I’ve written before about how to jailbreak your iPhone in 15 minutes, under 10 minutes and even 60 seconds, but every time, a computer was needed to to the work. While I still suggest backing up your iPhone, which will need a computer, jailbreaking it can now be done right from the iPhone’s Mobile Safari web browser.
Jailbreaking your iPhone on IOS4 is easier than ever now. Thanks to some hard work by @comex, I just went to jailbreakme.com on my iphone and tapped the slider. It did all the work, and a minute later, I had Cydia up and running. That’s it.
Yesterday, I posted about how to jailbreak your iPhone running firmware 3.1.3 in 60 seconds. After jailbreaking, I tried playing with ScreenSplitr and saw other apps that let you see your iPhone screen on your computer. The problem is that most require you to be tethered to a computer or have both your iPhone and the computer on a wifi network. I found something much easier for creating videos of your iPhone screen.
After jailbreaking, I installed Backgrounder on my iPhone. It lets you run things in the background, which the iPhone still doesn’t do (until 4.0). What I found was that some video recording programs will still record in the background and others will not. Of those that will, a couple will record everything displayed on your screen. Below is a video I made showing regular video, then my screen, then back to regular video. The whole thing was recorded using a iVideoRecorder ($0.99 in the app store) and Backgrounder. It was not edited at all and was uploaded to YouTube right from the phone.
As you can see, it was pretty simple to share my iPhone screen activity with you without the need for a computer. This is great if you want to, for example, show people how to take and edit iPhone photos on the beach or how well a navigation program works with a live demonstration. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
The problem with a stock iPhone is that it (currently) lacks things like app folder support for apps, carrier unlocking, and some apps that Apple just won’t approve for one reason or another. This is why we jailbreak. It provides more freedom over your device, allowing you to install whatever you want, change the look, etc. It’s just a lot more fun, but until now, you couldn’t jailbreak the iPad or an iPhone running the 3.1.3 firmware. Welcome to Spirit. (note, this will not carrier-unlock your device)
How to Jailbreak
This is by far the easiest jailbreak I’ve done on my iPhone. Run a backup with iTunes before jailbreaking! You simply download Spirit for the PC or Mac, unzip, plug in your iPhone or iPad and run Spirit. You’ll see a small window with a button that reads, simply, “Jailbreak”. Click it and wait a few seconds. When done, it will reboot your device and you’re jailbroken. Here’s a short video showing the process on an iPad:
If you encounter any problems or want more detail, check out this post.
Data loss is no fun. I know this first hand. As what some might call a power user, I go through hard drives and other digital media pretty quickly and I’ve had my fair share of them just quit on me with no warning. Of course, the first line of defense is to back up your important files regularly, but what if you didn’t do that or you have new files since the last backup? In those cases, you can send your drive out to a professional to recover your files, but you can also try to do it at home.
Recover Lost Files At Home
It seems like every year, there’s newer, cheaper, easier data recovery software on the market. Just last year, I paid about $70 for a program that I’ve sworn by since the first time I used it and this week, I was given a copy of MediaRECOVER Pro. It’s cheaper at only $49.95, is really simple to use, and pretty fast, at least compared to the program I was using before. To compare, I ran both on a 2GB Flip video camera. MediaRECOVER Pro took only 8 minutes to scan compared to 20 with the other software. (My test was with an advanced scan, while a normal scan was significantly faster) My other software also takes a minute or so to load before you can do anything, but MediaRECOVER Pro loaded right away. Both did equally well at recovering old deleted files. The install was pretty simple, too. I clicked “next” a few times and it was ready to go.
The software also comes in a cheaper version, called simply MediaRECOVER for only $29.95 The big difference between the two is that the Pro version includes the optical storage recovery and is only available for Windows currently. In both versions you can also see previews of your files in image form (when possible, ASCII, and HEX).
How To Undelete Files
When you run the software, the first thing you see is the main menu. From here, you can choose to perform a regular or advanced scan, perform a scan on optical storage like a CD or DVD, use Tools, or view the Help.
Most of us just want to dive in and get our files back. You can do this with the normal scan if you’ve just accidentally deleted files, but in other cases, you may need to do a advanced scan, which will scan sector-by-sector for your lost files. Initiating a scan either way is pretty straight forward. You select the drive you want to scan and can narrow it down to a partition. Then click the scan button and wait. The amount of time the scan takes can depend on the size of the drive and how many files it had on it.
Once scanning has completed, you just select the files you want to recover and click the save button to save them and you can get right to the folder they’re in with the browse button. In my test, I ended up with a video from a wedding that I shot over a year ago, which was a fun little surprise.
Professional Data Recovery Services
While FreshCrop, the company that makes MediaRECOVER, tries to “teach a man to fish”, you might say, not everyone is going to be able to just install and recover. There is the rare case in which recovery doesn’t work or you just don’t want to do it on your own. For those times, FreshCrop provides data recovery services. You package up your drive or flash card and send it out and they’ll do their magic on it. Looking at the prices, they’re a lot more wallet-friendly than all the services I’ve seen in the past.
