up your iPhone or iPod Touch the application just syncs.

So does it work? Yes. I launched Kindle for iPhone and input my Amazon login. All my purchased books were there, at exactly the place I had left off on the Kindle itself. And while this is a rather big deal for any foreign Kindle and iPhone owners, this experiment shows that US travelers will have access to Whispersync via their cellphones whilst abroad.

None of my newspapers showed up, and neither did any books or documents I had loaded on there myself, so this is limited to the books bought from the Kindle store. But hey, it’s free. If you know how to get it.

Product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Crippleware Alert! International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside …
• Hands-On With the International Kindle and Its Surprise Web Access …
• Amazon Kills U.S. Kindle, Cuts International Price
• Amazon Dumps Sprint for Kindle 2, Embraces AT&T
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the …

Stacks is a piece of software for the iPhone which adds spring loaded “stacks” of applications to any or all of the four coveted dock positions on your home screen. We first mentioned it back in the summer but now, despite still being in an alpha state, it is available (sort of) and ready to use. If you have a jailbroken iPhone.

There are a few advantages to cracking your iPhone open with a jailbreaking tool. You can install all sorts of applications that would never make through the Apple approval process, you can run those applications in the background (although your battery life may suffer) and you can install things that tweak the user interface quite drastically. Stacks is the latter.

The picture above shows Stacks in action. Once installed, you get four new icons somewhere amongst your applications. Drag one to the dock and you can rename it. For my first one I chose “News”. From there, press and hold any icon, just as if you were about to rearrange the apps like you normally do. Then drag any icon to the stack and it will pop open, just like a folder in the dock of a Mac. Drop the icon in there and you’re done.

To use the stacks, you just touch one and it will pop open, allowing you to touch one of the icons and launch the app. If you have too many icons in there to make a pop-up stack that will fit on the screen, Stacks switches to a window view which shows the icons arranged in a grid, again like the OS X dock. This is automatic, but you can lock it in as a default view in the preferences.

There are a few alpha giveaways: you can’t add icons for web-apps to a stack. I have a shortcut icon to Gmail on my iPod Touch and wanted to put it alongside the Mail application in a stack. It just won’t go. Second, there is little visual feedback. You don’t know if you have dragged the application onto the stack until you have let go and then popped open the stack to check. Third, there seems to be no way to rearrange the icons to choose which appears atop the stack. And lastly, icon badges are not displayed: If having a notification of unread mails is important to you, don’t put Mail in a stack.

To get the application you need to make a donation of over $1 to the developer via PayPal. You’ll also, of course, need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch. And you’ll have to be somewhat confident using the command line, as there is no one-click installer yet.

Otherwise, this is a fantastic add-on. It is sleek and feels as if it is actually part of the iPhone OS when you use it. Even if I use no other unofficial add-ons, this one is staying on my iPod.

Product page [Steven Troughton Smith]

See Also:

• Stacks for iPhone Adds Spring-Loaded Launcher
• Video: iPhone Exposé Hack

Superstar iPhone hacker George Hotz has just released Blacksn0w, an addition to his latest Blackra1n iPhone jailbreaking application. Why would you want it? Because it will take any iPhone or iPod Touch and jailbreak it with one click. It will also unlock any iPhone and allow it to be used on any cell carrier, anywhere in the world. It even restores internet connection tethering for iPhones running the latest 3.1.2 software.

Better still, it does all this in a few seconds flat.

George Hotz, you may remember, became infamous after achieving the first ever iPhone unlock using a soldering iron and some 1337 skills. Now he has styled himself as some kind of angel from a Caravaggio painting (see picture above) but he has also provided the easiest iPhone hack we have yet used. I tried it out on my iPod Touch. Here’s the how-to: Download the software (Mac or Windows). Run it. Wait a few seconds. Let the iPod reboot. You’re done.

