Hasta La Gadget!

The first beta of iPhone 3.0 wasn’t fit for everyday use, but for me, beta 2 is solid enough. And there’s even more reason to go for it: You can use MMS! It’s easy.

This is the method that has worked for us and a few others that we have confirmed solid—if you know of any shortcuts or another way to enable MMS, let us know in the comments. Update: If you’ve been having issues, Giz reader Justin adds some additional steps (now numbered 3 and 4) that he says has worked for him and several others. Let us know it goes.

What You’ll Need
• iPhone 3G running OS 3.0
• Another AT&T phone (non-iPhone)
• This carrier file
• SIM ejector tool (or paperclip)

Prep Your iPhone
1. Download the carrier file.

2. Connect your iPhone to your computer. Open iTunes, and option or ctrl click (depending on whether you’re Mac or PC) “check for upgrade” which will open up your file browser. Select the .ipcc file. This is just a carrier file, it doesn’t do anything to your OS or data. Uploading it to your phone will just take a couple of seconds.

3. To make sure the update worked, go to Settings->General->About and look for “Carrier.” It should say “AT&T 5.”
4. Then go to ettings->General->Network->Cellular Data Network. It should say wap.cingular in the APN box, WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM in the Username and CINGULAR1 in the Password field. Reboot your phone (you can do this after you take the SIM card out).

The Workaround

5.Take your SIM out of your iPhone and pop it into a phone that’s capable of MMS. Make sure it’s registered to your account on AT&T’s site (go into your account manager), replacing the iPhone as your listed phone. You might have to do this manually. I made a couple calls with the phone to make sure it registered

6. Go here, to AT&T’s MediaNet site, and register your phone number. You’ll get an SMS with a 4-digit code to confirm. Punch it in at the website.

MMS, Baby

7. Put your SIM card back in your iPhone. MMS should be working now! It’s kind of pokey (about 30 seconds to send a picture) and it’s dropped a message or two, but we were able to send pictures to people on multiple carriers and receive video from a phone on T-Mobile. It definitely works, and works pretty well. The interface for playing back MMS video (pictured up top) is slick, too.

8. Wonder how you ever did without it.

Word of Caution

We’re rocking an unlimited family messaging plan, so we’re not worried about any charges for blasting out tons of MMS messages. If you’re worried about account weirdness, you might wanna hold off. You could always ask your local AT&T guy to make sure you’re not getting hosed, just tell him you’re a developer (you’ve got iPhone 3.0, after all). Also if you’re squeamish about unofficial OS files, obviously.

Big thanks to Scratic, who showed this method to us. If you know a better way, let us know!

This article was written on October 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

Have you ever been on a page with a ton of animated GIF’s, and all you’re trying to do is read the content? It can get quite distracting, but if you’re using Firefox or Internet Explorer just hit the ESC key. Doing so will immediately pause all of the animated GIF images on the page. Go ahead, try it with this image:

The only bad part about pausing the images using the ESC key is that there’s no way to have them resume without refreshing the page.

One thing that I’ve never understood about browsers is why they don’t have a play, pause, and restart options on the right-click menu for GIF animations. That would be a really nice feature to have, but Firefox and Opera users do have a few advanced settings for GIF animations:

–Firefox Users Only–

In Firefox you can also completely disable GIF animations, or only allow them to play through one time. Here’s what you have to do:

1. In the Location Bar type about:config and hit Enter
2. Type “animation” in the Filter field (to quickly find the needed preference)
3. Double-click the image.animation_mode line and edit it to one of the following:
• none — will prevent image animation
• once — will let the image animate once
• normal (default) — will allow it to play over and over

–Opera Users Only–

If you want to completely disable GIF animations in Opera here’s what you have to do:

1. In the Location Bar type opera:config#Multimedia|ShowAnimation and hit Enter
2. Uncheck the box next to Show Animation, and then save the settings

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Create Animated GIF’s For Free With Gickr
• New Firefox 3 Location Bar
• Firefox 3.1 Alpha Coming July 25th
• Christmas Firefox Themes
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Even if you’ve been casually Torrenting for years, BitTorrent tools keep getting better. Here’s our guide for getting the most out of what is, slowly but surely, changing forever how people acquire and consume entertainments.

