Small Town GeeksTech News, How to’s, and Reviews

In addition to bloggers of the Small Town Geeks crew, today we are proud to announce that you can now follow @smalltowngeeks on Twitter to receive even more News, How-Tos, and Reviews!  Unlike some other blogs, our Twitter feed is manned by a human!  That means we will answer any DM or @ reply that you throw at us!

Just look for the Small Town Geeks logo:

You can also follow blogger Ryan @ryanminnick and blogger TJ @tjhouston

The folks over at MovableType recently announced a new open-source version of their blogging platform, named Melody.  Viewable over at openmelody.org, you can tell that this is a direct push to compete with wordpress.org‘s offerings and community base.

Asking current developers and coders to design and improve upon the software will certainly be a win-win for Melody; after all, the same school of thought has brought WordPress to its current 2.8 version (soon to be 2.8.1), and has allowed it to grow into the premier blogging platform for most (it even powers smalltowngeeks.net!)

Melody is a new open-source Blog Platform

I’m going to be demoing  Melody over the next few days, and hope to get a screencast up showing the benefits (or detriments) of the latest open-source blogging platform.

-Ryan

Greetings from Our Nation’s Capital!

My name is Ryan, and I’ll be your technology tour guide today; from Blackberry to managed Enterprise setups, I’m your man.  Serving as an IT Drirector for a Consulting Group, I deal with the latest in both consumer and business technologies and love to share new tools!

So a little bit about me: I’m 17, and I own my own IT-based company, as well as serving as an IT director and SaaS specialist.  While I do enjoy long walks on the beach, I have found that too much of my time is spent working, so my only true vacation comes from writing to all of you!  My personal blog, ryanmminnick.com, is a repository of my tech-centric ramblings and life experiences.  Here at smalltowngeeks.net, I hope to continue to help everyone by providing the answers that you need to the tech problems that you have.

Questions?  Email me at ryanminnick@smalltowngeeks.net and I’ll post videos, audio feeds, or posts to answer all of your questions (as well as respond by email)

I look forward to posting for you!
Ryan

I currently have a 1^st gen i-Phone that I use primarily for app development. Whenever Apple releases a new update to there software I have to leave my i-Phone in an un-updated state and wait for the folks over on the i-Phone dev team to find a way to jailbreak the device. They are getting very good at what they do over there, within a week of Apple releasing the new OS, they already have it unlocked and jail-broken. Below I am going to walk you through the process I used to Jailbreak my first gen i-Phone for the new OS 3.0.

Many people are using the new ”pwnage” tool that was released from the Dev team blog. I have built the necessary ipsw that is needed for the jail break (see below). Remember that this is for use with the 2g or 1^st gen i-Phone. Here are the steps:

1. Download necessary firmware from here.

2. Next put your i-Phone into DFU mode

a. Turn off your i-Phone

b. Hold down the power and home button.

c. When you see the Apple logo, release the power button but continue holding the home button down.

d. Open i-Tunes and wait for it to tell you that its in restore mode.

3. Once i-Tunes opens up and tells you that the i-Phone connected is in recovery mode, on the Mac hold alt and click restore or on the PC hold shift and click restore. This will bring up a file explorer where you can find the firmware downloaded above and restore from here.

4. After that your i-Phone will get the custom Pineapple boot logo, and that’s it.

4 easy steps to jailbreak your i-Phone. Also in the install, you will see Cydia and ICY which are the Jailbroken versions of the app store. Browse around there is a good chance you will find some cool apps that you wouldn’t find in the App store. Look for an update for jailbreaking the i-Phone 3g and 3gs in the next week.

Till then

“Carpe Noctum”

Seize the night!

Best Buy Lowers Price of Macbook

While looking around at the local bestbuy. I noticed the White Macbook for $899.00 which is $100 less then the normal everyday. This might be Best Buy’s way of countering Apples “Back to School” special. (Free i-Pod touch) not a bad buy.

Edit: Looks as though apple did a ninja style upgrade to the white Macbook increasing the speed of the proc. and the ram. Looks as though this updating is making this macbook out perform its uni-body brethren.