Sigh, happy too soon

Air Video thru Internet started dropping left and right. But then maybe it's just the problem of the office network. So I will probably give this another try after I got iPad and 3G.

Testing Air Video streaming across the Net. So far, nice.

So I set up the Air Video on my Mac Mini at home and ...

• Poked a hole on the firewall for the given port
• Set system not getting into sleep until after 3 hours of idling.

I set up my client and watch an episode of South Park at work. The experience was pretty darn good so far. At least here was a bit lagging but after a while I played flawlessly. I think I will be even happier once I got the iPad with 3G and keep streaming video using it.

Finally the iPod Touch is back to normal ... sort of

Finally my iPod Touch is back to normal, and during the process, I learned something:

- I kept having trouble installing an app "Human Japanese" even though the file size actually pretty small, but yet it keep being stuck at the "verify dependency" stage. After a reboot, things seemed to get better, but NOT that much better. But when I decided to install the other apps (in the Downloads folder) first, and save the HJ at last, I found the installation get pretty fast. I was wonder if the among of files in the Downloads folder (which at first, a LOT) partially caused the problem.

Here's how I reinstall my iPod Touch from scratch

After I restore the iPod Touch, I did the following:

• NEVER recover from the Backup. It does not save your jail-broken apps anyway. Shitty waste of our time.
• Install Installous based on this link.
• Setup Sync rest of the other items
• Install apps

However, there's something (maybe some songs or some setting that seems to upset the iPod Touch, and thus not only the sync takes forever, but songs and podcast did NOT show up on iPod Touch. I had to un-sync Podcast and Music, twisting by enable and disabling playlist to get it working. Very very strange indeed.


By trial and error, I found out that for some reason the jazz music by Julian Lage and ambient muisc "Kulturkantine"really update the iPod Touch when automatically syncing them from a playlist to my iPod. By the way, I am now switch back to trying automatically sync as much content as possible, and see how everything goes.

Keeping on getting the "Updating Library..." screen such a strange new thing to me.

Somehow it seems like the problem is on a playlist called "For iPod Touch" that seems to be causing trouble. Honestly I am still doing trial and error right now.

Found out that there maybe times that the Library takes seemingly FOREVER to update, and I learned that eventually it will come out of darkness and start showing again. So as long as I see "Updating Library ..." instead of a blank screen, it should be fine.

And it's obviously that my 2nd gen iPod won't be able to handle multitasking well since I tried messing with the Touch while copying ipa to the iPod Touch. things get very very slow. So basically Apple really does try it's best to keep the user experience well.

Getting rid of "Other" ... nightmare journey

So after I restoring the iPod Touch with the patched firmware iPod2,1_3.1.3_7E18_Custom_Restore.ipsw, everything worked nicely, but now I have a whole 1.64Gb area of "Other" that I don't seem to be able to reclaim what so ever. It doesn't seem to be some user data, as I couldn't restore back my application information even after I reinstall the app (be it AppStore apps or JailBroken apps). So that 1.64Gb is like totally wasted for no good reason.

So I was trying to see if there's any simple way to reclaim those "Other" area without restoring the patched firmware (and thus roll back everything and require me to resync all the apps all over again), and I couldn't find any article online that gives a better answer than restoring. So I went ahead and did a restore with the patched firmware.

After the restore, I checked and found that there is about 200Mb of "Others" stuff. Still wondering what the heck those "others" items are, and wonder if there's ways to get rid of eve those 200Mb.

And that began my journey of hell.

So I tried the "Erase all content setting" and damn it took SUPER FOREVER. I started it at around 5:50 pm, and by 8:00 pm, I realized that something went very wrong.

By 9:00pm, I realized that this piece of crap clear content shit won't ever come back. it stuck at booting up screen (for case it's kind of a pineapple). Time to go for Extreme measure.

So I follow the procedure from the Apple link, did a full restore on the patched firmware (saw Steve Job's cartoon look), and after almost 1.5 hours, I am back to square one now. There is 257.3 Mb as "Other" on the iPod Touch. But I don't give a damn anymore.

By the way, the firmware update process was very long, so expect hours of time when you plan on doing that. I restoring of the iPod Software take like an hour(!!), and restoring backup take almost more than an hour (which turns out provide almost zero value). Also, syncing all the podcast audio content takes a lot of time too. 2Gb of podcast tool almost half an hour. So I guess iPod touch 2g is using some slow slow flash memory.

Looks like there's other people who were not happy with the iPod firmware restore taking almost forever.

So I finally did it, using PwnageTool 3.1.5 to get my iPod Touch to iPhone OS 3.1.3. Sure the iPhoneOS 4 will be coming soon, and I have to do this all over again, and plus I won't get to use multitasking, but at least I can run all the latest app. Plus, the ability to use the latest managing tools in iTune 9 is nice too.

Let Apple syncs

I found out that the it's better to let sync stuff as much as possible with iPad. I know this may sound obvious, but I am so used to be control freak, and always want to control the experience as much as possible. Anyway it's good so far, and it allows me to continue the experience when I finally got my own iPad.

Sleeping Mac Mini

I figured out that the best way to make should Mac Mini goes to sleep mode and stays in sleep mode is by closing almost all application. Some applications are safe to stay open, like iTune, while others like Firefox should be exited before getting into sleep mode.