Great new iPhone gadget

Great new gadget on the horizon. This new kickstart project surfaced that provides a usb charging cable as compact as the size of a credit card. Given that it will be thicker, possibly 2 credit cards. This ChargeCard will allow you to borrow any USB port and charge your iPhone iPod devices. Very nice. Jump on the kickstart now to get it before the official release.

 

Official link here. iPhone ChargeCard

unlock softbank iphones

Yes. Now it is possible.

This is a soft unlock. Meaning you will need to repeat the process every time you change sim cards. You will need a jailbroken iPhone. At this point 5.1 will not work.

So this is what you will need to do.

1. First backup with iTunes. Remove from USB.

2. Then remove ultrasn0w and furiosmod if you have them installed. Remove gevey sim, insert your current sim. (The one that you want to activate). Turn off your iPhone, turn it back on.

3. Fire up Cydia and install SAM from repo.bingner.com. Reload springboard.

4. Now Open SAM, go to More info, if your ActivationState says ‘Activated’ then skip to step 6.

5. Go back to SAM, go to Utilities,  Revert Lockdown to Stock, then tap De-Activate iPhone

6. Go back to main menu, Enable SAM if it has not yet been enabled. Select your country, carrier, and make sure to tap on the SIMID

7. Go to more information, scroll down to SAM details, select and copy everything in IMSI, then hit Spoof real sim to sam.

8. Back to main menu, scroll down to IMSI, paste what you copied into it. (overwrite)

9. Fire up iTunes, connect iPhone, it will give you an error but appears to activate, close iTunes, and now Disable Sam (tap enable to disable)

10. Fire up iTunes again, connect iPhone, it will say error can’t be activated, disregard. Close iTunes, fire it up again, and it will give you another error but phone is activated, close iTunes and fire it up again, this time no errors and all is well.

There, now your softbank iPhone is unlocked on your NTT DOCOMO or whatever. Congrats!

Softbank wifi on iPad and iPhone not working on iOS 5

Since I do not have a fon router and I am now in the US, I have no real way of testing it. But I receive a dozen emails every week asking if there is anything new. Interestingly enough I will be returning to Japan in Nov to retrieve the fon router.

But for those feeling adventurous and technical here I once again release some background information that I have come across.

How Fon routers etc works.

  1. Customer connects to sbwifi.jp, sbwifi.jp uses the customers IP to determine the device phone number and account information, website generates an iPhone profile and installs it on the phone.
  2. The iPhone profile contains basic informations such as softbank email access and password, fon router access and password and other various wireless access informations. (You can access softbank email even if you are not on softbank network as long as you have the profile installed, I get softbank email on my T-Mobile EDGE network, imagine that)
  3. When you connect to the FON routers, the wireless profile automatically logins.
With the release of iOS 5 something changed in the settings that no longer allowed users to connect to the FON routers. Two possible causes.
One, Wireless settings has been updated to remove auto-login switch. Two, FON now matches UDID/Mac codes embedded in profile with actual device UDID/Mac.
I am putting my money on One. The reason being when the SBwifi profile is generated you are connected via 3G with WIFI turned off. Your Mac address is not being used. Websites in general can not grab your UDID. Softbank does not store or verify if you are using the same iPhone from when you purchased the plan. To think that the Fon profile has those information might be a little far.
So how do we overcome the auto login switch issue? I came across an interesting page this morning. As some of you have been reading, I believe the update to iOS 5 changed the wireless settings for all users. The updated settings no longer allow users to “Auto Login”.

Auto Login seems to be necessary in order to connect to the FON wireless routers. THis auto login is also called pre-connection password. Take a look at this page posted by apple on instructions to modify the auto login features. You will need iPhone Configuration Utility to modify the actual profile.

I have written about how to get that iPhone Profile onto your mac before. Here are the steps once again, the basics only.

Tether your internet connection via bluetooth or cable. connect to sbwifi from your mac, use safari to emulate the iPhone (might not be necessary) and generate that profile. It will be saved. Use your iPhone configuration to open the file up.

Play around with it.

Toy Factory for iPhone in-depth guide

Toy Factory for iPhone guide and tips.

You have come to the right place for the unofficial scoop on how to play this game. Well lets not let your imagination run wild with what this page will tell you. Quickly I will cover the following points.

Tips – how to succeed in quickly advancing in Toy Factory –with-out- purchasing rubies. Applying real world business into maximizing your profits.

Cost performance- a list of top toys to maximize your profit with the least amount of time spent.

Toy list – a list of toys in toy factory, their materials, price, cost and duration.

Material list – a list of materials in toy factory, their price, time needed and machine.

Machine list – a list of machines in toy factory and what do they make.

Toy Factory is a game build by Noritown released by Chillingo for the iPhone or iPad devices. This website is an unofficial guide to the game. All graphics belongs to Noritown and Chillingo.

Toy Factory is a very dangerous game to play. The game is extremely addictive. If you love playing sims, this is the ultimate time waster. Be prepared to waste a gazillion amount of time on it. The game is a Freenium game. It is free to buy and play. But to purchase certain ingame items you would need to use Ruby. Ruby can be purchased with real cash. Ruby can also speed up the game by making certain tasks faster. So for thoes with some spare cash, make your itunes account ready.

 

General game play

Well the game is quite easy to grasp. You are the master mind behind the toys. You are building toys with materials such as wool, wood, buttons, springs etc. You then turn around and sell those toys to people.

 

To build the toys, you first must build the materials. Each material is produced with different machines. Each material takes different amount of time and cost to make. Each player is allowed to place a limited amount of machines on the floor dictated by your level. As you level up, you will be granted more ‘space’ to place your machines.