This guide is intended for folks who understand the basics but may have only just started to scratch the surface of what BitTorrent clients are capable of. If you’re even more hardcore than the tips here, feel free to drop some knowledge (and links!) in the comments for everyone’s use. Spread the love.

Throughout this guide we’ll be using two of the most popular multi-platform BitTorrent clients, Vuze (formerly called Azureus) and µTorrent. Both apps take two fundamentally different approaches: Vuze packs in just about every feature you could imagine, including a search tool, social-networking-like sharing among friends, a content guide, and much more. µTorrent on the other hand is the opposite: sleek, simple and barebones. The choice is yours.

Lots of our pointers here will take advantages of some of Vuze’s newest features, but we love µTorrent too. Where applicable, we’ll highlight standalone applications that can help bring some of Vuze’s integrated functionality to µTorrent fans.

Set up Your Router’s NAT and Transfer Limits
This is, without a doubt, the single most important thing you can do to ensure the highest possible BitTorrent performance. And it’s also something often overlooked by casual and even intermediate Torrenters.

BitTorrent clients pipe all of their network traffic through a single “port” on your network. But your router likes to partially or fully block traffic that doesn’t come through on all the “standard” ports (like port 80 for web traffic, for instance). So you want to make sure your computer has a clear and open channel to all that data you’re going to be sucking down by setting up “port forwarding,” which lets your router know to which computer on the network it should send traffic on certain ports instead of blocking it. Make sense?

1. In your Torrent client’s preferences under the “network” or “connection” heading, find out which TCP/UDP port it’s using. Keep the default, but for the record, you can choose basically any number you want (but read Vuze’s “Good Port Choices” article first) and if you have multiple machines on the same network using BitTorrent you’ll want to choose unique port numbers for all of them.

2. Now, open up your router’s admin page. This is pulled up by going to your router’s IP address in a web browser (commonly 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.2.1). Sometimes you’ll have to enter a username and password; Google around for your model’s default name/password if you can’t remember it. Users of Apple’s AirPort routers should use the AirPort Utility app.

3. Now, the terminology for what you’re looking for is called different things by all the router companies. Some call it “port forwarding,” others call it “virtual servers” or “port mapping”—the terminology is surprisingly varied, but it’s usually listed under an “advanced settings” tab if there is one. The site Portforwarding.com can help you locate yours if you’re having trouble.

4. Once you’ve found where this all goes down, enter the port number from your client in step 1 for BOTH UDP and TCP fields (you’ll enter the same port number for the “private” or “local” UDP/TCP fields). You’ll also enter your current machine’s IP address (found in Network preferences on both OS X and Windows).

Note: If your machine is a laptop and you’re frequently connecting and disconnecting from the network, you’ll want to set up a static local IP address so you don’t have to switch your router’s settings every time you Torrent.

5. Hit save, and you should be good to go. Your BitTorrent client will have a network test built in somewhere in the preferences—use that to make sure your connection is clear.

6. Now, the final step, is setting a limit to your uploading speeds. As you know, BitTorrent simultaneously uploads to other peers while you’re downloading, and to ensure solid download speeds you must upload. But you don’t want these uploads to take over your limited upload bandwidth, especially if you’re on a cable connection. To be safe, cap your uploads around 20 kb/s. This is a good general ballpark that’ll ensure good download speeds and won’t clog your pipe. If you’re on FIOS you may want to kick that up a bit, but play around.

Vuze has a tool that can help you auto-configure your speeds too—probably worth experimenting with in the prefs.

