In an earlier post, I asked why there weren’t more free and useful sites around like that screen test thing.

Ha! Apparently there are!

A friend of mine, Ryan, recently had to restore his iPhone and was worried about jailbreaking it again and putting in Installer.app and he texted for advice.

Well, gone are the good old days of circuitous and tedious hacking - today, for people like Ryan its just a matter of navigating to a website with your iPhone or your iPod Touch and clicking ok to installing AppSnapp for 1.1.1.

All you need do is go to

http://jailbreakme.com

Yes, it’s that easy, believe it or not.

All the instructions and cautions are there if you’re the fraidycat, but it’s just a matter of agreeing to the jailbreak and you’re on your way to the wide and wonderful and often weird world of third party apps. Coolness.

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, 7:31pm, Oct. 25, 2007: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

For the paranoid among us:

Those of you who’ve bit the bullet and sprung for an iPod Touch (or an iPhone) and are concerned about the screen issue that has come up (faulty rendering of blacks and all) but can’t tell if your new toy is one of the defective ones, or if you’re just worried about stuck or dead pixels like we all are, there is a free online test that you can use to detect any problems. (Would that there were more of these free and useful things around, huh?)

Just pop on over to AppleServedUp, and run the two sets of tests they offer for free.

The first tests for stuck or dead pixels, which the site accomplishes by playing a video file that runs through the gamut of colors full screen so that you can examine for offending dots. You’d be surprised at what you might discover.

The second batch for the Negative Black Problem runs you through a cycle of tests, the first showing you a boxed area with a slightly lighter shade of black over the darker background; if there is no discernible difference, you might have a problem. The second test is the Greyscale Gradient Test that shows you a couple of sets of gradients that might not be visible if you got a lemon. The third one is the Faulty Black Aura test which shows you the cover of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, which messes up if you got a crappy unit.

Try it out.

[Crossposted from Mobile Philippines]

Japan’s Apple Store in Tokyo is in the high-end shopping district called Ginza. Specifically, Block 3, or Ginza 3. The location is a bit intimidating for the budget-conscious among us, since it’s ensconced in a place where across the street is Tiffany’s and Bvlgari, but the prices seem to be roughly the same as in Manila, my home base. Its advantage is that everything is there.

It’s roughly in the middle of the enormous shopping area, and only the Ginza subway line goes directly there (the cab flagdown rate is Y660, so that option was out). You’d have to know which exit to get out of to avoid walking a lot. I was told to find exit A13 which pops out right across the street from the store, in front of the classy Matsuya Department Store.

The Ginza store has the distinction of being the first Apple Store to open outside of the United States, and I was excited to go there. I had broken off rooting for stuff in Akihabara (something I could have happily done for weeks) Friday afternoon to go to Ginza for the Leopard launch, not realizing that being an authentic Apple Store, they’d shut it down for a couple of hours before the 6pm release.

I was there 4:01.

There were some guys at the door, and oblivious me tried barging in only to be stopped by one of them saying in rapid Nippongo that I should line up like everyone else, or something like that. I took a look to one side and saw the forming line and it dawned on me I wouldn’t be able to get in for a couple of hours yet.

After the Apple guy realized I didn’t speak Japanese, he managed to explain that they had just closed in prep for the 6pm launch, and that I should line up. I went to the end of the line, which was nearly a block long already, and waited. The people around me all had white earbuds on, and they were all just calmly looking around. I realized I was among my kind and relaxed. (I did cause a bit of attention when I pulled out an iPhone to listen to music - their phone system requires 3G, so an iPhone was a rare thing over there.)

[Read the rest of this entry »]

5:30pm, Friday, October 26: Hundreds form a four-block line outside the Apple Store in Ginza, Tokyo, braving the rain and cold (the Doodler being one of them), waiting for the doors to open at 6pm for the launching of Mac OS 10.5. One more:

Picture gallery (on the street and in the store), and full first-person account this weekend. (Yeah, I took these pictures - it’s my first time to be part of a real, authentic Apple Store wait-in as opposed to just reading about them and thinking, what idiots these guys are; I would never do that. Famous last words. I was tickled pink, although that may be from the freezing rain. More later.)