A friend asked if I was using a Blackberry 7100 and if I liked it. The answer now is a resounding YES since I’ve upgraded to 4.0 of RIM’s OS. That and the fact that T-Mobile finally unblocked all ports. Yeah, they had blocked all ports from the phone with the exception of the popular HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP ports, rendering some of the instant messaging apps, as well as the SSH and telnet clients unusable. Last week, they upgraded their servers and unblocked all ports so now I can SSH from my phone to my *nix servers. Pretty weird on this small screen but, still, incredibly useful. The overall reliability of the phone’s OS has increased dramatically and I’m no longer plagued by Bluetooth-induced phone resets. Yeah, I’m pretty happy.

Couple of good places to follow developments with the Blackberry: BlackBerry Forums, especially the forum entitled General Charm Discussion, RIMRoad (for Research In Motion) and PDA Street.

PC World has this article that describes a spyware program that specifically targets Microsoft’s anti-spyware app. Says it tries to disable it, delete all files within its folder and installs a keylogger that records information typed into several UK banking sites.

(From digg.com)

You can test your popup blocker at PopUpTest.com. It links to various popup techniques. Site seems benign and has links to free and commercial blockers.

Google Maps is apparently a new service from Google. I hadn’t seen it before today.

Got this from digg.com:

This web page describes a spoof that every browser but IE allows. As near as I can tell it has to do with the fact that IDNs (International Domain Names) can have country- or language-specific characters in them, yet the display like English characters. So you will see a URL that appears to be, for instance, http://www.paypal.com but it’s actually http://www.p&amp#1072ypal.com — the “&amp#1072” is an accented “a”.

You can circumvent this problem in Firefox but the fix doesn’t persist across browser restarts. Opera’ssupposedly got a fix for it now.

From Elias Fontinis comes TaskArrange which allows you to order the icons that appear in your taskbar as you want them. He’s also got Deskpins which lets you pin any window to your desktop and keep it on top of all others. Both are free.

(digg.com)

I’m not usually big on minimizing apps to the system tray … I’ve already got far too many icons down there. But this one does a couple of things that I find to be really handy: it keeps Firefox resident, even if I’m not running it at the time (and if I’m not running Firefox now, you can bet I will be within the next 10 minutes). It also allows me to start Thunderbird, have it minimize to the tray and announce when I’ve got new mail. Both of these are good things for me.

To make this all work, go here and don’t forget to click on the Installation link at the top of the page to get all the details on what you need to do. Not a lot of work but a tiny bit more than usual.

(digg.com)

Have you ever wondered how someone else can send email that looks like it came from you? This how-to guide describes it in excruciating detail. Not for the faint of heart, it’s a bare metal guide on how to do it. It’s not elaborate nor does it explain what the various commands do but it shows you how simple it is to send email, making it look like it’s coming from someone else.

Why am I passing this on? Because you should know how easy it is.

Another item courtesy of digg.com:

Copy your DVD into DivX5 format – Guide for 16:9 anamorphic movies

Yeah, free! SimpleOCR is free and a pretty decent OCR application.