Posted on 01 May 2008
You might have changed the background image or wallpaper of your iPhone to give it a personal touch, but what if you could set a video as your iPhone wallpaper. Would you be interested? If "Yes" then checkout
vWallpaper, the latest native iPhone application that lets you do exactly that.
Posted on 01 May 2008
Our gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here's how:
To masquerade as an iPhone, you'll need to tweak your browser's user agent, which web sites use to identify your browser when you connect to the site. In Firefox, you can install the
previously mentioned User Agent Switcher. In Safari, you can select the iPhone user agent through the Develop menu (which you can enable by navigating to Preferences -> Advanced and checking "Show Develop menu in menu bar." Likewise, Opera has user agent switching built in. On the non-Safari browsers, you'll have to manually add a new iPhone user agent
like so.
Now that you're all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you've got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you're done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.
I haven't actually been able to verify this yet (though there are
reports of success), so if you give it a try, let's hear how it worked for you in the comments.
*One Gizmodo reader using his unlocked iPhone with T-Mobile reports that entering his T-Mobile number worked, but your mileage may vary.
Posted on 01 May 2008
One of the most common (and obvious) recommendation before hacking the iPhone is to backup the iPhone so that if things go horribly wrong you can at least restore your iPhone to avoid losing any of your settings such as sound settings, widget settings, certain network settings, and other preferences and information such as text messages, notes, call history contact favorites etc.
Posted on 30 April 2008
Blogger Ron Brinkmann doesn't want to buy an overpriced laptop stand or build his own
DIY laptop stand. Instead, he takes the cheap and easy route and uses a
$6 hot water bottle as a water-cooled laptop stand. Brinkmann says:
Yup, buy a hot water bottle, fill it up with tap-water (room-temperature is fine) and insert strategically between laptop and lap. It's comfy, acts as a nice heat-sink, and as a bonus it probably blocks a fair bit of the dangerous 'electronic rays' that are shooting out of the bottom of the computer straight at your important bits.
Brinkmann claims the water bottle works great on the table as well—just lean your laptop on the water bottle and the rubber surface grips the table and keeps your propped up laptop in place. Nothing beats this cheap and simple, and the cooling effect of the water bottle means no more burning laps.
Posted on 30 April 2008
Men's Health magazine online offers four free workout videos that you can download, drag into iTunes, and sync directly to your iPod. The routines range in intensity from the at-home muscle plan—which suggests a circuit of exercises you can do at home—to more gym-focused workouts like the "Ultimate Strength-Boosting" workout. The videos are short and serve more as reminders for how to correctly do the exercises rather than 30-minute as-you-go walkthroughs. For even more free iPod video workouts, check out
previously mentioned iPod Gym. The Men's Health videos require a free registration with the site (or quickly stopping the page load before it hides the direct video links).
Posted on 30 April 2008
Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing Manager
When I add a new friend to Gmail chat, sometimes my friend's email address is added as their contact name, such as hikingfan@gmail.com. I personally like to have the name of all my chat friends in my chat list so I don't get too confused as to who's who. To change this, I used to go into contacts, select the contact profile, add the name of my friend, and then save it.
But now with the new version of Gmail (launched for Firefox 2 and IE7) you can make edits to Gmail contacts directly from the chat list. I find it to be a great time saver. All you have to do is hover your mouse over one of your contacts to prompt a pop-up with contact details. If you just click on the contact name, it will automatically become an editable field. Simply type in the desired name and hit "enter." Your changes will save the name in your chat list as well as in your contacts.
Posted on 28 March 2008
When I switched to Gmail more than a year ago, I still had a significant amount of old email stored with my old address. Because I keep messages for a long time and like to frequently search them, I wanted to move my old email to Gmail so it would all be in one place and I could access it on any device, including my mobile phone.
In the end, the move went smoothly, but I picked up a couple of tips along the way that I thought were worth sharing.
Setup
First, you need to tell Gmail how to retrieve your mail from old accounts using POP. Go to Settings > Accounts > Get mail from other accounts > Add another mail account. A new window will pop-up asking you for the email address you're going to import mail from. Fill this in and click on "Next Step."
I found it useful to label incoming messages with "Imported" (use any thoughtful label you can think of), so I could easily identify imported mail later on.
Then, validate with "Add Account" and finally, select "Yes, I want to be able to send mail as yourname@gmail.com." I'm a big fan of using the "from:me" search in Gmail that lets me look for email I sent using any name or address by simply searching "from:me." I wanted to make sure I could continue to find everything I’ve sent under all my old addresses and aliases, and this last step makes that work.
Sending mail from your old address
If you would still like to have the option of sending mail from Gmail that appears to recipients as if it were sent from your old email address, you can set up a custom "From:" by going to Settings > Accounts > Send mail as: > Add another email address.
Click on "Next Step" and then "Send Verification." You'll receive an email with instructions on how to validate your old address. Once it's set up, you can select this address in the "From" field when replying or forwarding.
It might take a while for Gmail to fetch everything from your old account, but the end result was definitely worth it for me.
