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I couldn’t think of a better topic for my 100th post, than something that kept me awake until I found a solution. Updating from OS3 to iOS (4), I ‘forgot’ to create a proper backup of my files. I didn’t really forget it, as I knew I don’t care about save-games and have all my contacts etc. synced. Still, I forgot something: my photos.

Once in a while, when I don’t want to take my camera with me, or simply don’t have it close by, I take photos with my iPhone camera in order to fill my Project 365 with life. When updating my phone earlier, everything was deleted, which unfortunately, also included the photos I took. Luckily enough, I’m surrounded by backups: iTunes makes backups from my iPhone. These backups again are backed up with my TimeCapsule. This again is partly backed up with Backblaze. (I guess losing my photos I took during two months of traveling through New Zealand and the USA left a mental scar.) Anyhow, here is the solution to my problem (and hopefully yours, too) and other problems that may occur if you just need certain files from a previously made iTunes backup without the need to restore the whole iPhone:

1) Download the iPhone / iPod touch backup extractor (Windows user have a similar app, which is available here).

2) Click ‘read backups’ and choose the newest one, or the one that you think is right. (Mac version – for Windows version please follow the instructions from the link above.)

3) Select the content you’d like to have (for photos it’s iPhone OS files) and click ‘extract’.

4) Once you decided where it should extract these files to, your photos are available in the folder Media -> DCIM -> 100APPLE once the extraction process finished.

I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

Update: @ischack mentioned in the comments that it appears as if the program crashes, but he adds that the ‘beachball’ rather is an indicator for the extracting process working. Thanks

Trackmania is (next to the GTA-series) my favorite game. It’s THE game, if you’re looking for an exciting race game with jumps, loops and other crazy stuff.
Unfortunately, it isn’t available for the iPhone/iPod touch yet. Luckily enough though, there’s an alternative that will run smoothly even on the iPhone 1st Gen., which already tells you that it isn’t the kind of game that has a lot of bling-bling to offer when it comes to graphics. But that isn’t what the game is about anyways. It’s about testing your driving/flying skills and about competition.

I played Trackmania quite a while, was asked to join a clan and realized I’m playing too much. But Trackmania (and now also Jet Car Racing), is that kind of game that you can play if you have just 30 minutes or even 5 hours of time to spare and since it’s a racing game, you don’t miss out if you’re not playing for a while.

I’m excited that I found this game. If you like/d Trackmania on the computer, I’m sure you will like this game for your iPhone/iPod touch.
Here’s a video about the game:

Flickr is a great place to share your photos. It took me some time before I became acquainted with Flickr, but since I started my Project 365, I’m using this plattform to share my photos.

To view new comments, upload pictures or more, a Flickr client on the iPhone can save precious time and is always available everywhere you take your phone. The official Flickr app though, is missing a few features one may like, such as photos near you and groups. Overall, I get the feeling that the official app is good for checking a new photo once in a while, but not if you intend to do more.

Darkslide instead is a Flickr client that pretty much gives me everything I could need – and more. I’m sure it’s going to fulfill you’re needs as well, but just check it out for yourself. There are both a free and a pro version available, while the only difference of those seems to be the advertisement.

I didn’t publish a lot of reviews in my Apps-section, but today I’d like to change that. The reason is my very high mobile phone bill, due to many calls to and from abroad.

Telekom offers an app with which you can easily check how much money you already spent and how many of your free minutes are left. I’m not a Telekom customer but rather decided to get a Simlock- and Netlock-free iPhone with Vodafone instead. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a similar app, as the iPhone isn’t sold by them. Nevertheless, if you’re guessing that someone else made the effort to create such an app, you’re right, it’s called Kosten Check D2.

Before I start writing about why I like it, I would like to pint out that a lot of people rated this app badly for it either not working at all or it having stopped doing so. Said that, to me it works fine thus far – knock on wood.

The app nicely shows you how much money you spent and how much free SMS, MMS and/or minutes you have left. This works because the app connects with Vodafone.de’s QuickCheck. Obviously since the app doesn’t really do much more, one would not see the need for it, but I prefer an app over websites any day. The app is nicely made and as I mentioned, it’s working well with me. So if you are looking for an app that helps you controlling your costs without having to log onto Vodafone’s website, this one may be the one you are looking for.

André wrote a nice article on how to disable the annoying message you get when you call  someone or even when someone calls you. Well, the article isn’t really about that but rather tethering. Nevertheless, thanks to Michael, I know now that a side-effect of setting this up, is that the call forwarding message disappears.

If you’re German speaking, just visit André’s (more detailed) or Michael’s (additional information) article and follow the steps. Otherwise, just read on:

1-a) Mac OS X: Close iTunes, open the Terminal and type (copy/paste) the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

1-b) Windows: Close iTunes and type (copy/paste) the following into Start -> Run

%ProgramFiles%\iTunes\iTunes.exe /setPrefInt carrier-testing 1

2) Visit this website, scroll down to the table, choose your carrier and download the *.ipcc file.

3) Connect your iPhone via USB and start iTunes.

4) Now press Alt (Mac OS X) or Shift (Windows) and search for updates. A new window will open, where you choose the just downloaded file.

5) You don’t get much response from the system (or at least I didn’t get anything), but it sure works.

