The iPod touch jailbreak attempts continue but there's little progress and less to report. Martyn, one of the hackers, has disassembled his touch and has attempted to read the chips directly. This hasn't been a huge success. I have been using iPhuc's grestore mode and my digital camera's video to try to see if we can learn more about the vocabulary the touch uses to communicate with iTunes. You can view my extremely blurry pictures in the attached gallery.

Does the touch indicates the future of the iPhone? The news looks bleaker by the day.

If you're looking for the 'next thing' with which to boost your Facebook ninja status, Subsume just might be it. Right now it's an alpha so it's a little rough around the edges, but it primarily displays updates from your Facebook friends with Growl, a TUAW favorite that allows applications to display useful popup alerts when something happens (your song changes in iTunes, new email arrives, a buddy goes offline, etc.). Setting up Subsume is easy, just like with any other app that hooks into Facebook; you're taken to a Facebook login that prompts you for your credentials (if you aren't logged in already), then Facebook asks you to authorize Subsume to display your info. At an interval that Subsume's site doesn't describe yet (remember: it's an alpha folks), the app will check your Facebook account for any status updates from your friends, then display them in Growl's handy, unobtrusive update alerts. For the Facebook obsessed, this could turn out to be a great app that keeps you on top of what's going on without having to keep some kind of a window always open and taking up space.

Subsume is provided as free for now at subsume.info. I should note that the developer, Jacob Jay, developers one of my favorite picture sharing utilities: PictureSync, which we've mentioned on TUAW a few times before.

We've definitely caught the Twitter wave here at TUAW (we even have our own account), but it is by no means the only 'what are you doing' or lifestream service on the block. Another big player is Jaiku, which brings a fairly different perspective and set of features to the table. While Twitter focuses primarily on asking 'what are you doing?' and offers straight text input, Jaiku allows you to add RSS feeds from virtually any other blogs, sites or communities you post content, generating a sort of play-by-play for almost everything you're creating on the web. This definitely swings Jaiku over to the lifestream category, and it has a number of other features that will likely appeal to those who are looking for more than a plain text mini-blog, such as 'channels' that allow Jaiku users to all post in one theme-specific area (likening it to a giant chat room), as well as an actual comment system on posts.

A major boost for web services like Jaiku (where we also have an account), in my opinion, is great software that can hook into them. While using a browser to interact with these services is fun and all, nothing beats the speed, flexibility and (ideally) extensibility of a well-written desktop client, and Juhu for Jaiku is exactly what I'm talking about. Doing for Jaiku what Twitterrific does for Twitter, Juhu is an app that lives in the menubar, giving you a resizable window for peeking in on what your Jaiku contacts are posting. Posts, RSS links and channel chatter are all available in Juhu's nice, compact UI, as are some of the nice little touches Jaiku offers, such as adding an icon to your posts and specifying your location.

All in all, Juhu is a great client for a feature-packed service that's been progressing very nicely. Fortunately, just like Jaiku, Juhu is provided free and is also open source under the MIT license. If you've been looking for a different take on the lifestream service, Juhu makes Jaiku a great option for Mac OS X users.

I'm a pretty happy DreamHost customer, though I've been with enough basic hosting plans to realize that many hosts (at least the ones in my price range) might experience some hiccups from time to time. It just seems to be the way hosting is, at least in my tax bracket. Fortunately, DreamHost offers a status website and RSS feed to help customers check in on the network, but a fellow DreamHost customer by the name of Geoff has created a Dashboard widget just to give us one more option for staying on top of things. The widget simply loads the same status text one can read via the website or RSS, but it offers a compact, quick-access window into the world of DreamHost's status without having to refresh a website or add yet another feed to your exponentially increasing RSS list.

iChat Extender is a little app that lets you tweak various settings of iChat that unfortunately don't have a pref pane of their own. Features such as the format of the 'iTunes now playing' status message and the style of chat bubbles can easily be adjusted with this handy and free app.

For more fun with little apps, check out the developer's other utilities such as illis, an iTunes controller and Growl notifier, as well as Star, a menubar utility for rating your iTunes tracks and notifying you when a track is un-rated.

All of these utilities are free and Universal Binaries.