Cover Your Ass
All the regular disclaimers apply: don’t be an idiot when you’re downloading stuff you probably shouldn’t. Here are some tools and strategies to make sure you keep yourself virus- and subpoena-free. But like always, no guarantees! Proceed at your own risk! Etc.

1. Don’t seed more than is absolutely necessary. The RIAA/MPAA/NARC’s number one priority are heavy uploaders. Not to say that the downloading part is any less illegal, but if you stop seeding and delete your .torrent file after it’s done downloading, your odds of staying safe are significantly higher.

Note: If your carefully crafted code of online morals compels you to continue uploading beyond the amount you shared during the download, feel free, knowing that it increases your odds of getting a friendly note from your ISP. And, please, do seed any files that are intentionally being distributed via BitTorrent, like a Linux distribution or Creative Commons licensed stuff from friends like Nine Inch Nails. You can’t get hurt by that.

You could make an argument that Torrenting is mainstream enough to survive on many thousands of people seeding very small amounts (ie: the amount uploaded while they’re downloading), or you could make an argument about the double (triple? quadruple?) paradoxes that surface when contemplating the morals of consuming vis a vis sharing in the gray to grayish-black Torrent market. But I’m not your dad—what you do is up to you.

2. Go for torrents with a lot of seeds and good comments. If hundreds of people are seeding a file, the odds of it being of good quality and virus free are higher. I know this may seem contradictory to point #1, but you’re not in this for the geek cred. You’re in this for you. So go with the herd. Also, comments on torrent sites will often have some shreds of useful info—if a lot of people report strange behavior with the downloaded file or a mysterious password lock, skip it.

Also, seeking out the geek legends of the Torrent community will go a long way to ensure good downloads. Choose people like aXXo‘s Torrents where possible.

3. Use the Bluetack IP filter to keep known baddies out of your life. The folks at Bluetack maintain a list of IP ranges of known spammers, virus seeders, and undercover snoops like Media Defender who might bust your ass. To add the list to Vuze, go to Preferences -> IP Filgers and type in the following URL into the auto-fill field: http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/level1.zip

Update: Someone who should know has advised us against using Bluetack for a whole litany of reasons, most shocking of which is that Bluetack is some elaborate ploy to mess with P2P networks from the inside. Over my head, but for what it’s worth, maybe don’t use Bluetack.

4. Look at private torrent sites. Even though Oink’s hallowed days are over, there are still a number of good, private BitTorrent sites, where your odds of getting hit with random malware or a federal subpoena are lessened. But they may take some conniving to get invited to, and you’ll likely be forced to upload a certain amount to keep your membership.

5. Moderation, moderation. When you can, watch on Hulu, or heaven forbid, buy from your favorite artists. And the less massive your bandwidth usage, the less likely you are to draw the ire of your ISP (or their monthly bandwidth cap).

Autodownload Your Favorite Shows via RSS
For serialized stuff like TV shows, you can easily set up Vuze to subscribe to popular series via RSS and auto-download them every week. It’s nice. µTorrent lovers should check out TED, a cross-platform standalone app that does the same thing.

1. In Vuze, search for your favorite show. Once you’ve found the newest episode and added it to your download list, click the orange RSS button under “Subscribe.” The subscribe window can also look at other files in your library and subscribe to those too.

2. You’ll see a lot of different options, all seemingly the same. Choose HD where possible, and if there’s an EZTV option, choose that—it’s a reliably source of good torrents. Then, new episodes will appear in your Subscriptions area automatically, and you can pull them down.

Stream to Your Game Console or Transcode For Your iPod/PMP/Phone with Vuze
The newest version of Vuze added a seriously useful transcoding and streaming tool—just when you thought there couldn’t be anything else crammed into this app. But it’s great, and works perfectly to auto-detect a PS3 or Xbox 360 on your network and stream your downloads to your TV without any annoying configurations.

1. Enable the streaming add-on under the “Devices” option in the left pane.

2. If your PS3 or Xbox 360 is on and connected to your network, it will automatically show up as a device. Simply drag a file from your library to the icon for your console, and it will be available in the expected area (in the Video menu of the PS3’s XMB and the My Video Library, as another PC, on the Xbox 360).