Delete Files For Good
Sometimes you have the opposite problem. You have files on a drive or portable storage that you need removed permanently. After all, with programs like MediaRECOVER, you need to be sure sensitive data is unrecoverable by others. I hate to break it to you, but just emptying the recycle bin isn’t going to cut it. For this reason, FreshCrop included some extra tools.
In the Tools section, you can wipe the media of all files, format it for re-use, and even add Secure Delete, which will let you wipe files from Internet Explorer. These tools are a handy addition to this package.
Conclusions
Admittedly, I haven’t used many data recovery software packages, but I haven’t had to, either. What I had worked well, and this is not only better, but it’s cheaper, too. For $50, the Pro version (which I would buy) pays for itself the first time you recover your vacation photos or the video of baby’s first steps. Easily worth the money, it works very smoothly. Although you may not need it right now, it’s worth bookmarking for when you do. Personally, I keep a copy of my recovery software on a thumb drive with me just in case.
Like many people, I use videos in some of my posts and those videos are almost always on YouTube. For me, I use the video to compliment the post and help show things that just can’t be shown in photos or described in text. But I also want those videos to be discovered independent of the blog post and bring people to my site. I’m sure almost everyone posting videos on YouTube would love their video to go viral, but that’s no easy task. Recently, I was asked to review some software to help with this task.
I was given a link a website about how to get views on youtube, where I could get YouTube Jump Start, software that promises to get you tons of “quality views” to your YouTube video without doing anything that could put your YouTube account at risk of deletion. Here I am a few weeks later, and I have some real numbers from a real video I submitted (mostly) just to test this out.
About YouTube Jump Start
As mentioned above, it’s designed to boost your YouTube video views, but how does it work and how much is it? The details about exactly how these views make their way to your video aren’t really clear, but the sales page promises “no bots” and “no proxies”, so we’re left to assume these views are all real people seeing your video. Today, I confirmed that these are, in fact, “real people”.
The program includes a couple different packages, depending on how many videos you want to promote, from $70 and $15/month (4 videos a day) to $100 one-time for 25 videos ($4/video). The upside is that this is for 200+ views per video, per day, “forever”.
When you fire up the program, you just pop in a video URL and it submits. It was a lot easier than I ever anticipated. It might have been a little too simple for my liking, actually, but as long as it does what I want it to, that’s fine.
Tons Of New YouTube Views
I’ve been on the web a long time and I’ve seen a lot of programs, scripts, and sites that offer to generate non-organic traffic for you. Organic traffic is the stuff that just happens when you have good content and people feel compelled to tell other people about it. This traffic is the stuff you have to help yourself get. There’s no shame in going after more traffic. In fact, you SHOULD be doing this if you’re serious about people seeing your content. In any case, I’ve seen a lot of promises to deliver traffic and a lot that have failed to deliver. This was not the case here.
For the first week (maybe a little less), I let my video ride on organic traffic and a couple tweets I sent out and it did pretty well on its own. As the initial views slowed down, I decided to kick in the Jump Start program, represented largely by the brown in the graph above. As you can see, it started delivering right away. Not too bad. It actually shows a couple points where it almost doubled my organic peak. That brown part of the graph is truly traffic YouTube can’t identify the origin of, so it’s not ALL from this program, but I think it’s a safe guess to say that about 95% or more is.
The graph above shows that the viewers seem to come from all age groups, and I also looked at the geographic location graphs, which seem to indicate mostly United states traffic, and that’s important to me. After a few weeks, YouTube Jump Start delivered about 4,000 to 4,500 views to my video.
Is This Valuable Traffic?
That’s debatable, really. First off, let’s think about what good non-organic traffic is. They sum up what I was thinking almost word for word:
If you have more views, your video will not only show up on earlier search pages, but will be recommended to others via YouTube’s related videos function. Your video may even be featured on YouTube’s Global Homepage! (if its worthy enough).
This, of course, is why I did my test. My video, as indicated in the first graph, did pretty well on its own, so it’s safe to assume that the video didn’t totally suck. Sadly, out of 5,000+ views, only 456 were “related content” views and 114 were from YouTube search. 261 and 69 (respectively) of these were from before I ran the program. What this says to me is that although I saw a ton of views to my video, I haven’t realized the benefit of the software in the ways I had hoped. Ideally, The software would get tons of people viewing my video and those people would share and rate at least a little. This doesn’t seem to have happened much, if at all. As for it boosting organic traffic within YouTube (related videos and search), I think almost all 250 or so organic views were as a result of the added traffic Jump Start gave the video. This isn’t what I’d hoped for, but it’s a lot more than I’d have without the software.
Conclusions
Everything really boils down to this question: Is the return on investment good enough? If you produce videos that are good enough and just need some help, this could work, but I don’t know if it will really generate the organic traffic that is most critical to success on the web. Ultimately, the best plan is to create killer content regularly for the best organic traffic, but this could give you a good, well, jump start.
