Fix iPhone camera blank images

Last night after back from the beach (and the crowded Apple store in Mag. Mile), I found the pictures that I took yesterday were all gone! Further testing showed that the camera ’simulates’ to take a photo but after tapping the lower left corner icon of the Camera application, all you can see are blank photo rectangle boxes! I looked around net for a while and tried reinstall(restore) version 1.1.4 but no luck. It still worked the same way, blank photos.

The next morning (today), I tried to look around again, and found a message in ModMyiPhone mentioned that it might be the permission issue, the post suggested to change the ownership of a directory in /var/mobile/Media/DCIM. SSH-ed into my iPhone I found that it should be just right. But I spotted a Info.plist property list file. I looked at it’s content, looks like it keeps track of what pictures you imported last time with an photo and group index. Hmmm… maybe the index was screwed up when I import the pictures muliple times in iPhoto and Aperture. Why would I do that? because stupid Aperture won’t delete and pictures in the iPhone once I imported them into Aperture. So I re-imported the pictures into iPhoto, selected delete originals, and remove all imported  pictures in iPhoto. Ugh! Remove the Info.plist file seems do the trick just fine. the camera is working again now.

While I looked around, I found quite a few people lost precious moments/memory because of this bug. They thought they captured the moment with photos in their iPhone. Daughter’s dance practices, son’s ball game etc. I sincerely feel sympathy with them and they didn’t even jailbreak their iPhone! And hopefully the just released iPhone 2.0 firmware fixed this bug.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Bring back iPhone from paperweight

Due to itch at the moment, I upgraded to 1.1.3 with the instruction here. It all worked fine except some glitches on ringtones and non-AT&T Edge/APN setups. So I searched, trying to find the link for Installer.app that I used for T-Mobile APN related packages. Install it and reboot iPhone, then boom! single user mode with error cannot find libncurses.dylib, WTF! I guess I panicked for few minutes, but soon I figure that there must be a way to write back old images even the OS failed to boot. After looking around for the possible saving instructions, the answer is DFU mode and restore to “1.1.1″ ipsw image from iTunes. At first I thought that I have the image ready but it turned out it’s 1.1.0 (or even older) version. Downloaded the 1.1.1 ipsw image and thankfully the “alt-click” restore button trick still works in iTunes, so I successfully restore iPhone to 1.1.1 default status that asking for activation from iTunes. I followed the jailbreakme.com instruction and it is amazing that once you have correct version firmware installed, the jailbreak process is sooo easy. Granted, my iPhone is back to working status. And the AnySim unlock still works flawlessly. Ran the 1.1.3 soft upgrade again and now it’s back to normal. 

Wired – The Untold Story of iPhone

Today Wired magazine published an article about how Apple blew up the wireless industry with iPhone negotiation. 

Building iPhone toolchain

It may not matter in 2 months (Steve said Feb, I will assume the end of Feb.) But since I did it, it’s always nice to have a record of what and how I did it.

Death Star Explodes

 From Gizmodo and Engadget.com