GeoHot is asking for donations, but the app is free if you like. I’m going to use it to add enough background-running applications to drain the battery in mere minutes. IPhone users, with the carrier unlock and the tethering support, may find it more useful.

Product page [Blackra1n]

blacksn0w is live [On the iPhone]

See Also:

• Geohot Trades Hacked iPhone for Crazy Expensive Sports Car …
• iPhone Freed From AT&T; Some Soldering Required
• Video: Unlocking the iPhone 3GS
• A Brief History of iPhone Hacking

Halloween means time for costumes and some awesome nerd tricks with the pumpkin.

This hack-o-lantern has got to be one of the best we have seen this year. The lantern has a remote control to change its colors. Channel buttons 0-8 on the remote control help cycle through the colors of the rainbow. Button 9 activates an ‘angry pumpkin’ mode that flashes a red strobe for a few seconds, says Ian Lesnet who has published a how-to on instructables.com.

It isn’t an easy project. The idea uses among other things a circuit that decodes the remote control signals and a color changing LED module and you have to have a fair understanding electronics and programming to get it right.

For the rest of us, there’s always the Youtube video that shows the different color modes of the lantern.

For more great geeked out lanterns, check out the winners of SparkFun Electronics’ competition, which include a self-powered illuminated pumpkin that uses zinc and copper plates to light the LEDs, and a Silly String hack-o-lantern.

See also:
Pumpkin Mods Combine Tech, Orange Squash

Like a too-trusting doggy who keeps running, tail wagging, back to its abusive owner, only to get booted in the muzzle once again, hackintosh-monger Psystar has rolled over and asked Apple for another whack.

This time the lawyer bait is the Rebel EFI, a boot loader which allows the installation of OS X Snow Leopard onto pretty much any commodity Intel PC. The Darwin Universal Boot Loader, or DUBL, allows the system to start up from a Snow Leopard install disc and to boot into the Mac OS when you’ve done installing.

All you need to do is download a small file (7.6 MB) and use it to make a bootable CD. You then start the computer from this disk and wait until it tells you to swap in your Snow Leopard DVD. That’s it.

Or, that’s kinda it. The list of caveats, warnings and workarounds that follows the short instructions shows just why Apple will never bother supporting its OS on third-party hardware: There are just too many unknowns in the various machines to consider them all. Take this example, which is the description of the Psystar Labs Approval program.

To alleviate some the incompatibility issues some devices will experience, Psystar has begun their home certification program. Once authenticated, users will be given the opportunity to send in hardware components that are not working correctly and have our engineers build a profile for the device.

Nice. You might have to send in, say, your wireless card and hope Psystar can get it back to you along with a working driver. Not bad enough? How about this?

If when booting OS X your computer hangs at a screen with the Apple logo and a “no smoking” sign, you may have an issue with a BIOS Setting. To rectify this, follow these procedures.

Uh oh! “These procedures” turn out to be a lot of rummaging in the advanced BIOS settings of the machine. But the most confidence-inspiring part of all is this one, which gets its own FAQ entry entitled “‘Installation failed’ message.”

You may receive this message upon the completion of the OS X installation. Please know that this may not necessarily be the case and that it may have correctly been installed.

With all the trouble involved for the end-user, Psystar is surely giving this away just to needle Apple, right? Wrong. The asking price is a hilarious $90, currently reduced to $50 as an introductory offer. But at least there’s a trial version, right? Again, kinda. The free trial will let you install OS X but will only let you run it for a couple hours at a time, and then with the rather ominous-sounding warning, “limited hardware functionality as compared with the full version.” That means you can’t be sure that all the hardware drivers work on your machine without paying up first. Seriously, why not just run Windows?

The final irony is that the Rebel EFI is activated by an “authentication code,” which means that it will doubtless be all over the internet the minute a hacker gets hold of it. And in this case, “hacker” means every single customer.

Product page [Psystar]

Press release [PR Web]

Photo illustration : Charlie Sorrel