 

After you have accumulated enough materials, you then can build your toy. The building process is instant. After the toy is built, you will then display the toy in your toy shop. Each toy shop has a limited amount of ‘space’ that you can use to display your toy. The space is also, dictated by your level. As you level up, you will be allowed to display more items.

 

Toys are not sold instantly. They take time to sell. For example, A doll is priced at $1000. The doll has a duration of 10 minutes. That means, the shop will generate $1000 over the period of 10 minutes. When the time is depleted, the doll is sold out. You then can place another doll on the empty space.

 

As you place your dolls and begin to decorate your store, customers will walk in on a constant basis. The customers upon entering will have a Happy face or a Sad face. Apparently, if they see a lot of toys, they are happy. If they see a lot of empty space with less toys, they are sad.

I still do not know if the customers being happy or sad affects your store performance. But if you are completely sold out of all toys, then your store will stop generating revenue completely.

As you level up, you will be able to build better toys, build better machines to make better materials and expand the overall size of your store.

 

Tip

Do not spend your ruby to speed up material building or to save expired material. Save your ruby to buy machines. Every level up grants you one ruby. So I would suggest to invest into a Twister or Cutter. Machines purchased with ruby builds 5 items at the same amount of time spent. It is the ultimate investment.

 

Do not leave your material constructions unattended. They will expire. Especially the materials that takes a long time and high cost to produce. Set up a timer on your phone to remind you that the production is amount to complete.

 

You can move stuff around after you purchase them. Bring up the BUILD menu, tap on the item you want to move, drag it to its new place.

 

You can store items that you do not want to sell, but want it out of your shop. Bring up the BUILD menu, tap on the item, tap on store. You can bring the item out anytime you want using the build menu. Items in storage has an EA symbol.

 

Game saves/Player profile

Many of you might have wondered how to restart/reset your game saves, well the simple answer is, there isn’t a way. Once you have created your profile/save, you can not delete, reset or restart. It is a done deal.

 

The reason behind it is quite simple. Chillingo is on a full blast implementation of the Crystal ID system. Crystal ID system is similar to Apple’s Game Center. When you start Toy Factory for the first time, it gives you the option of playing with Game Center or without Game Center.

If you choose WITH game center, it will then create an account based on your Game Center login on Crystal. Then every time you start Toy Factory with Game Center Login, you will login to that saved file.

 

If you choose to start the game WITHOUT Game Center, then it will create an account based on your deviceID ( most likely UDID )  on Crystal. You will then, load that saved file every time you start your game.

 

There is, absolutely no way to –delete- the game save once it has been created. Even if you use the in-game Crystal menu to delete the account, your game save will remain, persistent. Removing of the game does not help. Save games are stored on server.

Virtually, each device has 2 save profile. One with Game Center, and the other with UDID. So using this knowledge, it has been confirmed that if you sign up a new Game Center account, you will then be able start a new game of Toy Factory. However, signing up for a new Crystal account, does not grant you a new game.

 

Generating revenue- Toys that make a lot of money.

Generally, the more expensive the toy, the more money it will make, right? Not quite. We have to look at several factors here. Since each toy has a duration, you can pretty much factor how the toy generates over a period of time, lets say minutes. So, to see how profitable a toy is, you would calculate Revenue / Time or Revenue over Time (ROT).

 

Lets take Airforce One for example. It sells for $6400 but has a duration of 960 minutes. It’s ROT is 6400/960 or $6.6/minute. Lets compare that to Belle Ballerina priced at $2400 over 240 giving us $10/minute. That means on the market, Belle Ballerina has a better ROT than Airforce one. But ROT isn’t everything. We also have to look at the Cost and time it takes to produce factor.

 

List of Toys with high ROT. List of Toys with high profit.

Each toy is composed of materials. Each material takes time to make. Cost is the entire cost associated by adding all materials together. Time is how long would it take to make all of the materials on a one by one basis. You can take a look at the following lists.

List of Toys with low production time. List of Toys with low production cost.

Now with that said, you can make your own choices on what toy to make. For those with a lot of free time, you can focus on high ROT toys which require more store control and production. Those with less time, should stick with high revenue dolls.

 

At level 22, the best toy to make is Snakes and Ladders. Its easy to make, only 4 wood and 4 stickers. It is cheap. It only costs 1088 to make. Its fairly fast to make. And it has a profit of 5662. Its crazy. If you want to make money, build this!

A note on leveling up.

Some of you might feel that you are leveling up too slow. Here are a few tips

  • DO THOES QUESTS! yes, the quests given helps. Do those quests.
  • Building materials AND toys gives you lots of exp. If you have time, build some high exp materials. You will use them later in the game. I would recommend building tons of the _same_ material at the sometime to be simple. That way, all of your materials finish at the same time.
  • Buying decorations gives you experience, also. Those expensive decorations, wall paper and titles award lots of experience.

 

Quests
The quest system is not perfect. After a while, you will notice that its on a loop. Very often you will get quests such as Visit your friends shop, pull the lucky draw or collect materials from friends. So before you visit your friends shop, lets see if you can hop on that quest to make some exp points.

So fed up with the iPhone Unlock scams!

The internet is filled with vile and crappy people who uses scams to make a living. Today I am just outraged by people advertising iPhone unlocks for sale. If you have a real solution and charges money for it, fine. But if you are selling fake promises, fuck you.

So I have launched a separate website to teach everyone the real truth on iPhone unlocks. Find out what can be unlocked. Find out what websites are scams and what solutions work. Take a look.

The Truth about iPhone unlock project.