Pressing the Windows key by itself, brings up the start menu, and from there you can navigate up and down the start menu with your keyboard arrow keys, and press enter on the program you want to launch.  No more mousing around!

There are several other Windows key combinations you can perform as well, by holding down the Windows Key and pressing another key:

• Windows Logo+BREAK (Display the System Properties dialog box)
• Windows Logo+D (Display the desktop)
• Windows Logo+M (Minimize all of the windows)
• Windows Logo+SHIFT+M (Restore the minimized windows)
• Windows Logo+E (Open My Computer)
• Windows Logo+F (Search for a file or a folder)
• CTRL+Windows Logo+F (Search for computers)
• Windows Logo+F1 (Display Windows Help)
• Windows Logo+ L (Lock the keyboard)
• Windows Logo+R (Open the Run dialog box)

The first thing you need is your Vonage web account information. Once you have it, enter the following into your web browser, making sure to replace the parts in bold with your account information.

https://im-config.vonagenetworks.net/config?&login=USERNAME&password=PASSWORD&type=1003

You’ll end up with a page full of mostly useless information. however, you want to copy down the following entries as they relate to your account:

ProxyUserName=username
ProxyUserPassword=FAB16g93E7a
ProxyDomain=a.vonim.com
ProxyPort=10000

Now that you’ve got the secret information, you have two choices depending on whether your iPhone is jailbroken or not.

1) If your phone is NOT jailbroken, go the the App Store and grab the free FRING application. Once you’ve set your free Fring account up , go to More then Add-ons
Select SIP, then Other

Fill out the fields as follows:
User ID = ProxyUserName
Password = ProxyUserPassword
Proxy = ProxyDomain:ProxyPort

(mine was a.vonim.com:10000)

Now save those settings and try making a SIP call. you’ll notice that your calls appear to come from your Vonage line. Neat!

2) If you phone is Jailbroken, get on Cydia and install the free SIPHON aaplication. Install it, then go to your iPhones settings menu and open up the settings for Siphon. Enter your username and passsword that you got from the webhack above. For server, enter the Proxydomain:Proxyport.  (mine was a.vonim.com:10000) There’s all sorts of other settings you can make if you’re a real SIP guru.  Close the settings, fire up Siphon and start dialing.

Be sure whenever using either softphone to include the area code when dialing.

Grab the latest version of Itunes before you start and be sure you’re on Iphone 3GS 3.0 software ONLY. I can’t say whether this will work with updates beyond that.

1) go to http://purplera1n.com  Click on the link for your OS, and download either the Windows EXE or the Zipped Mac app.

2) Connect your Iphone 3GS via USB to your computer. Cancel any sync activity.  Launch the appropriate app for your system.

You shoudl see one of these two windows, depending on your OS:

3) Click “Make it rain”, and let the Jailbreak commence…

Your Iphone should go into Recovery Mode at this point, and after a couple minutes, reboot itself. At that point, you’re done. One my phone, it actually got stuck rebooting. I had to perform a reset by holding power and home at the same time.

4) After it reboots, you should have a new app called Freeze. Run it, and it should install Cydia – the jailbreak software repository.

5) Enjoy your new found freedom.

Some cool things you can do with your jailbroken iPhone 3Gs:

• Run background apps
• Hide unwanted app icons (stocks, youtube, weather..)
• Tether
• SSH into (and from) your iphone
• Run unix/bsd command line tools with MobileTerminal
• Customize the look of your iPhone
• Use Qik for live video streaming
• Unlock your iPhone for another carrier

Here’s how I made it work – there may be better ways, but this worked for me, mostly:

Install OSX86 – most of the OSX install is based on this information Try as I might I was only able to get this to 10.5.6. I ran into consistent problems with trying to upgrade to 10.5.7. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

Go out and buy yourself a valid Leopard OSX license.

Find iDeneb 1.3 iso – you know where to look. Download these HP Essential OSX files HERE

Make a USB-bootable thumb drive, from the iDeneb iso, if you don’t have an external DVD drive to burn the Iso to.

