How To

How To: Set Video as your iPhone’s Wallpaper

By rossboardman ⋅ May 1, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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.

Popularity: 15%

How To: Get Free Wi-Fi Access on Your Laptop at Starbucks, Barnes and Noble

By rossboardman ⋅ May 1, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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.

AT&T Giving Free Starbucks Wi-Fi to iPhone Users? [Gizmodo]

Popularity: 20%

How To: Backup the iPhone, Restore from a Backup & Delete a Backup

By rossboardman ⋅ May 1, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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.

Popularity: 12%

How To: Prop and Cool Your Laptop with a Water Bottle

By rossboardman ⋅ April 30, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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.

Water-cooled laptop stand - $6 [Digital Composting]

Popularity: 15%

How To: Download Free Video Workouts for Your iPod

By rossboardman ⋅ April 30, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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).

Men’s Health Downloads [via jkOnTheRun]

Popularity: 14%

How To: Edit contacts right from your chat list

By rossboardman ⋅ April 30, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing ManagerWhen 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 …

Popularity: 25%

How To: Importing old email to Gmail

By rossboardman ⋅ March 28, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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.

Popularity: 30%