Archive for January, 2010

Bad Design:
Sony’s PlayStation 3 Remote

Posted 1261 days ago ·  Tagged: , · 4 Comments

I got my PlayStation 3 which is great and all, and I also ordered the Bluetooth remote. Already when I ordered it I winced at the horrible, horrible design choices and they’re even more apparent now that I’ve used it a little. Not only is it filled with a lot of useless buttons, it even has buttons that do the exact same thing! I recently bought a WD TV Live media player, and its remote looks like this:

wdtv-remote

It’s brilliant! It does everything it needs to with a minimum of buttons (17 to be precise). Now let’s take a look at the PlayStation 3 remote:

bd-remote-2-playstation-3

I mean, come on, this thing has 51 buttons. Who uses numbers for their DVD/Blu-ray player? I don’t even know what the “CLEAR” and “TIME” buttons do and I’ve never in my life used those colored buttons. Under those we have the four standard menu buttons, but the triangle, square, cross and circle buttons do the same thing! It’s the same with the L1-R3 buttons, which do the same as the arrow buttons underneath. It’s ridiculous, so in the WD TV Live spirit I decided to photoshop it into this:

bd-remote-2-playstation-3_new

Honestly, do you need more?

Other than the design flaws the remote seems to work fine, it’s weird not having to point it anywhere though.

Jailbreaking my iPhone

Posted 1263 days ago ·  Tagged: , · 4 Comments

I’ve recently started considering jailbreaking my iPhone because I’ve started getting these spam calls from Somalia – sometimes 15 calls per night – and I know that there’s a jailbreak app which makes it possible to block calls. So, after stumbling upon an extremely simple jailbreaking guide, I went ahead and followed it, thinking I could always just restore my iPhone if something got messed up.

First of, the jailbreaking process itself is incredibly easy, it probably took less than 60 seconds. Then I started exploring the new world of Cydia, an application which makes it possible to download other applications for jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches. It looks very similar to the official App Store, i.e. you find an app and press download. After surfing various sites for neat apps, I now use the following:

Winterboard

This app manages the themes you are using, I settled on Matte Nano and Glasklart, as seen in this screenshot:

photo 2

Backgrounder: This simply lets applications run in the background.

Cycorder: A video-recording app. I haven’t tested the quality yet.

CyDelete: Makes it possible to delete Cydia apps without opening the Cydia app itself.

Five Icon Dock: Makes it possible to have 5 apps in the dock.

iBlacklist: This app blocks incoming text messages and phone calls, bye, bye, African spammers.

LockInfo: Customizes the lock screen, as seen in this screenshot:

photo
I still need to find a better wallpaper, but this app is amazing.

OpenSSH: Makes it possible to use SSH to transfer files (themes and icons for example) from your computer to the iPhone.

SBSettings: Very useful app which is accessible from anywhere on the phone. You just slide your finger on the status bar and a GUI drops down making it possible to enable/disable 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. on the fly.

And that’s it for now. At the moment I’m kind of confused why I didn’t do this a year ago. Oh, well.