I bought a new external hard drive (my 3rd) as I seem to constantly be running out of room. This time I went for something a little more pretty and also something that may encourage me to buy a Mac Mini. I got an Iomega Minimax 750GB. At first the quality seemed a little rough then I noticed it comes with a very thin clear film plastic protector stuck on the top. Once you remove that I realised the marks are caused by that and the actual plastic isn’t damaged! I had no problems setting it up and partitioning it so I could leave 200GB devoted to TimeMachine. No eSata or FW800 but I’m not using it to work on, just as a backup device, so speed wasn’t as important as looks :p

So being able to instantly backup my whole computer I decided to re-install OSX, this time not enabling the annoying encryption that doesn’t work with TimeMachine anyway. Having re-installed OSX on my Macbook pro and therefore un-pairing it with my 8GB iPod touch of course it meant I could no longer sync them. The solution was to delete all the music on the iPod (which is fine as I have a copy of the mp3s on the external hard drive) but some strange iTunes programming means you can’t delete podcasts! I had about 2GB of podcasts I could no longer access through iTunes so the quickest and easiest solution I could think of was to restore the iPod, reformatting it and removing everything. This meant the firmware was reset to 1.1.4 but without my £12 software upgrade that I purchased through iTunes in January. Because I was using a re-installed version of OSX and iPod firmware iTunes kept hassling me to buy the upgrade — the software I had already purchased! I logged in to my iTunes account to try and download it again only to find you can’t. iTunes wouldn’t even let me purchase it again!

So I thought I’d take the opportunity to try jail-breaking the iPod so I could add the applications I had already bought as well as other 3rd party applications and themes. I looked at this option a few months ago but it looked far more complicated and risky. The other day I applied the jailbreak and have since been installing loads of themes and applications on it. It really is a simple and easy process and gives your iPod a lot more functionality. I’ll outline the process I took, which you can follow (of course at your own risk).

1) Restore the iPod using iTunes to 1.1.4 firmware then close iTunes before configuring the iPod or transferring anything to it (it can take a while to download the new firmware from Apple as I think it’s about 160MB).

2) Download ZiPhone and press the jailbreak button. The process is now complete but you will now want to add applications and custom themes.

How to add applications
Connect to wifi and run the installer application. It will refresh it’s list of default sources (you can add more sources for even more apps). Once complete you can add the Apple software upgrade (mail, weather, maps etc) by clicking the ‘install’ button on the bottom and go to the ‘all packages’ folder and search for and install: 1.1.3/4 iPod Full Features. Other applications I’ve added so far (you can add them from the default sources by just searching for them in the ‘all packages’ folder in the installer app) and found quite useful are:

• BossTool — for moving your fonts to another partition to free up space for applications
• Converter — for translating Australian measurements to the old fashioned English ones
• RainbowLight — for pretty colours
• SummerBoard — for applying themes, I’m currently using Katamari (pictured above), though not very useable it’s pretty
• weDict — for language translation
• Apollo — instant messaging, MSN and iChat etc
• Wallpaper — for browsing and downloading other people’s wallpaper images
• MobileFinder — for file management
• TapTap Revolution — guitar hero for the iPod/iPhone
• snes4iphone — SNES emulator
• iSolitaire
• Chess
• Raging Thunder — driving game using accelerometer
• MxTube — for downloading YouTube videos
• Sysinfo — for checking out running processes

How to access any file on the iPod from OSX
In order to transfer anything to and from the iPod (handy for installing ROMs for game console emulators) install the BSD sub system and OpenSSH application using the same method outlined above. Then follow these instructions on the MacRumors forum to install and configure the OSX application.