You’ll need a mac to do the following:

1. Open up Disk Utility.app in /Applications/Utilites/
2. Select the drive you will be using in the left hand pane.
3. Click the “Erase” tab
4. Under “Volume Format” select Mac OS Extended
5. Click Erase
6. Click the “Restore” tab
7. If you havn’t already, go to your iDeneb.iso and double click it.
8. Back in Disk Utility, you should see the iDeneb.iso in the left pane with another image under it with an apple logo on it.
9. Drag the image to the “Source” location
10. Drag your drive you have erase to the “Destination” location.
11. Click Restore
12. Open up UInstaller and select your newly formatted drive
13. Check the “Install PC_EFI v9 Chameleon Edition 1.0.12”
14. Click Install

Now you can boot with the USB drive. The next part is tricky:

Power off the netbook, and plug in your USB drive.

You’ll need to plug in an external monitor to the VGA port and a USB keyboard and mouse to the other USB port- I used a Mac keyboard, as it has a USB input on it for my mouse.

Now power it up, and quickly press F10. You should get into the BIOS. You can go right ahead and Exit and save changes. This is just to get the USB drive recognized for boot. This time, quickly press F9.  You should see your two boot choices show up on the screen – USB Hard Disk and Notebook hard Drive. Now, before choosing one, you need to switch to the external monitor ONLY. Press the FN key and F2 until the external monitor is on, and the notebook LCD is off.

Now, choose USB Disk and press enter to begin the iDeneb installation. You’ll need the USB keyboard and mouse until the very end.

Everything on your mini is about to be erased.

1. The installer will now begin. Wait at the apple logo until a language selection screen is shown. Select your language and hit next.
2. Go to the top of the screen where it says utilities. From this menu select “Disk Utility”
3. Click on the Mini’s Hard drive in the left pane.

Use the Disk Utility partition manager to create two partitions. Make the first one formatted as free space and the second formatted as Mac OS Extended

After erasing is complete, exit the disk utility
Now click next and select your newly erased hard drive as the destination.

On the next screen you will see an option at the bottom that says “customize”. Click on it and apply the following patches:
a. Expand “fixes” and select: acpi, cpu, and remove firewire
b. Under “patches” expand chipset and select ichx fix
You can now continue with the installation.

First, run the VooDooPS2 Controller package. When prompted, make sure to check that box that says trackpad. Go through all the prompts until it’s installed. Reboot.

Now with working trackpad and keyboard, Open up OSX86 Tools again. Go ahead and reinstall all the kexts in the kext folder.
1. Click on “Install kexts” towards the bottom right
2. Find the kexts folder on your flash drive. Select the first one.
3. Shift+Click the last one to select all.
4. After the installer completes it will ask you reboot. Do it.

To enable Quartz open OSX86 Tools and click the Enable/Disable Quartz GL button. It will tell you the current status. If its disabled, feel free to enable it by clicking the button that says “Enable Quartz GL”.

If you start ActivityMonitor before doing this you will see that OSX only sees 1 processor (press the CPU tab below te process list). To allow it to use the second core do the following:

1) Open Terminal when logged in as an Admin user.
2) Gain root access (“sudo su -” and enter your user password).
3) cd /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
4) Recommend backing up “com.apple.Boot.plist”. Copy it to your home directory or somewhere else.
5) Edit “com.apple.Boot.plist”. Use vi (ie: vi com.apple.Boot.plist). Move the cursor to the line that has “<string>cpus=1 -f</string>”, then press lowercase d twice to remove it. If there are no other <string> lines between the line with “<key>Kernel Flags</key>” and the next <key> line, then delete the Kernel Flags <key> line as well. Save the file by pressing uppercase Z twice.
6) Reboot
7) Launch ActivityMonitor and confirm OSX now sees both cores.

I could not get the Mini to sleep in OSX 10.5.6. The hard drive would sleep, the screen would go off, but the LED’s stay lit and the fan keeps going.  If anyone gets this to work on the 2140 let me know. The wired ethernet adapter doesn’t work either, and I haven’t tested the SD and Express Card slots.

