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It is a sad day indeed.
I bought myself an iBook back in 2004, wanting to get myself out of PCs. I didn’t know that I’ve just entered myself into the world of Steve Jobs. Three more Macintosh computers, a few iPods and iPhones later, and I am still thrilled to be in this world that was changed by Steve.
Thanks for leaving a dent in our Universe, Steve. Rest in peace.
I recently got myself the latest Airport Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi base station, dubbed the 5th Generation to replace it’s cousin, a 7-year old Airport Express 802.11g base station. Everything went smooth with the new Airport Extreme, setup was foolishly simple and I was up and going in less than an hour of having the base station delivered to my home.
I retired the Airport Express into my desk drawer, and told my wife that we should keep the Airport Express instead of putting it for auction on eBay. Simple reason: the Airport Express is ultra portable, we brought it together with us during our stay in an Australian share house and that made us fully connected to the internet whenever we needed to.
Everything was fine, until this noon. I was sitting comfortably downstairs in my living room, trying to use my iPhone 4. Wireless signal doesn’t seem to be that strong. It could be the way my house was built, but I decided to put the blame on the iPhone 4 simply because it’s running on a beta version of iOS. Please don’t ask which version. That’s when the thought of extending the wireless signal came into play.
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I thought I’d upgrade my iPhone 3GS (which was recently semi-retired, but has since found a new home in my wife’s handbag) with iOS 4.2.1, since that is the first version to ever support Find My iPhone. I wanted to be able to locate the phone (and thus, my wife) if required.
So, I went ahead and search for the direct download, knowing that Apple would not be offering the said firmware anymore from within iTunes, now that iOS 4.3.1 is out in the wild. I found a couple of sites, and managed to grab a copy. However, upon trying to perform the upgrade, I was greeted with Error 3194. Yes, the darned error code which basically means that you can’t install that particular version of iOS onto your device because Apple would not allow you to do so anymore.
The story behind this is, Apple would stop signing older firmwares whenever new ones are made available. Signing is a process that happens when you install new versions of iOS onto your device, whereby iTunes checks with Apple’s servers and ‘signs’ the installation. I’m not about to jailbreak my device, so I went ahead and installed the latest firmware, which is 4.3.1 (build 8G4).
Anyhow, since this post relates more to direct downloading the firmware from Apple’s website (Apple continues to offer older firmwares, although they wouldn’t sign it, I am not sure why), we’ll stay on topic and provide you with the locations. You are free to do whatever you please with the IPSW files that you download, which I know most of you will use it to jailbreak older devices. 
Here’s a tool that I recently used to do some crazy stuff on my iPhone. Now when I say crazy stuff, this means things that Apple would usually not allow you to do, that is if your device is not jailbroken.
Before I continue, I’d like to say that I am not a jailbreak person and that I would never jailbreak my device. Okay, I actually jailbroke my original iPhone 2G so that I can use it outside of AT&T’s network, that’s all. 
Apple designed the iPhone to be more interaction, less interruption. You interact more with the phone’s functions and apps that you download from the App Store – you don’t actually need to see what’s under the hood, or how the file system looks like.
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This is a mysterious one. Ever since I got myself an iPhone 4, my original iPhone 3GS has been sent to semi-retirement. I occassionally use it, especially when my iPhone 4 is plugged to the wall socket and charging.
During a two-weeks trip to Australia, I brought my iPhone 3GS in the luggage as backup. And in order to conserve battery power, I decided to turn the device off instead of having it drip battery juice by sleeping. I never needed the iPhone 3GS throughout the trip. So, when I came back home, I powered the device back on. It worked like normal. It’d even sync with iTunes like normal. However, one thing was wrong until I realize it later. The date and time has been reset back to 1970.
I noticed the very same issue with my iPod touch as well. It was reset back to the same date and time in 1970. I guess this warrants an investigation.
A simple search across the internet made me realize that the battery may possibly be failing. It may seem very true for the iPod touch, which is about 2 years old now. However, my iPhone 3GS just passed its one year old birthday about five months back. I guess it all depends a lot on your usage pattern. As I have outlined before in my post regarding how I took care of batteries across all my rechargeable devices, this shouldn’t have happened, at least for the iPhone 3GS.
I’m still puzzled, but I’d rest my case that the battery on both devices are really dying.
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