You’ve all been annoyed at the default iPhone sounds sooner or later. They’re pretty ordinary, I’ll agree with you. One of the extremely useful features of JailBreaking your device is that you have the power to change the default sounds for pretty much any event. Today, I’ll show you how to replace your default SMS tones with custom ones of your choosing. In order to do so, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone (running 2.x), Cydia, OpenSSH and optionally WinterBoard. You’ll also need the audio file you want to use (obviously) an SSH client (ideally a graphical SFTP frontend like FireFTP) and an audio editing application like Audacity. Ready? Here goes! more…

I’m a huge music enthusiast. An audiophile, even. However, and this is not so uncommon I hear, I much prefer the consistence of a song’s lyrics than its melody. I love knowing what the singer says and feels, and you can only truly understand with a good understanding of how emotions translate into music and words. The music part is mostly instinctive, a bass line triggering a feeling in your guts, a guitar riff flipping your heart around, you can’t really learn that. However, it’s within everyone’s grasp to understand what a song says, and I believe it’s important. That’s why I’m going to give you a tip to get the lyrics from every song you love onto your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s really easy, you don’t have to do much.

First off, I’ll assume you’re using iTunes since you own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple made it so that synchronizing that baby on any other platform is a real bitch, and they’ve greatly succeeded. So open up your iTunes, select a song you like in your library and right-click it to “Get Info”. If you look at the tabs near the top of the popup window, you’ll see a “Lyrics” tab. Clicking on that should simply open the tab with a big empty text area. What we’ll do here is we’ll fill up that box with the song’s lyrics.

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One thing I’ve never understood about Firefox users is how they use Firefox’s buit-in search box. It’s a nice feature and it’s extendable, I’ll give you that, but I find there is something so much more powerful and convenient also built into Firefox that doesn’t get the credit it deserves: Quick Searches (or Smart Keywords). It’s not even mentioned on the Firefox Features page! The idea of quick searches is relatively simple. It’s a bookmark with a keyword. You use that keyword to access the bookmark. You can add parameters to your keyword in such a way that Firefox will replace a given string in the bookmark’s URL with your parameter, therefore making it a powerful GET URL shortcut.

With the recent addition of the Awesome Bar (or Smart Location Bar) since Firefox 3, the location bar has become the place where most power users will type their queries in. Why use another box to query specific search engines/sites? You can access the location bar effortlessly with F6 or with a mouse click, so why would you bother with a whole other bar for the same purposes as the main one? more…

I’ve recently coded my first Wordpress plugin, for the fun of it. I’ve been using Wordpress for some time, and I know PHP quite well, so I figured it’d be fun. Wordpress has a weird/interesting way of being extendable. I won’t go into too much technical details about that, but suffices to say that it’s easy yet complicated to perform tasks you want to. Yeah, that weird.

All that being said, I upgraded my Wordpress from 2.7 to 2.7.1 in the middle of coding some new features for the latest release of WP-prettyphoto, 1.1. That made me realize that updating Wordpress’ core also updates the installed JavaScript modules, namely jQuery (among many others). When I first coded WP-prettyphoto, when things weren’t working I just replaced the jQuery I had with the latest official stable release and things worked fine. I didn’t give it much thought. So when I updated Wordpress, all hell broke loose and WP-prettyphoto was metaphorically crying in agony because jQuery wasn’t man enough for it. I then tried performing the same manual updating procedure, and without really surprising anyone — I was alone anyway — WP-prettyphoto was back prettyfying my stuff like a starving fat kid eats a cheesecake.

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