Use a Red Bull can as a radio interference shield

Posted Jun 26th 2008 9:00AM by Mike Schramm

I love the iPhone, save for one thing. It sits on my desk every night, right near my computer, and the speakers I've got hooked up to it. And every 15 minutes, when the iPhone checks email for me, I get that buzzing -- the sound of radio interference flying across my speaker wires.

And almost every night, I have to jump out of bed angrily just to shut off the speakers and stop the buzzing. Little did I know, all I've ever needed was an empty can of Red Bull.Yes, someone has fashioned a "shield" out of an emptied and carved up Red Bull can, and supposedly it works like a charm -- just fashion it around the dock that came with the iPhone, use a little doublestick tape to make sure it stays on there (and I would maybe put some around the edges, too, so you don't slice your fingers open every time you pull the iPhone off the dock), and no more buzzing sound.The maker does wonder if it would affect the actual signal of the iPhone at all, but it hasn't so far. If you've got a Red Bull can around to cut up and are driven as nuts as I am by that buzzing noise, here's your makeshift solution. The other option is to buy speakers that don't buzz, of course, but this seems a lot cheaper.

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How to send free text messages from an iPhone

Posted by Dave Merten Jun 28, 2008 at 2:32pm

With current AT&T iPhone contracts, you get 200 free text messages a month. With the new 3G iPhones, this will change. You will need to pay $5.00 a month extra for these 200 messages. Today, I’m going to show you how to send an unlimited number of messages in US and Canada, for free.

How to send free text messages.

1. Create a new email message.

2. In the To: box, type 10digitnumber@teleflip.com. (1235551234@teleflip.com)

3. Type a message and click send.

4. The message will be sent to the cell phone with the number in the To: box

5. All recieved text messages will be sent to you as an email.
Note: This only works for US and Canadian numbers.
Also, there is a Web app that you can send free text messages with. It’s called TxtDrop and you can access it by typing “http://txtdrop.com/iphone/” in your iPhone’s Safari app. They also have a OS X widget here. Enjoy!

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XP Game Compatibility

You want to know if all your favorite games are still going to run under Windows XP. Remember what happened when we tried to run games on our Windows 2000 machines? Sometimes we were a little disappointed. Windows 2000 was made more for corporate applications than "Quake," but true techno-geeks know they don't have to sacrifice death matches for a robust business environment -- at least not anymore.
Windows XP has shown an impressive track record of game compatibility. We ran a number of standard games, such as "Tiger Woods Golf," "NHL 2001," "Max Payne," and "Unreal" on our Windows XP Professional machine. Some of these games were specifically slated for Windows 95 and 98, and were shown not to work in Windows 2000. The installation in XP was as smooth as silk. The games ran quickly and beautifully -- not a problem in sight (except for my bad chip shot -- Tiger was hanging his head in shame).

Some less-sophisticated programs may not run as smoothly, and we found that some older applications, such as the Atari 2600 Classic Game Collection, did not appreciate the Windows XP environment. In this case you can use the Application Compatibility Wizard, found in the accessories menu. XP includes integrated compatibility layers to mimic older versions of Windows, so if your program does not work in Windows XP, the compatibility wizard will walk you through the process of getting even your favorite DOS games up and running. In this case, we ran the Atari Classic Game Collection in the Windows 95 environment, at 256 colors and 640x480 screen resolution. Then we set XP to always run our Atari application in this environment, and everything was smooth sailing after that.One final tip about compatibility: Don't run the compatibility wizard if your program appears to be running well in the normal environment, as the wizard will give you an error message. In general, XP has great program compatibility, so you can upgrade your operating system without giving up all your old favorites.

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