3. The tool will also transcode to iTunes in sizes optimized for iPods, iPhones and Apple TV using the same process. Just drag the file from your Vuze library to the iTunes icon, and after a somewhat slow conversion time, it will be copied to your iTunes library. Pretty sweet.

Next Steps
There are plenty of places you can take it from there. Like setting up a dedicated, always-on torrrent machine, either with a spare PC or a standalone NAS box with a built-in Torrent client. Then you can take advantage of web-only interfaces to access and manage your downloads from the road.

Sounds like pretty good fodder for a future how to, doesn’t it? Keep your eyes peeled.

So that’s about it! Like we said before, if you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments—your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend Torrenting, everyone!

Image courtesy of, you guessed it, Jason Chen.

This article was written on February 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons that I love Gmail the most is the remarkably powerful filter system that is integrated into it. With the filtering system you can analyze emails as they hit your Inbox, and then perform certain actions on them. If you spend the time to setup quality filters it can almost be like having your own personal secretary to sift through emails, but it’s a lot cheaper.

Google doesn’t limit the amount of filters that you can create in Gmail (although just 20 of your filters can forward emails to another address) so you can go as crazy as you would like. Today we’re going to take a look at some of the various ways that you can put the filters to work for you.

–Using Gmail Filters–

Setting up Gmail filters can be as easy or as hard as you would like. Some filters that I’ve setup are rather simple and are just based upon the from address, while others took a little more thought. Lets start with an overview of how you would setup a filter:

1. Click Create a filter (next to the Search the Web button at the top of any Gmail page).
   
2. Enter your filter criteria in the appropriate field(s).
   
3. Click Test Search to see which messages currently in your account match your filter terms. You can update your criteria and run another test search, or click Next Step.
4. Select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to messages matching your filter criteria in the order in which the actions are listed — for example, you could choose to Forward matching messages to a specific email address, then Delete the messages.
   
5. If you’d like to apply this filter to messages already in your account, select the Also apply filter to x conversations below checkbox.
6. Click Create Filter.

–Tips & Tricks–

Using the filters can be pretty easy, but here are some things that might help you out along your quest for a cleaner Inbox:

• When blocking email addresses in the From field you can keep things a bit more general if you would like by specifying just the domain. For example, if you receive a bunch of messages from Orkut users instead of blocking each individual address just enter *@orkut.com in the From field.
• I’m able to use only one filter for blocking dozens of spam addresses thanks to the OR operator. For example, entering in spamaddress1@junk1.com OR spamaddress2@junk2.com will block emails coming from either of those addresses. There’s no need to create separate filters for each address.
• If you use Google Talk’s chat history feature you’ll soon realize that your conversations are also analyzed against your filters. To exclude chats from a particular filter enter is:chat into the Doesn’t have field. This will ignore all of your Google Talk conversations in the filters.
• You can scan filetypes in an email by putting filename:type in the Has the words field. Just replace “type” with the extension of the file that you want to filter. For example, to filter for Windows Media Player videos you would enter filename:.wmv into the field.
• Gmail supports what’s called “plus addressing” meaning the email address username+blah@gmail.com is still sent to the username@gmail.com email address. When signing up for services use this method so that filtering is even easier. For example, you could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the To field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them.

–Useful Filters–

To get the ball rolling I thought I would list out some of the ways that I’ve put the filters to work:

• Anti-phishing – I use the plus addressing technique that I mentioned above for all of my financial accounts. Then when the emails come in I check the To address to see if it is from someone like eBay. If it is I’ll apply a “Financial” label to it. This coincidentally happens to serve as an anti-phishing mechanism as well, because if you think about it almost no scam artists are going to guess the “plus addresses” that I’ve created. When I see an email from eBay that didn’t get my label I know something fishy (no pun intended) is going on.

