by David Turnbull on January 26, 2010
Note: While the focus of this article is on iPhone jailbreakers, some of the content applies to all iPhone users.
I did it. I finally did it. After months of humming and harring I finally jailbroke my iPhone. And no, it was much less of a big deal than I’d imagined. By the sound of it jailbreaking sounds like some ultra-geeky covert operation that could get you a life sentence. In reality it’s no more than pushing a button and then getting some extra features for your phone.
The big question though is “why?” There’s a million different reasons you may want to jailbreak your iPhone, and honestly it’s very dependent on what matters to you.
What nearly turned me to the dark side recently was the BTStack Keyboard application that lets you use a Bluetooth keyboard with your phone in any text field. But even that wasn’t enough (and I can assure you that was a feature I was previously dying for).
What finally encouraged me to make the switch was reading a post from Shawn Blanc about his jailbroken iPhone, which pushed me past the tipping point after seeing plenty of minimalist home screens on blogs like Minimal Mac. They were all too sleek to ignore. Read the rest of this article…
by David Turnbull on January 19, 2010
Thirty four degrees Celsius (ninety-three point two Fahrenheit for you crazy foreigners). Not an outrageously unexpected temperature amidst another beautiful Australian summer, but still enough to spark interest in a new habit: cold showers.
Standing under that icy waterfall was nice enough, but that was mainly because of the heat of the air. It was the feeling afterward that has remained persistent over the past couple of weeks, a feeling of seemingly endless energy, that I’ve become addicted to and compelled me to write about my experiences.
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by David Turnbull on January 8, 2010
Over the past few weeks I’ve barely written a word. This is not because I’ve been vainly attempting to achieve perfection but because every time I sit down to write I feel disconnected from the words that are popping up on the computer screen in front me. And without that connection it’s impossible to get lost in my work, and without that focus anything that I do churn out feels less polished, more like a rough draft, even after multiple editing sessions.
But late last night I was re-reading parts of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and these particular passages really stuck out at me and inspired me to hop on my computer today and expand on his ideas as well as pump out some wonderings of my own.
Every hour of the day give vigorous attention, as a Roman and as a man, to the performance of the task in hand with precise analysis, with unaffected dignity, with human sympathy, with dispassionate justice – and to vacating your mind from all its other thoughts.
…perform each action as it if it were the last of your life: freed, that is, from all lack of aim, from all passion-led deviation from the ordinance of reason, from pretence, from love of self, from dissatisfaction with what fate has dealt you.
Be uncertain. I don’t know where this article is going. There is no outline, or plan of any sorts. I pondered how to begin it in my mind before hitting any of the keys, but beyond that I’m typing blind. I feel this uncertainty is a valuable tool to latch on to. Nothing kills creativity faster than being overly certain of the final result.
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by David Turnbull on December 25, 2009
Early this week I hit a point in my life where I begun to feel that I was without problems. That’s not to say things were perfect – far from it – but I had control over my situation and many bad habits that plagued my days were coming to an end.
This wasn’t as joyous as you’d imagine. Being without a problem to solve is a problem in itself as it can lead to self sabotage, purposefully causing friction just so you can be there to reduce it. There was a feeling of what now?
Honestly, my feelings were fairly premature. I’m planning on being around for another 80 years – plenty of time for genuine problems to arise – and there’s certainly ambitions I’m yet to reach and milestones that lay just ahead. What I experienced was a burst of clarity rather than a justification to stop striving.
Nevertheless, even though my attitude was not congruent with the reality I found the idea of self sabotage intriguing enough to warrant this article to explore the topic.
I will never have “everything” but I do expect there do be a point where I have enough to survive, the ability to do what I love and freedom from self-imposed restrictions. It’s at that point that could lead to artificial complications, formulated purely for the sake of activity. And since it’s a lovely Thursday afternoon as I write this, and there’s no where in particular I need to be, a preemptive strike is in order.
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And this is my blog, Adventures of a Barefoot Geek. I write about a range of topics including how to achieve peace of mind, mobility and simplicity - all mixed in with some good ol' fashioned geekery.