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I’d been wanting to get myself a Dremel rotary tool for ages, but only started looking into it recently. Immediately, I was overwhelmed by the variety of options thrown at me – do I get the tool by itself and then buy the accessories separately, or do I go for one of the kits? Which option is the cheapest?

Firstly, kit codes appear to be in the format of <Tool series>-<Number of attachments>/<Number of accessories>. As far as I can tell, there are four kits available in South Africa, although I could only find information on Dremel’s website about the 300-1/55, the 4000-1/45 and the 4000-4/65; the fourth kit, which I saw in Builder’s Warehouse, is a 300-2/40 and contains a Dremel 300 bundled with various accessories and a mini-workbench.

To help myself decide what to go for, I went through Dremel’s website and put together a spreadsheet detailing the accessories each kit contains. You can view the spreadsheet online. Note that the total accessories count is less than the number the kit code indicates; this is probably due to inaccuracies on Dremel’s website, as the kit I got included the correct number of accessories.

Hopefully, this spreadsheet will help your decision. In the end, I went for the 300-1/55; the value it gives at its price-point bested the Dremel 4000 kits easily.

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: dremel

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I recently purchased a dock for my iPhone from a guy on Ebay. It’s not an official Apple product, because $5 is a far better price than the $29 Apple wants for a piece of plastic. All-in-all, its a great little product, and it would be perfect but for one thing; every time I plug my iPhone 3G into it, it mutes the sound.

Of course, given that this dock has a Line Out jack on the back, it makes sense that it would disable my iPhone’s built-in speakers. After all, why would you want your iPhone’s tinny sound tarnishing whatever you plug in the back? However, seeing as I’m using it as a bed-side stand, there will never be a speaker system to tarnish. Here’s how to prevent it from muting your iPhone.

Step 1: Open it up. You’ll need a small phillips screwdriver, about 2.5mm in diameter. Just stab it through the rubber layer on the bottom and unscrew.

Step 2: Using a soldering iron, remove the tiny resistor (Pictured to the right) from the marked location on the PCB.

Step 3: Reassemble and enjoy. :)

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone

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Like many jailbreak iPhone users, I prefer to SSH to my iPhone 3G via the USB cable instead of over my wifi network. Since upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.2 and iTunes 9.0.2 (Specifically 9.0.2.25), however, I’ve discovered that the tool I used, iphone_tunnel.exe, no longer works. Instead, every time I try to connect with Putty or WinSCP, the error message iphone_tunnel gives me is:

new connection !
AMDeviceNotificationSubscribe = 0
iPhone attached !
AMDeviceConnect = 0
AMDeviceIsPaired = 1
AMDeviceValidatePairing = 0
AMDeviceStartSession = 0
MobileDevice: _send_message: Could not encode message as XML
AMDeviceStartService = 0
AFCConnectionOpen = 0

My initial search results lead me to downgrade the “Apple Mobile Device Support” component to the version used in iTunes 8.2.1.6, but this did not work. After a lot more searching, I discovered a slightly different tool, itunnel, which I originally discounted as just another name for iphone_tunnel. It is actually a modified version of iphone_tunnel, presumably for iTunes 9 compatibility. It works fine on my iPhone 3G, and I imagine the same would go for the iPhone 3GS.

You can download it from MediaFire (623.55 KiB).

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone, itunes

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My experience with safely buying a US iTunes voucher was entirely positive, but being scammed isn’t the only way things can go wrong for a South African iTunes user.

I recently came across a post discussing the legality of using US iTunes gift cards in South Africa. In short, redeeming the voucher as a South African is a breach of contract, as you are breaking Apple’s terms and conditions on voucher redemption. The article goes on to cover why Apple includes these terms, and why breaking them may also lead you to break content copyrights.

So what does this mean for us? Effectively, Apple are entitled to terminate offending iTunes accounts on the basis that their terms of service were breached, which may well result in the account owners losing access to any purchased content.

Thus far, Apple have not enforced this, and I’m hoping they never do. Currently, it’s in their financial interest to turn a blind eye in favour of increased iTunes voucher sales, but if the content providers push hard enough, Apple’s stance may change and then we all lose out.

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone, itunes

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Using an iPhone and iTunes as a South African user sucks. Every iPhone user I know has registered a US iTunes account to get access to apps that are inexplicably* unavailable in South Africa. The only downside is that, without a US credit card, the only way to buy apps on the AppStore is by using iTunes vouchers/gift cards. Naturally, getting the vouchers in the first place can be a risky endeavour.

I decided to take a chance on http://www.buyfrompowerseller.com/, given their positive eBay feedback profile. The order went in at 18:35 GMT, and 76 minutes later, I had my voucher code; iTunes happily accepted it and my first purchase was entirely without incident. So far I’m entirely happy, although I’ll update this post if anything develops.

* Apparently South African law requires all “games” to be reviewed by the Film & Publications Board. Thus, even if an app is set for global distribution in iTunes, it won’t appear in the South African flavour.

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone, itunes

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As it doesn’t appear to be online elsewhere, here are the checksums for redsn0w 0.8 for Windows:

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone

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Ahh, a new PC, a new install of iTunes, and all the apps I downloaded for my iPhone are nowhere to be seen. iTunes doesn’t offer me a way to redownload all the apps I installed, and what’s more, when I try to sync my iPhone with the new copy of iTunes, I get the following message:

Are you sure you want to sync applications? All existing applications and their data on the iPhone will be replaced with applications from this iTunes library.

I’m not especially inclined to manually redownload all those apps, but nor am I keen on the idea of losing them all. Fortunately, I had not yet nuked the old PC and a quick search revealed that iTunes stores your downloaded apps under My Documents\My Music\iTunes\Mobile Applications. I simply copied all the .IPA files from my old PC over to the new one and then, in iTunes, clicked on File > Add Folder to Library…, selected the folder, and breathed a sigh of relief as the apps reappeared in the Applications library.

Of course, all this could be avoided if Apple provided a way to back up one’s Applications library. iTunes does provide a “Backup” feature that involves burning your library to CD/DVD, but that isn’t quite what I had in mind.

Posted in: Gadgets by Ashley Ross / Tags: iphone, itunes

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