IOS – way to purchase Cydia apps from a regular browser and not from inside Cydia

Well since you are using Mac OSX, when you plug in your phone you can do the following to back up your pictures OUTSIDE of iTunes.

Step 1

Open up Preview with your phone plugged in. Go to File > Import Image. You will see it populate all your photos/videos. Save them in a separate folder (maybe somewhere on your desktop), then delete them all from your phone.

If you are concerned about mass deleting these files, you can just do it with SSH. This is after you've imported all your images through preview.

From Terminal on your desktop type

ssh root@your-iphones-ip-address-here

Will prompt you with a PW, chances are if you haven't changed it it's alpine or Alpine. Change directories via the following command:

cd /var/mobile/Media/DCIM

Depending on the amount of images/videos you have you will see 100APPLE/ and maybe 101APPLE/. In the directory type this to remove ALL images and movies in one command

rm -r 100APPLE/ 
rm -r 101APPLE/

Backup in iTunes now and you have a fresh backup with just numbers/apps/whatever else. You can then import the pictures/videos back if you want after you restore it.

Perhaps pedantically, I'd like to point out that while you can play back 1080p video through an Apple TV 2, you will still get 720p output. From the XBMC FAQ:

At present, though the ATV2 can decode 1080p video (using Apple's private VideoToolBox API for hardware-accelerated decoding), it is limited to 720p output. The 1080p video is decoded, then down-scaled in hardware to 720p.

Slightly off-topic, but I find Plex to be a superior Apple TV client to XBMC. I prefer the Plex interface to XBMC. You will, however, need to set up a Plex server, as Plex for iOS is a client that needs to hook up to a server, which does media management and transcoding as needed.