Archive for December, 2013

iPhone 5s and evasi0n 7 1.0.1 lessons

Well, at least I was patient enough to wait until the panic died down about version 1.0.0 of evasi0n for IOS 7. My first attempt with 1.0.1 did not go too good. I ended up cutting my loses and restoring. I believe that part of my problem was that I did not have 7.0.4 installed. Other possible mistakes made: had the phone plugged in before firing up evasi0n, did not kill any applications, and did not restart my phone before like I ususally do. Also, I just hooked it up and went for it. As a result, I got stuck on the configuring system 2/2 portion. My response was to kill evasi0n on my computer and try again. Same thing. I rebooted the phone thinking I would definitely have to restore at this point, but I didn’t have too. I deleted the evasi0n icon, killed everything running and rebooted again. Once up, I tried again. It seemed to work this time, until it rebooted and would get stuck on the Apple screen. At this point, I had no choice but to restore. This is when I discovered that I did not have IOS 7.0.4. So, I upgraded and restored, and made sure everything checked out before I more cautiously tried again.

After I restored, I made sure I killed anything I had running/open and I rebooted. Once the phone was rebooted, I started up evasi0n (MacOS Mavericks) and then plugged in the phone. This time everything went flawlessly. When instructed by evasi0n on my computer, I hit the evasi0n icon on my phone. All went well. Note: quite a few reboots with this jailbreak (three or four if I recall).

Turns out I was still a little too early, since the Mobile Substrate had not yet been updated. As a result, pretty much nothing worked. Fortunately, Saurik quickly turned around an update to Mobile Substrate, now called Cydia Substrate. So, between that and PreferenceLoader update and the 3.0-1 update to TetherMe, it looks like I am back in business.

How to move a Windows 8 key to another machine or activate after a fresh installation.

On the old machine/installation, bring up an Administrator Command Prompt.

Enter the following to remove the product key:

slmgr.vbs -upk

From the new machine, go into Administrator Command Prompt.
Enter the following to activate the new machine by phone:

slui.exe 4

If you have already tried the Product key and got the message stating that the key can only be used once, you will be presented with a Windows with a phone number (855 toll free number), and a long string of numbers.

If you did not enter the product key, you will be prompted to Activate with a new key. I have not tested this, but I believe that you could enter your Product key. You should get an error. I would close the window, and try a “slui.exe 4” again. I would think that would get you to the same screen.

Call the phone number.

You will be prompted to enter the long string of numbers.

Then, you will be asked for more information. I was asked how many computers the key has been used on. I answered one (the truth). I was then given a long string of numbers that I entered in the fields at the bottom of the window.

Once complete, I clicked Activate. My installation was successfully activated.

Finding/Replacing control characters in Excel.

While doing some database work, I found myself needing to replace extraneous tab characters in a couple columns in Excel. Here is how I was able to do it. This method could just as easily be applied to any other control character once you know the ASCII code.

Go into Find/Replace.

In the “Find what” field, just hold down the Alt key and enter 0009.

Release the Alt, and Find/Replace as you usually would.

This will find all the tab characters since 9 is the ASCII code for tab. You can do this for any other ASCII character as well, but I doubt that would come up very often.

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