Gadget News

If you’ve been holding off on a T-Mobile G1 purchase because you didn’t like the apparent user restrictions, there’s some good news. The Android powered phone comes with an easy button for getting root. Install a terminal app and you can manually start the telnetd service. All that’s left is telenetting into the device and it’ll give you root level access.

What with its open source operating system and developer-friendly nature, cracking open phones running Google's Android was always going to be easier than the full-on assault that was required to hack the iPhone, but we're still impressed by the speed with which hackers have broken the T-Mobile G1.

First is full access to the file system on the phone. This part is easy, but you could potentially break everything with an errant rm -r. You need to grab PTerminal, a command line tool, from the Android marketplace. From there, you navigate to your system/bin folder (where the binaries are kept) and type telnetd to launch the telnet program which lets you login to the phone remotely.

Assuming your Wi-Fi is switched on, you can now type netstat to get your IP address. From there, you just grab a computer on the same network and telnet in. You now have root access to the entire file system. This is the dangerous part, and it's odd that telnet runs this way. The root user, or superuser, is the God of the computer and can do anything, so proceed with care.

This means that one of the big G1 problems has been bypassed. Off the shelf, you can't install applications on the SD card, only in the G1's internal memory. Using this method, you can put applications on the SD card and point the phone at them. According to a post on the Android Community forums, this works just fine.

Aside from putting applications where you want them, root access to the OS means that a carrier unlock should be possible, meaning that you can use the phone on any supported network. On the same forum thread, user Shebanx, claims to have done just this, and although he used a third party unlock service, he claims that all the Google Apps still work (Gmail, Calendar and so on).

It's a great first step, and we can be sure that, as Android is a Linux-based operating system, there's going to be plenty more where that came from. Bring it on!

Android Jailbreak, first steps forward !!- get root access to your G1 [Android Community]

How to get Root on the G1 [XDA Developers Forum]

G1 is Jailbroken [ModMyGphone]

As you can plainly see, we’re embracing International Caps Lock Day with full gusto. Go ahead, try it out in the comments. Caps lock is the cruise control for cool. Surprisingly, there are quite a few full time haters of the key running campaigns: CAPSoff and anticAPSLOCK actually united to form CAPSoff.org to further development of a caps lock free keyboard.

Once you’re tired of yelling at people online (like that’ll happen), you might attempt to do something useful with the key. In OSX, you can remap the caps lock key in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Modifier Keys. You can make it an extra Command, Control, Option, or select No Action. If you want to map it to another key entirely, try a program like fKeys. You could map it to Esc to make Vim—THE BEST TEXT EDITOR EVER—easy to use. In Windows, try this | TechRepublic.com" href="http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/howdoi/?p=113">handy guide from TechRepublic for remapping your keys.

If ease of use is not your goal, you could always make a random caps locker hardware dongle.

More Stunning Video Shot With Canon 5D MKII DSLR

By Brian X. Chen November 06, 2008 | 12:34:51 PM

Oo la la. In late September we saw a short film that a professional photographer shot using the Canon 5D MK II: a full-frame, 21.1-megapixel DSLR with video-shooting capabilities. That video was breathtaking, and now some folks in Japan produced a quick six-minute short with the $2,700 camera. It's not as high-budget as the earlier sample, but still, stunning results with a camera that we can't wait to get our hands on at Gadget Lab. Check out the video (above) and let us know what you think.