Bricked iPhone 3GS Reboot Loop After iOS 5 beta 7 OTA

Sep 01 2011

My aging iPhone 3GS — that has been firmware upgraded, jailbroken, and restored innumerable times throughout its 2 year life — was seemingly bricked this morning when I went to upgrade it to iOS 5 beta 7. (Yes, I have my phone’s UDID tied to some developer’s account. Thank you bitcoin!)

My iPhone would reboot constantly, showing the Apple logo, a black screen, a white screen and some vertical lines. I’d seen many botched firmware installs in the past, but this one was odd.

The thing that worried me the most was that I couldn’t even get it into DFU mode. I can’t remember that happening ever before with a botched upgrade or jailbreak.

Fortunately, I came across the Recovery Fix utility from the Tiny Umbrella website.

At first, Recovery Fix seemed to offer no hope, as I still needed to get into DFU mode. But after randomly trying for about 5 minutes, I guess I got lucky, because DFU engaged and it broke out of the loop!

At that point, the greenpois0n software tried a few things, but ultimately stalled. This was fine, because the phone was now fixed, and upon reboot was showing the connect to iTunes graphic.

I’m now attempting to re-install iOS 5 beta 7 via restore in iTunes. We’ll see if it has better results than the OTA update I tried this morning…

UPDATE: The restore worked! I’m now running beta 7 with the latest iTunes. Trying the OTA update was not a good idea — this was touched on in the release notes, and now I know why.

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Panasonic Lumix GF3 VS Compact Camera

Aug 02 2011


I had some time to play around with a Panasonic Lumix GF3, and was left feeling thoroughly impressed. I don’t care much for its touchscreen, low bit-rate video modes or lack of physical controls, but the size of the camera has left me thinking that it’s a real game-changer. Continue Reading »

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Removing Rolling Shutter With Adobe Warp Stabilizer and Final Cut Pro X

Jul 29 2011

When I heard that Adobe had produced a new filter to correct rolling shutter, I was highly skeptical. Previously, I had tried a few first-generation filters from other vendors, and they all seemed to make little difference at fixing my camera’s rolling shutter distortions. But after giving Warp Stabilizer (a filter available for Adobe After Effects) a chance to correct some incredibly bumpy footage, I was absolutely amazed at how well the filter performed! Continue Reading »

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Final Cut Pro X Rolling Shutter Removal and Stabilization

Jul 25 2011


Stabilization filters to remove unwanted bumps and shakes in recorded footage have been available years, but as CMOS based shooters have grown in popularity, the use of this feature has become more questionable, as stabilization often highlights rolling shutter artifacts that can look worse than shaky video.

The solution, taken up by Apple, Adobe and some other smaller plug-in makers, is to develop algorithms that attempt to identify and correct this common issue. In the video up top, I’ve used Final Cut Pro X’s stabilization and rolling shutter analysis in an attempt to increase the image quality of my footage. Continue Reading »

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