  Note: It’s not enough just to analyze the “from” address of an email when dealing with financial companies because those are often spoofed by the scam artists.

• Bacn – Remember Bacn? We talked about it last year when it was introduced as the “almost spam” emails we often receive on a daily basis. They refer to things like notifications from Facebook or newsletters that you’ve subscribed to. These are emails that you want to read, but don’t want cluttering up your Inbox. I have a ton of various filters set up for things like this, but my main one just applies a “Notifications” label to the email messages and then they skip the Inbox.
• Forwards – I receive quite a few forwards on a daily basis, and I normally never even open them up. Unfortunately the text “FWD” doesn’t show up in the subject line for most of the ones that people send, so I had to take a additional steps to block them all. Here are the two methods that work well for me:
• If you can see every person that they send the forward to go ahead and pick one of the email addresses that you’re not familiar with. Then just create a filter blocking all emails being sent To that address. That way you should still receive any of the personal emails that are directly sent to you while removing all of the ones that are mass-emailed.
• If the BCC (blind carbon copy) was used the previous method won’t work since you can’t see anyone else’s email address. But you likely won’t see you’re email address in the To field either. To get around this create a filter using the sender’s address in the From field, and then enter -youraddress@gmail.com into the To field. The minus sign before your address is crucial because this filter will check for any messages from the sender that aren’t addressed to you.

–Overview–

There’s a lot more that you can do with the filters, and the advanced operators guide by Google will definitely help you out on setting up extensive filters. I’m sure there are a lot of advanced Gmail users out there, and so we want to turn the stage over to you now. Let us know in the comments how you use Gmail filters to cleanup your emails.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Helpful Tip: Advanced Addressing in Gmail
• 20 Things you can do with Gmail Filters
• CyberNotes: Multiple Email Addresses In GMail Filters
• Hack Alert – Check Your Gmail Filters!
• CyberNotes: Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

If you left this week’s Apple event a little underwhelmed, it’s because most of 3.0’s new features have been available via Cydia and the App Store. Here’s how to enable iPhone 3.0‘s biggest additions today.

Since many of iPhone 3.0’s features were deliberately blocked by restrictions in the official SDK, for several of these apps, you’ll have to jailbreak. But don’t you just love that we already have the definitive tutorial on jailbreaking your phone to hold your hand through the process? That said, a lot of these features are available via free and paid apps in the App Store too.

So start with jailbreaking, then get yourself downloading these apps to get that fresh 3.0 experience before the software even drops.

Cut and Paste: Clippy (Cydia, Free while in Beta)
Apple’s ridiculously delayed cut and paste solution looks slick. Slicker than Clippy, the best unofficial C+P solution, which still gets the job done though. One limitation is that you can only reliably copy and paste where you have access to the keyboard (so grabbing web snippets other than URLs is tough), but if you’re staying in the main text-input apps, it works. Copying text from web pages is technically possible now, but it’s extremely buggy and crashes Safari.

GPS Turn-by-Turn: xGPS (Cydia, Free)
iPhone 3.0 is totally fine with turn-by-turn GPS apps, as long as you bring your own maps to the table (Google’s can’t be used due to licensing issues). xGPS does use Google’s Maps, and does turn-by-turn brilliantly with active GPS tracking.

Tethering: iPhoneModem/PDANet (Cydia, Free)
We’ve got you covered with another detailed tutorial on tethering your iPhone to your Mac (with iPhoneModem) or Windows machine (with PDANet). Keep in mind, the iPhone has always supported tethering—iPhone 3.0 simply brings an official software tool to do it, but it’s still up to the network carriers to enable the feature (and set the pricing). Tethering via these jailbreak solutions works in the meantime, but be careful with how much data you use to not raise any eyebrows at the Death Star.

Email Multiple Photos: Emailpix (App Store, $3)
There have been several official apps touting multi-photo emailing, but for the most part they’ve been sloppily implemented. Emailpix does it fairly smoothly, though, and gives you a choice of resolution to send to save time. Granted, it takes a while, and emails are sent from Emailpix’s server, so you may not want to use it for your nude self portraits.

