Visas and iPhones and Meds, oh my!

Hey hey,

These past few days have involved lots of busy travel preparations... it feels really good to be getting things done. On Tuesday I finally mailed out my Visa application, after going to AAA for passport photos and doing all the things necessary to have it expedited. Lets hope they are prompt! As of today I have 11 days before I depart... it's hard to believe.

My next project has been my cell phone. On my trip to Ghana last year I learned that you can buy a SIM card for one of their networks and load money on it as you go. I think that's a good system, and it ends up being cheaper than getting AT&T's international plan. I also won't have to worry about the random fees and charges international plans always seem to tack on.

Warning: If you don't want to hear about the laborious process of hacking my phone, skip over the next few paragraphs!

SO, in order to do this with my iPhone I would have to jailbreak and unlock it. The unlock is what allows me to use a non-AT&T SIM card with my phone, and I can't unlock without jailbreaking. I learned a lot about this process from my good friend Jaren... it can get so confusing!

I learned that the current firmware on my iPhone (4.3.5) can only be jailbroken if it is tethered, meaning that every time the phone is turned off or runs out of battery, it has to be plugged into the computer and go through the jailbreak process all over again. Not fun. We tried to downgrade my firmware to a version that would allow me to do an untethered jailbreak, but to no avail.

At this point I decided to just deal with it and try the tethered jailbreak. I was finally able to jailbreak using the program Redsn0w, but when I went to unlock my phone, I learned that my iPhone's modem firmware, or baseband (05.16.02), cannot be unlocked. Great. I then learned that you can change the phone's baseband to the iPad (thats right, iPad) baseband 06.15.00. However, doing this will kill GPS functionality and drain my battery life. Oh, and its irreversible. Not worth it.

While banging my head against the table, I realized that my best option at this point will probably be to buy a cheap jailbroken and unlocked phone on eBay. Enough of this madness. Then, my mother swept in to save the day by handing me my brother's old 1st generation iPhone. He upgraded a while ago, and the phone had nothing wrong with it! From there, the process finally went smoothly. I found this very helpful guide that led me through the process step by step, and it actually worked! Now I have only to find a friend with a non-AT&T SIM card and test it out.

Whew. Next challenge: getting my pharmacy/insurance company to give me three months worth of malaria meds at once.

Thanks for reading!