The article in the link above found on Mac World’s iPhone Central provides some insight into altering your iPhone’s carrier setting (ie. the ATT_US.ipcc file).

What I was originally interested in was perhaps the capability to re-enable Internet tethering since that feature became available when iPhone OS 3.0 came out and with a simple mod to your iPhone using an alternate ATT_US.ipcc file. But the tethering capability has since been disabled with iPhone OS 3.1. Yet there are iPhone users who are supposably still working on a mod.

The part of the article that caught my attention was the authors example of disabling the phones data services. Meaning turning off all non-Wi-Fi Internet access, both EDGE and 3G. Why might you want to do this? Because, as the author’s example explains – if you are in a foreign country, your carrier typically charges exorbitant rates for data network access (although buying a discount package in advance can help keep these costs down). The author’s idea of customizing your phone’s carrier setting (which can be easily undone) was to make sure you don’t inadvertently accrue any of these charges, so you’d like to turn off all data services for the duration of your trip, but still retain the ability to use your phone for calls and messages. Enabling Airplane Mode won’t do the trick, because that turns off both the phone service and the data networks. Keeping Data Roaming off (in Settings -> General -> Network) should be sufficient, but you are worried that you may inadvertently enable this. What else can you do? You can make a carrier settings change that is guaranteed to block all data network access, even when you are not in a roaming area. And, at the end of your trip, it’s easy to undo.

To begin simply launch the Google Mobile App speak into your phone, it will then launch Google without having to navigate to google.com.

For example; on a recent road trip to Oregon I wanted to located a specific pizza parlor in Medford. I used the app to speak the name of the pizza parlor and city, then clicked on the google maps link that came up and quickly routed the path from where we were at the time while driving. It was just too easy and saved me time of not having to try and type in the search term on the screen.

Here’s a brief outline of features;

1. Quick access to Google via speaking into the mic on the phone.
2. Search by voice. Speak your queries instead of typing them.
3. You Location is already known. Don’t have to specify your current location when searching for nearby businesses because it knows your geo location already.
4. Google Suggest. Search for suggested queries and businesses that appear as you type.
5. Search history. Quickly search again for queries you recently performed.

The solution (as I discovered after working with Dan) was to change my Wi-Fi access point on my wireless router. Basically I changed the wireless security protocol from WEP to WPA.  Apparently there are reports that show its more stable and better throughput when using the WPA over the WEP. Please note that I am also using an older D-link wireless rounter/firewall so your results may vary.

After changing over to WPA be sure to change/update any other device in your home accessing your local network via wireless connection to switch to WPA and of course changing the pass-pharse at the same time.

Also see Apple’s iPod touch and iPhone: Tips when using Wi-Fi

The iPhone 3GS has a built in screen capture utility…and it is really easy to use.  Below is a picture of a 3GS to refer to.  To get a screen capture merely:

1. Press and hold the home key (the one at the bottom that the red arrow is pointing to).

2. While holding the home key, press the Sleep key at the top (see the yellow arrow).

The picture should be saved in the photo gallery entitled “Camera Roll.”

Use this to assist in documenting iPhone actions (e.g. this one).

How to create custom ringtones using iTunes:

I found a post that indicated how to create custom ringtones from existing audio files that you may have. The post was based upon the Mac version 7 of iTunes. In addition there were hundreds of comments from people for whom the method did not work. So in this post I have adapted the instructions for Windows OS and the Windows version of iTunes version 8.2. In addition, I noted the one work around that I had to apply, to make it work. But I do want to give credit to the original post.

1. Right click on the song you are going to make into a ringer and select “Get Info.” Please make sure that you have rights to utilize the song that you have chosen. For example, as a ringtone for when my wife calls, I have chosen her favorite song that she plays on the piano. It happens to be a public domain song. So no copyright issues there.
2. Select the “Options” tab. Take note of the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Place a checkmark in both boxes and input the time you want your ringtone to start and stop. The ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Click OK when you’re done.
   
3. Select the “Info” tab. Make sure that you have values for Name, Artist, Album Artist and Album. This was the workaround that I had to incorporate to get the ringtone to show up for synchronization with the iPhone.
4. Make sure that iTunes is set to encode your songs to the AAC format. Go to iTunes > Edit > Preferences > General. Click the “Import Settings” button (see images below) Change the “Import Using” drop down menu to “AAC Encoder” and a bitrate of 128 kbps or less).
   
5. Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times you have set.
6. After the song is done encoding, navigate to your iTunes Music folder, locate your song, and drag it to your desktop. After the song is on your desktop go back to iTunes and delete the clipped version from you iTunes library (It won’t delete it from your desktop, it will only remove it from iTunes).
7. Go back to the song on your desktop and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r.
8. After the extension is changed, double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Then sync your iPhone with iTunes. The new ringtone should now be available to choose as a custom ringtone.
9. Remember to go back into iTunes and restore your custom start and stop times to the default values for the original version of your song.

If you have any problems with this, let me know so that we can update the procedures.

Well what is the easiest way to get these posts automatically on you iPhone?  The answer of course is to install a RSS Reader app on the phone and then subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog!

For a RSS Reader I chose Free RSS Reader.  Just do a search on the App store for this exact title and you will see a free and purchase version.   I chose the free one of course since after all it is named FREE RSS READER.  Following is a screen capture of the App search within iPhone.

Once you have the RSS reader, there are two pertinent RSS feeds:

1. the blog posts are at http://iphones.blogs.sowingcircle.org/feed/
2. the comments to the posts are at: http://iphones.blogs.sowingcircle.org/comments/feed/.

Here is a quick way to get to the iPhone’s Favorite Contacts.

Quickly press the iPhone home button ( ) twice.  The home button is the circular button at the bottom of the face of the phone.  This of course assumes that your phone is unlocked.