Seoulscapade

I’ve noted before my disdain for Apple and the company’s culture of arrogance. And I’ve mentioned my annoyance at certain decisions made regarding the iPod Touch. What further annoys me about this product is that Apple expects you to pay extra to have some more very basic applications added to it. The way around that is to jailbreak your iPod Touch and get 100s of apps for free.

Here is the easiest way to do it. Simply go to the ZiPhone blog site and download the latest ZiPhone. This program is backward compatible, so it’ll work with any iPod Touch version. Unzip it somewhere on Windows or Mac. Have your iPod Touch plugged in but iTunes off. Now fire up the ZiPhoneGUI.exe.

You will be presented with a screen similar to the one below. The latest version just has one Jailbreak button for both iPhone and iPod Touch. Just click the appropriate button to jailbreak your iPod Touch. You’ll see streams of white font text output on your Touch and it’ll eventually reboot. When that happens, you ready to add sources and start installing free stuff.

I’ve noted on forums that people sometimes get errors and have various problems. If you have problems, you can always fire up iTunes and simply restore your iPod Touch to it’s original condition, in which case I think all previous settings are wiped. I didn’t have any problems at all, at least not with jailbreaking the thing.

For more info on jailbreaking, see iPod Touch Fans, Lifehacker and Lonman06. There are also other methods to jailbreak an iPod Touch. Just search Google.

Wiggle Issue with 1.1.4

The first thing I wanted to do was take of ZiPhone’s web clip link. However, I found that you cannot customize your home screen after the jailbreak. This is easily fixed by adding a repo source to obtain what is called the January App Pack. It contains useful apps that come standard with the iPhone—Weather, Stocks, Google Maps, and Notes. Somewhere in there is also the “wiggle” functionality, or the ability to customize your home screen.

Here is the repo source to add, and a few others:

http://www.spaziocellulare.com/ispazio.xml

http://ipodtouchmaster.com/files/repo.xml

http://applerepos.com/

Refresh your sources. Then search your packages for 1.1.4 iPhone applications and Tweaks. Add the goodness.

Now go to your home screen and touch an icon and hold it for a second or two. You will then see all icons wiggling. Web clips will show a black and white X on their corners. To delete a web clip, such as the one ZiPhone installs, simply click the X and delete.

Manually Add an English-Korean Dictionary

Korea is perhaps the 10th largest economy in the world, and yet iPod Touch does not include a Korean keyboard. I told you Apple sucked. Worse than that, you can’t install an English-Korean or Korean-English dictionary through the installer—at least, not yet. You have to do it manually.

First of all, install weDict via your iPod Touch Installer.

Next, what you’ll be doing is accessing your iPod Touch via the SSH protocol and copying files over. I did this using my Linux machine, however, you can do the same in Windows or Mac.

In Windows, you could download Putty or WinSCP to do it. If you can install the Terminal v100 app on your iPod Touch, you could use that. Initially, I could not install the Term-v100 on 1.1.4. Later, after added the repos above, I was able to. So, here I’m just describing what I did without that app.

To begin, download the English-Korean files from Stardict. They’ll be in a tarball, so if you haven’t got Linux, you’ll need a good zip program that can unzip the formats involved. On Linux, there is dictzip program you can get especially for this; otherwise, other archiving programs will do the job. I believer you can rename the *.dict.dz file to *.dict.gz to unzip. More instructions are here and here.

Once unzipped, you only need the .dict and .idx files. For iPod Touch 1.1.3/4, these need to be copied to the /private/var/mobile/Library/weDict/ folder. For 1.1.1/2, copy them to the /private/var/root/Library/weDict/ folder. For people who don’t want to deal with the command line, I’d recommend using one of the windows programs above.

In Linux, I did this in a terminal window with the following instructions:

scp english-korean.dict root@192.168.0.9:english-korean.dict

and

scp english-korean.idx root@192.168.0.9:english-korean.xdx

Your Touch IP address may differ. You’ll have to got to your Wi-Fi settings to check what it is.

You’ll notice I didn’t nominate a directory to put them in. At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly where they were supposed to go, so I just got them onto the iPod first. Then I logged into the iPod and had a look around with this:

ssh root@192.168.0.9

If you have to logged on the username is of course “root” and the password is “alpine.” Don’t use “dottie” as specified on some sites. That is probably the password for earlier versions. For 1.1.4, use “alpine.”

I found where the weDict folder was and moved (mv) the english-korean.* files there. That’s all there is to it.

Now fire up weDict on your iPod and try a word to see if it gives you its Korean equivalent. If not, you’ll probably need to go into weDict’s settings and make sure there is a tick against “english-korean.”

Korean Keyboard

If you want to go the other way and search Korean-English direction, you’ll need a Korean keyboard. Unfortunately, this does not seem available to 1.1.4 users. You can install a Korean keyboard on iPod Touch 1.1.1 or 1.1.2, and instructions for that are on this site. If you can get a keyboard, then you can install the korean-english dictionary available on the Stardict site, in the same way as I’ve shown above.