The Geek in Progress

1. The new Apple TV supports 720p videos at 30fps, now you won’t have to convert you existing 720p to 24 fps.

2. You can stream 1080p videos to the new Apple TV (but it will down-sample them to 720p). With the Old Apple TV, iTunes will not allow us to stream 1080p movies but now iTunes does allow us to stream these to the new Apple TV!

3.The new Apple TV accepts any kind of mp4 720p video thrown at it, while the previous one stuttered even on the low bitrate 720p movies.

4.The new Apple TV runs on iOS (and since can be jail-broken, it is already been jail-broken with GreenPoison and Limera1n); thus, the possibilities are endless! (while the previous Apple TV can be hacked to run Boxee, XBMC and other stuff, but Boxee and other hacked apps were very buggy and slow)

5.The new Apple TV has the ARM4 chip (the same used in the iPad) as compared to the old one’s Pentium M at 1 GHz. Thus, the ATV 2G is much more powerful and smoother than the old one!

6.ATV 2G is smaller than the ATV 1G. Way way smaller!

7.ATV 2G is shockingly cheap than ATV 1G (at 99$)!! Is it because of lack of a HDD?

Well “streamers” will rejoice with the new ATV but “storers” will have to keep their old shiny box of joy.

But my point is that why store, why keep multiple copies of your gigantic media collection and then constantly sync it with your ATV ! Sure you will have to keep your PC or Mac ON while viewing media on the ATV 2G, but its a small price to pay compared to it’s other great features.

Yesterday night. I was sitting in the couch, bored and watching TV. I switched on my “trusty” iPod and just opened up Cydia to find something interesting..

I ended up installing MakeItMine and Infiniboard..

MakeItMine lets you change the word “iPod” or the Carrier Logo on the status bar….It ran smoothly but Infiniboard crashed to Mobile-Substrate Safemode on icon re-arrangement. Since I couldn’t find any conflicting apps then so I just removed Infiniboard and IconSupport (it’s dependency)…

Well today i was just browsing through the SpringBoard and found Categories there. Since i don’t use it anymore and it is the only app, except Winterboard, that modifies the SpringBoard. I removed it (I read on some site of CategoriesSB conflicting with Infiniboard). I reinstalled Infiniboard and Multi-Icon-Mover (allows multiple icons to be moved at one instance on the SpringBoard). And viola! It works smoothly now (though you may find slight lags after heavy application use, this is because of the heavy use of the processor).

Now i have a “kewl” SpringBoard, with only four horizontal pages of apps with a long list of apps vertically!

Let me tell you this.. that  I own an Apple iPodtouch 2G. Its a great device but it’s usability is heavily restricted by it’s developers, Apple. the current Os installed in it is iOS 3.1.2, i have refrained from upgrading to iOS 4(the latest iDevice Os offered by Apple) because then i will have to backup the SSH blobs (SSH files via an ECID number) from my iPod and after the jailbreaking process, most of the cool apps that ran fine on OS 3 will not be fully compatible on the latest OS. Furthermore if jailbreaking is not you “cup of tea” then the latest OS leaves 6.8 GB of space on a 8 GB iPod for our use. The new “multi-tasking” feature of the new iOS will also be not available for use with my iPod, and also no home-screen wallpapers. So i will be barely getting any new features if I plan to upgrade.

Well, i have already jailbroken my iOS 3.1.2 device with Spirit many times. My present customization include:

-Winterboard with the Illumine Theme, Text Glow, Custom slider and Illumine Media Buttons.

-Status Bar tweaks with WiCarrier (shows the present WiFi network with assigned IP) and Battery Control (shows battery percetage)

-iBlueNova (allows BT OBEX profile, which basically allows to iPod to send and receive  and send files (not only from the filesystem but from the Music Player, video Player and Photo Viewer it self)

-Activator (installed with Lockinfo; I later uninstalled LockInfo)

-Stacks (allows the same Stacks functionality like in the Mac OSX Leopard)

-HomeScreen Wallpaper (allows me to change my home-screen background without WinterBoard)

-YourTube  (now this one’s a god send! Well this peice of nifty code adds a download button in the iPod’s Youtube app, with every iPod compatible video{ in h.264 stream contained in MP4 container) it gives two options, i.e. download High Quality or Low Quality video)

-Reflective Dock (adds reflections on the dock)

-FiveIconDock (this one’s self explanatory)

-qtwitter (this is the coolest app to upload text, photo and even #NowPlaying {current song or video  playing}  to FaceBook or Twitter)

And a few other unmentionables!

So today I’m going to search for a new tweak to alter the movement of the SpringBoard (PogoPlank and the Dock app were useless and i am thinking more of a InfiniBoard-type app). Lets see if i find any thing of my use or not….

Hi, So this is what blogging is like….Cool…..

Let Me explain myself, I am 18 years old and computers, arts and astronomy have always been my obsession. Since in my current Level of studies (A Levels), I can only take computers as an extra subject. And so my other two obsessions will have to be kept in a “dormant” stage for now. I still practice Arts and read Astronomy books in my free time but most of the time I will be in front of my Computer, customizing it in every way possible and modifying and customizing any piece of hardware (with software) i can find in my home!

This blog will be about my daily (or almost daily) time spent on the patching and making my devices more cool. This way I’ll be able to tell the world that what i know and you (the reader) will surely learn many things in the progress.