Installing Summerboard Themes

I recently had a go at installing the excellent Wood Shelves Summerboard* theme on my iPhone, but found the process of adding a theme manually a blind stumble. It involves using SFTP to connect to the phone, but various tutorials had outdated information, and I had to cobble together the various snippets until I got it to work.

So, just in case this is useful for someone else, here’s how I got it to work. This assumes you’ve already jailbroken your iPhone, and have installer.app and Summerboard installed, ready and waiting for you.

How to connect to your iPhone (1.1.4) and add a Summerboard theme:

1. Via Installer.app, install BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH (found in the ‘System’ Category)
2. Go to Settings> Wi-Fi > (Network Name) and click on the blue arrow to get your IP address.
3. In Transmit (or other SFTP capable app), enter the following information to connect:
   • IP Address
   • Username: root
   • Password: alpine (not ‘dottie’!)
   • Mode: SFTP
4. Once connected, navigate to /private/var/mobile/Library/Summerboard/Themes. There are, it seems, 2 locations for Summerboard themes, but for the 1.1.4 iPhone, this is the one SMB prefs reads from – iPod Touch may be different.
5. Upload the theme folder and change permissions on the folder (and its contents) to 755

The theme will now show up in the SMB prefs menu! Hurrah!

Vishal Parpia reminded me that you should disable SFTP by removing OpenSSH afterwards, otherwise your iPhone becomes eminently hackable. If you can work out how to change the root user password, so much the better!

*(a theming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch’s ‘Springboard)

Tags: hacks, iphone, summerboard, themes

M83 - Graveyard Girl

Last.fm recommendations have turned up trumps for me this week. M83 turned up with the new album “Saturdays = Youth”, and I’ve been playing it on loop ever since. Incidentally, I’ve been buying music from Play.com. MP3’s, no DRM and 320kbps, it’s a great deal (and sadly I don’t get any commission for pimping them).

Graveyard Girl is a luscious 80’s flavoured song from the album, and while the video isn’t all that great (except for the floating dogs – GENIUS!) it’s enough to give you a taster.

Esso Maps

These Esso maps from the 1960’s were a great ebay bargain find. I particularly wanted the London map, as the cover illustration was just stunning.

Collecting motoring maps from the 30’s onwards has become a bit of a hobby of late, and I’ve started uploading photos of some of them to Flickr.

Tags: flickr, maps, retro

The Poison Sky

I’d missed this the first time I watched the Poison Sky last week! I know, I’m probably the last person to notice it…

In the Tardis, just before Donna looks at the monitor, there is a brief flash of Rose calling the Doctor – just for a few frames. Often the ‘story arcs’ throughout the season get on my pip, usually because they’re loud and obvious, but these brief flashes of Rose are really well done. Yay!

Tags: drwho

Richard Hawley - Coles Corner

Last August, I was in a pub near Lindisfarne (The Lindisfarne Inn no less) when Richard Hawley and two members of his band came in for a drink. At that time, I had never seen a photo of him, and had only downloaded a few tracks from 3hive. All I knew was that he looked very cool, and that I kicked myself a few weeks later when I saw him perform on Jonathan Ross and realised it was him.

It became the catalyst for discovering his wonderful music. Echoes of Scott Walker, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash often make his songs seem suited to late nights and rain soaked streets, much like this title track from his previous album Coles Corner. I’m guessing not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s most definitely mine!

Download Richard Hawley – Coles Corner. In addition to the tracks available from 3hive, there are more at Last.fm.

Tags: foundsounds, podcast