Blue-tooth Speaker Stutters ... and solution

I used my iPod Touch (2nd Generation) with iOS 3.1.3 to play Tech News Today (from Twit network) throught a Sony Errison bluetooth speaker.  It worked OK but I found a lot of stuttering as time goes time.  So I moved my iPod Touch closer to the speaker speaker, and the stuttering went away.

Loading and playing video taken from digital camera to iPad

I thought loading videos take I've taken on my digital camera Canon Powershot SD880IS was just a piece of cake.  It turns out that it was slightly more challenging than I expected.

First of all I DO NOT want to sync the videos using iTune video sync.  So I tried using VLC Player for iPad, and found that although it played most of the videos, some of them has serious stutter effect and made them unwatchable.  And then I tried playing them on OPlayer, and maybe it's because I turned off the native Quicktime playback flag, so these .mov files were not played neither.

Just when I thought I ran out of solution, I came across BUZZ Player.  I tried it by copying my .mov files into the app folder through iTune, and found that my videos were played flawlessly.

So there you go.  BuzzPlayer allows you to play videos taken from digital camera.  Happy ending.

What to do after roll back to 3.1.3

Now that I am back to 3.1.3, I need to install apps that I use daily, and also configure it back to what I like.  Here's my steps:

- Go to Cydia, update all.
- Follow the instruction here to add back Installous.  Make sure you turn iTune Sync OFF!
- In Cydia, install AppBackUp


Restoring backup previous backup by AppBackUp is kind of tricky:

- First you need to install all the related apps
- Then make sure all these backup are done backup once
- Copy over the files under .../Perferences/AppBackUp/tarballs
- Go to AppBackUp again and do restall on all these apps

The backups should be successfully restored by now.

Roll back iPod Touch 2g from 4.0 to 3.1.3

I upgraded to OS of my iPod Touch 2nd Generation to 4.0 months ago. and since then my life was in hell as the 4.0 was running in very slow mode every once in a while and I have to keep waiting from time to time until the device become responsive again.  Finally, I am ultra feed up, and decided to go back to iOS 3.1.3 for good (and probably never ever upgrade that device again).

Apple makes it so hard to DOWNGRADE a device.  If you just download the firmware from the popular firmware site, and then tries to install the 3.1.3 firmware by Shift click on [Restore], you will eventually hit the error 3197.  On the top of that, some people claimed that the 3.1.3 on felixbruns is corrupted. Maybe that's why I got the error 3xxx even though I following the instruction by hacking the host file.

Finally, I found the ultimate solution: just go to Sinful phone site, download the Custom Firmware of 3.1.3 specifically for iPod Touch 2G, and bam, problem solved.  3.1.3 completely updated without any error.

I tried the device and found it much more responsive than it used to be.

Some Education Apps that I fouind useful

MathBoard:  doing math using chalkboard
Degas Ballet: simple puzzle game, but with Degas ballet photos

ABC Writing - Learn Phonics, free app
Phonics Free - Learn Phonics, free app
MyUiphonics - Simple phonics app, not so good UI .. better than none.

Apps for kids

Now that I've seen how kids enjoying using iPad, I have ultra strong incentive to write some free apps to let kids learn on iPad.  But suddenly I also aware that there needs to be some sort of parental control on the device so that parents can let kids playing with iPad along without worrying about them getting into trouble, like went off to some crazy web site, purchase apps without parent approval.

So parents, read these and see if you find iPad a safe enough education tool for your kids:
http://knol.google.com/k/suren-ramasubbu/how-to-setup-parental-controls-on-ipad/2hrtmvjs09ng1/5#