Bluetooth File Transfer: iBluetooth (Cydia, Free 15-day trial)
iBluetooth lets you pair with your computer to send and receive files. It’s kind of buggy, but does work (try setting up a PIN code if you can’t get your phone to pair initially).

Universal Search: Search (Cydia, Free)
It doesn’t search your applications or your iTunes music like the 3.0 version, but Search is great for the most valuable searching situation: email. It also searches contacts, notes, SMS and the web. If you have a ton of apps, consider pairing Search with QuickGold, a Quicksilver-like app launcher that can also search your contacts, SMSs and Safari history in addition to apps.

Accelerometer Controls: mCoolPhone (Cydia, Free Trial/$3)
The “shake to shuffle” feature in OS 3.0 is kind of lame, and while mCoolPhones can’t touch your iTunes functionality, it lets you assign shake events to various other phone functions, like answering calls.

Notes Sync: iPhoneNotes (Mac-only desktop App, Jailbreak required. Free)
To pull off native notes sync, make sure you have OpenSSH installed on your jailbroken phone and grab iPhoneNotes, which will import all of your notes and also sync back any text file you have on your computer.

Background Apps/Push Notifications: Backgrounder (Cydia, Free)
iPhone 3.0 will attempt to solve the multitasking problem by providing a long-awaited framework for push notifications, which will allow apps to get your attention when they’re not running. But it stops short of true background multitasking, which most Cydia apps are capable of (especially services like SSH). You can use Backgrounder to force official App Store apps to keep running even when you switch away to another app. It’s great for keeping IM apps open and signed in while you do other things.

Landscape Keyboard: iRealSMS (Cydia, €10) and EasyWriter (App Store, Free)
Ah, the beloved landscape keyboard. In iPhone 3.0 it’s coming system-wide (finally), but you’ve been able to get one in the most important typing apps (email and SMS) for a while. For email, try the free EasyWriter App Store app, and for SMS, there’s iRealSMS, which also adds a number of other features for hardcore texters like quick-replying and advanced sorting.

MMS: SwirlyMMS (Cydia, $8) and Get MMS (App Store, $4)
MMS is a major hole, and its implementation via unofficial apps thus far has been shoddy. The best is SwirlyMMS, but even that doesn’t work very well with AT&T’s MMS provider, which most people will obviously be using. But if you’re not on the Death Star, give Swirly a try.

Get MMS, on the other hand, makes receiving MMS messages via AT&T’s annoying web interface a little easier. It takes a screengrab of the login and password AT&T sends, and lets you save the attached video or photo.

Voice Memos: Epiphany (App Store, $2)
There are a million and a half voice recorders in the App Store, but we love Epiphany, which buffers its recordings and only goes back in time to grab the important parts when you tell it to. It can’t send the clip via MMS like iPhone 3.0 will be able to, but it will easily sync with your computer via wi-fi.

Adding Features Still Missing From iPhone 3.0:

Video Capture: Cycorder (Cydia, Free)
The biggest thing Apple still has yet to add into iPhone 3.0 is video recording. Thankfully, Cycorder is incredibly capable.

Flash: iMobileCinema (Cydia, Free)
iMobileCinema is a deep, deep beta plugin for Safari that supposedly enables Flash videos for a few sites. Its major compatibility claim though, with Google Video and YouTube, is moot because Apple’s YouTube app catches these URLs and plays them fine. A good project to keep an eye on though.

So as you can see, the majority of iPhone 3.0’s feature additions are already needs that have been addressed by third-party devs. Of course, most of these apps will not be as elegant as Apple’s native solution, but it shows that iPhone 3.0 is largely about catching up.

The jailbreak world is big. If you know of any apps not covered here that address any of these features, please let everyone know in the comments. Additional research for this post by Nick Ellenoff