Cydia Apps for a Time Walker’s iPhone

I feel like I am already familiar with certain apps on this iPhone device, although I’ve never used them before. If your brains were to spontaneously explode, for example, over a square kilometre, your memories would lie disconnected on the ground in an amplified map of their former positions inside your head. Tiny differences in cranial coordinates would translate to much larger differences over a square kilometre. Someone – maybe even the next ‘someone’ to squat in your now-empty skull – could even decode that map.

Well, okay, so the analogy isn’t perfect. But in crosstemporal terms, it all makes sense and this is roughly what has happened to me, and why I keep stumbling over stray sense memories connected to things, like the App Store apps on the iPhone. An iPhone which, according to the first clear memory I do have, I discovered lying beside me on the pavement, and then conveniently used to upload my experiences here, in case I again lose even this tenuous grip on chronology.

So this is really for my own future reference, more than anyone else’s. If you too are from another planet, then maybe you’ll find some use in this, because there are 18 apps (pictured above) on this iPhone that I have no inkling of, whatsoever. Further research over the last 24 hours has uncovered that they all have one source in common: ‘Cydia’, a grey market app store that can only be installed on what they call a jailbroken phone. Reading back in the blog and putting two-and-two together, I suspect that Cydia was left incompletely explored by my predecessor, and so I’ll be opening all the icons on that cavern wall, one row at a time, and posting the results of my explorations here. Perhaps then continuity can be restored.

You are looking at an impossible screen. This game Planetfall is under something called ‘copyright‘, and is no longer sold on this world in a modern form. It could easily be converted, but this ‘modern’ iPhone is under lock and key, and refuses to open its filesystem to the kind of view that will allow you to make that decision. I know it’s going to sound like a grim fairy tale of a dystopian grotto zone, but the iPhone indeed protects by default the commercial viability of millions of commercially *dead* works, blocking them from your view, wherever possible. Protecting zero sales isn’t logical: even a supercomputer couldn’t do it. This is a serious flaw: not because it isn’t important to behave legally, but because the law of this land is functionally insane. Thus, a device that forces you into compliance with it, is also functionally insane, and so is using it.

To my kind, it all sounds very much like publishing a dictionary from which has been struck all words containing the letter S. Because somebody claimed to ‘own’ that letter 30 years ago and then *disappeared*. And yes, there really is an elaborate system out there keeping track of it all. Massive resources are expended by globespanning ‘corporations’ attempting to control the uncontrollable, I shit you not! (If telepaths ever do develop on this rock, it will probably become necessary to lobotomise them.)

With jailbroken file browsers like iFile and Discover (available via Cydia), you can get off Apple’s meds and free your iPhone’s mind by opening a portal into its filing system and transferring whatever you want, whenever you want, sans velvet handcuffs. Both iFile and Discover can transfer files to and from any iPhone’s folder by connecting wirelessly to a standard web browser. I definitely recommend this over installing more complex and thus less secure filesharing like Netatalk. Don’t do it! It’s unnecessary. iFile is the best file browser I have seen for this device. Screen space is used efficiently. Files can be created and moved with ease, even alias pointers created. It feels like a full mobile Finder! But iFile invariably chokes when transferring large files (if it’s >30MB I don’t bother trying), so I’ve taken to using the Discover app for wireless transfers (which it has a habit of always performing flawlessly), and then iFile for the actual browsing. BTW if you see an app called Discover in the App Store, that’s not it! What I mean is the Cydia version that is not only free but also unconfined to a tiny windowless cell in your filedungeon.

Training you in how to interpret every file you will see under the hood is beyond this post, but my rules of thumb are:

1. Don’t copy anything to a location you don’t understand;
2. Don’t let free space get below 100MB;
3. Try to keep all your data in ‘/var/mobile’ (it’s the iPhone’s user data area, also referred to as ‘/private/var/mobile’); and
4. Don’t manually delete or rename anything you didn’t put there manually.

In this way I have begun copying any media I discover that is effectively outlawed, to this phone.

We need to engage with these abandoned works, because in such a suffocating intellectual polity, the best solutions are left aside simply out of fear of breaking rules. I would also advise installing Backgrounder, and using it to enable background processing (the blocking of which is yet another abuse of Apple’s power) for Discover, so that you can transfer files while checking email, &c. Backgrounder is so useful and liberating that it turns even some App Store apps like IM+ Lite (the instant message app that couldn’t notify you of instant messages), formerly crippled by Apple’s nonsensical regime, into useful programs at last.

NEXT: SECOND ROW – UPGRADING AN iPHONE TO A FULL MEDIA CITIZEN

[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]

Navigate the ‘Cydia Apps for a Time Walker’ series at rgbFilter…

• PART I (this page)
• PART II
• PART III (coming soon)