Having almost 4GB and endless pages of apps on my iPhone, I started to wonder if it’s possible to add an icon as a spacer to increase the clarity. There are many ways if you have a jailbroken phone, but I also found a way to do so on a ‘normal’ one.

Just follow these steps:

1) Visit http://blank.appleiphone.fr/ with your iPhone

2) Add to  Home Screen

3) Instead of typing something which would appear as name, click Cancel

4) Add to Home Screen – again

5) Now the Add button appears without typing a name

6) Move your new spacer (blank icon) to the place you’d like it to be and voilà, there it is.

Thanks for the hint Ananas!

Using iTunes as my main – and most likely only – media player started off quite badly. Not only that I had to change every single video I have into a *.mov-file, I also found *.mp3-files that would neither play on my iPod nor within iTunes. Trying to add these files via iTune’s automatic adding function would move them to the not added folder instead.

The MP3 Validator for Mac OS X neatly solved this issue for me. Just download the software and open it, before you can simply drag-and-drop your mp3-files into the program. It will show which failure persists and repair it. Just checked my whole library and found quite a lot of failures on files which I didn’t suspect in the first place.

PS: Windows-user might be happy to read that MP3 Validator is doing the same for them.

PS:PS: Thanks to Trevin Chow for this helpful piece of information.

Since the beginning of mankind, people tried to communicate as efficently as possible and the introduction of the e-mail, which enables us to share information worldwide, sure had a massive impact on how we see and live communication today. Google intends to take it a step further and creates something new: Google Wave.

If you don’t know what Google Wave is, watching the following (unofficial) video may help:

I was happy enough to receive an invitation and currently I’m trying to understand all the features and possibilities that Google Wave offers at the moment. A nice to know information for new ‘Wavers’ is the following search:

search:public

This will enable you to find publicly written waves, as you may not know many people that have an invitation yet. This way you will get to know the features and can help to make this preview a beta soon.

If you still have no idea what Google Wave is, where it fits in between Facebook and Twitter, or if you simply would like to read more about it, you will find a good article here.

At the moment it’s quite slow and I encounter some issues once in a while. Nevertheless, this seems to be the next big thing and I’m looking forward to seeing the impact it will have on the communication over all and for me.

Just one more thing.

The so-called Web-Apps for the iPhone aren’t really newsworthy, but in regards to Google Wave it may be interesting to know that an added Google Wave home screen bookmark will not show the Safari wrapper, but look like an independent app.

Apps are undoubtedly one of the best things about the iPhone and also the iPod touch. They make your life easier with To-Do apps for example, bring your friends closer via Facebook & co. and shorten waiting periods with games.

Because I found so many interesting apps and sure will find many more, I would like to share these findings with others. Hence I created a new ‘Apps’ category in which I will inform you about apps that I find interesting, useful and/or fun. These may not necessarily be the newest or the best apps available, but with the help of your comments I hope to find even better ones that make the day-to-day experience with the iPhone or iPod touch an even more rewarding one.

When I got my phone a few weeks ago, I directly connected it to my computer and everything seemed to work well. (Keep in mind I sync my Iphone using Itunes and Windows XP on VMware with Ubuntu as host.) After a while it showed me the alert message 1611 though and since I was wondering what was going on, I went online to read that I bricked my Iphone. You can imagine the sudden burst of cold sweat on my skin, thinking my brand new gadget is broken. Luckily, I never really believe the first thing I read online – especially not if it’s bad news – and went on to read more. I finally discovered that it’s nothing else than some minor flaw that is quite easy to solve. I came across the same error today again, after I tried to sync my phone with a different ‘computer’. Before I’ll tell you what happened, here may be the solution for you to get around these alert messages. If you’re using virtualization tools, please read on.

As I mentioned earlier, I use virtualization software to run software that isn’t native to Linux distributions, such as Itunes. VMware always served me well, but since VirtualBox has USB 2.0 as well and offers a great seamless mode, I tried the new version and found it snappier. Reason enough for me to try to move my data I have saved to my new playground. I read online that just copying the Itunes folder would do this for me, but when I just tried to sync a new album quickly before sport, I realized that Itunes was deleting applications from my phone. Apparently I clicked something like do not sync programs, thinking it would just sync my music instead and I’m good to go. This, it turned out, wasn’t the case. I wasn’t too worried about the whole thing though, as I knew I just made a backup of my Itunes folder.

When I tried to restore my phone earlier today, I came across the mentioned alert messages again and neither of the hints Apple provides helped me. It seems that the virtualization tools have problems with the restoring process, as I remember that I solved the issue by rebooting my computer, starting Windows and using Itunes there, when I first got my phone. So I started Windows and was told that my phone software doesn’t function properly and Itunes needs to download the update for it again. Fair enough, but when it synced my stuff afterwards, I found all my settings gone. I can’t really be bothered to sort everything now but will have to do so soon. Another point I’m really happy about: I sync twitter, feeds, mail, contacts and calendars, which means nothing important was erased.

While this was partly my fault – no doubt – I will try not to make such a mistake again, as  it tends to be quite time consuming to restore my ‘original’ settings. If it should happen again though, I’ll post it here and hope to make your lifes easier by sharing my experiences.