Joaquim Barbosa

iOS 10.2.1 and jailbreaking: what are my options?

What with the release of iOS 10.2.1 and the soon-to-be-closed signing window for iOS 10.2, many people are wondering what the best strategy is for their device. Should they stick with a jailbroken firmware or jump to iOS 10? If they're already without a jailbreak, which iOS version do they need to be on to make sure they get one? What do they need to do to be able to upgrade to iOS 10.2 later, and keep their jailbreak for now?

In this article, we'll quickly go through what we consider the smartest options for each device and iOS version, so that you can (hopefully) make an informed decision.

Extensively updated to reflect beta release of Yalu for 10.2.

How to move your Mac user folder to a separate drive from the boot drive

If you only have a small SSD in your Mac or Hackintosh, then storage space can be at a premium. For most users, by far the largest thing saved on their boot drive is the User folder, which contains their user account. If your user folder is filling up your SSD and you want to keep that high-speed storage for the operating system and applications, then this guide is for you.

It is possible to move your entire user account onto another drive, completely separate from your macOS boot drive. This will free up space on the boot drive and allow large media folders like Music, Movies, and Downloads to reside on a larger capacity drive.

How to get the new iOS 10.2 emoji on your jailbroken iOS 9 device

With the release of iOS 10.2, Apple introduced a whole bunch of new emoji. The Unicode 9.0 collection features 72 new emoji, including such crowd-pleasers as "Nauseated face" and "Fox face".

Emoji are an extremely popular part of messaging on iOS and some people even update their devices just to get the new releases. However, you needn't choose between your jailbreak and your smileys; in this article we'll go through how to get the new iOS 10.2 emoji on your jailbroken iOS 9 device.

Delta emulator for iOS beta 2 released

Riley Testut's new project Delta, the retro game console emulator, continued its early phase testing yesterday, with the release of a second build for those on its closed beta testing program. According to Testut, healthy feedback from the testers resulted in a slew of bugs and improvement suggestions reported from the first beta, and this second iteration consequently comes with a handy list of fixes and additions.

How to save jailbreak tweaks on your device with redeb

Sometimes a developer's repo goes down, they withdraw a tweak, or they update the tweak on their repo and don't leave your favoured previous version up. In these cases, you may want to save the tweak to your device so as to have it for later use.

The trouble is that Cydia removes the install files, saved in .deb format, after it has finished installing the tweak to your device. So unless you save the .deb file after you download it from Cydia, but before it installs (which is unlikely as it's cumbersome and easy to forget to do), you would seem to be out of luck. But are you? In this guide, we'll show you how to repackage already installed tweaks into .deb files for safekeeping, using redeb.

How to customize the “About This Mac” section of a Mac

The "About This Mac" window contains information relating to your computer specifications and OS version, and is useful for quickly checking any of those details. However, it's a little impersonal, and often (on a Hackintosh), incorrect. If, like me, you enjoy customising your machine to your own personal taste then this guide should help somewhat, by jazzing up the "About This Mac" section.

How to verify your .shsh2 blobs with img4tool

We recently reported how some of the .shsh2 blobs saved with previous versions of tihmstar’s TSSChecker were faulty. One problem affected all iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus blobs, rendering them useless. This issue has now been fixed going forward, though past blobs are invalid.

The other problem was more complex and affected only certain models of certain devices. It is also fixed for blobs saved from now on, but given these occurrences, it is important to be able to check whether the blobs you saved in the past are in fact valid and fit for use with Prometheus.

In this article, we’ll go through how to use another tool from tihmstar’s Prometheus suite, img4tool, to verify that your .shsh2 files are good. This method will clarify whether you are affected by the second problem mentioned above, but will also work in general, when checking the validity of your blobs in future.

CoolBooter demo: the dual-boot tool for iOS

Developer Jonathan Seals recently released a new piece of work called CoolBooter, an interesting tool which allows some 32-bit devices to dual-boot different iOS firmwares. With a simple reboot it can allow, for example, switching between iOS 6 and iOS 9. Whilst this functionality is commonplace in the desktop computing world, booting multiple operating systems on iOS devices is much rarer.

Sebastien and I talked briefly about the tool on Let's Talk Jailbreak 157, and in this article I'll give some more info, as well as a video demonstration of it in action.

iOS 10.2 jailbreak could come via YaluX update

The creator of the iOS 10.1.x jailbreak YaluX has announced that he intends to update the tool, currently in beta, to add support for iOS 10.2. Luca Todesco tweeted that his solution for the instability of the early builds of his tool has tangentially allowed for compatibility with the most recent firmware, news which will no doubt delight many in the jailbreak community who are trapped on iOS 10.2, and who have been lamenting the death of the jailbreak on currently signed firmwares.

TSSChecker now correctly supports iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus

It seems tihmstar has been busy putting right the flaws in his suite of tools; just one week after he revealed that a bug in his .shsh2 saving tool TSSChecker had led to all iPhone 7(+) blobs saved with it being invalid, a new update restores the ability to correctly save blobs on Apple's most recent flagship device.

Yalu + mach_portal now supports TSMC models: still unstable

Luca Todesco's beta jailbreak for iOS 10.1.x, dubbed YaluX or Yalu + mach_portal, slightly broadened its device support list recently by adding the iPhone SE (TSMC chip version) and iPhone 6s(+) (TSMC chip version) to the club. Bear in mind, we do not yet recommend the tool to the average user, and Todesco himself has spoken of the possible difficulties brought about by too many people making use of the tool in its unfinished state.