For work I currently use a {my sprint username}@sprintpcs.com email which forwards an alert to my phone in the form of a text message. It’s annoying, because it doesn’t tell me the content of the message, only that I’ve received one and who sent it. I found out awhile back that Sprint was discontinuing this service, which sucked (I thought).

Today I found a similar better service: {10 digit cell number}@messaging.sprintpcs.com, which will send a text to the phone with the first 160 characters of the email, because that’s the limitation of the text-messaging protocol. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great substitution for a service that is going away.

Because the wife needs a new phone, and because it was too good a deal to pass up, I just bought a Sprint HTC Mogul PPC 6800 on EBay.

$149.99 original price with Buy it Now.
-$15.00, -10% coupon in my ebay messages
+$6.99 shipping
= $141.98 paid.

(in 60 days)
-$45, -30% Microsoft cashback.

Overall amount: $96.98.

This Windows Mobile 6.1 device should be a good upgrade from my WM2003 Palm Treo 700wx, but I think the feature I’m most looking forward to is the GPS — and there’s gotta be some auto-geotagging settings.

SSL is a fairly recent addition (seemingly) to the usenet client arena, most clients that support it have only added support within the past two years or so. I’m giving NZBPerl a try, mostly because it’s the only one that fits in natively with Torrentflux b4rt. NZBPerl “technically” supports ssl (with the –ssl switch), but in practice it hangs and never really accomplishes its tasks. It’s all over teh interwebs that NZBPerl doesn’t quite work with ssl, but since the author last released in late 2006, it’s not likely to see an update to properly support ssl.

I spent about 4 hours over the weekend playing around with the source to no avail. If I could find a working patch, I would have applied it and submitted it upstream… that would have been ideal of course.

So I instead used the haxy method, wrap the nonssl nntp requests in stunnel, therefore effectively accomplishing the same goal. Here is the setup I used in Ubuntu:

# superuser assumed
apt-get install stunnel4
vim /etc/stunnel/snntp.conf
# put in the following
foreground=yes
client=yes
[nntp]
accept  = 127.0.0.1:119
connect = SECURE_NEWS_SERVER:563
# /put
stunnel4 /etc/stunnel/snttp.conf 1>>/var/log/stunnel.log 2>&1 &

Then in Torrentflux-b4rt, enable NZBPerl (ensuring prereqs match first), set the server hostname to 127.0.0.1, add your username/password to the list, and give it a try. Of course inspect /var/log/stunnel.log if there are any issues. Worked like a charm for me.

Apparently there are some malicious Adobe Flash ads out there that can hijack your browser clipboard. The issue affects Linux, Windows and OS X; Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer — basically any client that relies on the Adobe Flash plugin. If you don’t believe it, check out the proof of concept (you have been warned). That particular site hijacks your clipboard with “http://evil.com”.

I saw this today when my browser (Firefox 3.0.1 — latest on Windows XP — patched) wouldn’t let me copy and paste text. It would be the same potentially malware [http://windowsxp-privacy.com/?id=...] result every time I CTRL-V’d. After some digging around, I realized that it was localized to my browser (I thought for sure it was a system issue at first), so to fix the issue, I closed the browser and re-opened. The issue was resolved.

Considering the manual effort required to update Flash, combined with the fact that I usually only install Flash when a computer is built and never update it, this leads me to believe this issue is widespread and not going to be fixed anytime soon. It’s a minor annoyance, but still, a pretty neat little exploit.

Ended up purchasing an Apple Macbook 13.3″ refurbished and used. I just couldn’t see myself (or my wife) using and enjoying something so small and gutless.