Now on to installing Windows 7:

I chose, again to do this on a USB drive as opposed to burning the DVD.

Next, download the Windows 7 ISo from Microsoft. Extract the files from the ISO using WinRar to a directory on a windows machine of your choice.

Next, log in to a windows machine with admin privileges.

Open a command prompt.

Type “diskpart” in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks.Type “list disk” to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity.

Next, type the following commands, one at a time:

Select Disk # (Where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed “Select Disk 6”)

Clean (removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)

Create Partition Primary (Creates a new primary partition with default parameters)

Select Partition 1 (Focus on the newly created partition)

Active (Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)

Format FS=NTFS (Formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key.)

Assign (Gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned.)

Exit (Quits the DiskPart tool)

Go back to your command prompt, running it as an Administrator. Using the “CD” command, find your way to the folder where you extracted the ISO files. Your command line path should look something like “C:\Users\USERNAMEHERE\Desktop\Windows 7 Beta\”.

Type the following commands:

CD Boot (This gets you into the “boot” directory)

Bootsect.exe /nt60 L: (where ‘L’ is the drive letter assigned to your USB key from the previous step)

Bootsect infuses boot manager compatible code into your USB key to make it a bootable device.

Copy all of the extracted ISO files into the USB drive. You don’t need to do this from the command prompt. Just drag and drop the files from the “Windows 7 Beta” folder into the drive using Windows Explorer.

Your USB key is now all ready to go!

Plug it into your HP Mini and make sure you enter the BIOS (F10) to temporarily change the boot order to allow booting from the USB drive.   Boot it up and follow the Windows 7 installation, choose the advanced installation, and use the Free space you allocated above in the OSX Disk utility.

Once the isntallation is complete, you should have a nice working copy of Windows 7 on yoru Hp Mini 2140. But wait, how do you get to OSX?

Once you’re in Windows 7, connect to the internet and download the beta 2.0 of EASYBCD. You can find it here:

http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=642

Install it, and run it.

Click Add/Remove Entries. Click the little Mac tab towards the bottom.

For Name, enter whatever you want to identify it as OSX

For Mode, choose EFI, and click Add Entry. Click the Save button. Exit and reboot.

You should now get prompted at boot to choose between Windows 7 and OSX. When you choose OSX, just leave it for a few seconds. You’ll see a couple extra text menus with some countdowns. Just let them go, and in a few seconds, you’re in OSX again.

Good luck!

After downloading the free application and loading it my BlackJack II, I found the interface to be nice and smooth, and exaclty what you’d expect from a Facebook application on your mobile device.  The only problem I found was that the subtle different shades of blue used throughout the menu areas make it difficult to determine which menu item you’re currently viewing. There’s no easy way to get back to the HOME screen for the application. Regardless of this minor flaw, this application is a welcome addition

Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/facebook.mspx

In theory, you should be able to simply set up Internet Sharing on your Windows Mobile device with Bluetooth PAN. Then on your Mac, simply create a BlueTooth PAN connection. The problem with this is that you run the risk of eating up your mobile device’s battery much quicker as its using its 3G connection and its bluetooth connection simultaneouslly. Even though it should work, I never could get it going, anyways. Ideally, we want to plug the phone in via USB, so that it is charging while sharing its connection. OSX won’t support the standard ActiveSync USB Internet Sharing method, so you’ll need to do a little work to get it going.

First download these files

Unzip and Copy all three files to /Library/Modem Scripts

Back on your Windows Mobile device, in the USB connection settings, change USB to mode to MODEM instead of ActiveSync. You may get a warning here that ActiveSync won’t work when Modem is selected. Remember to change it back later when you are ready to sync up again with a Windows computer. Once you’ve selected modem, plug your device into your Mac via USB.

Now, go to your Network Preferences menu.

On the left side, you should see your list of Network Interfaces. Click the little “+” sign to add an interface. Click Interface drop down menu, and you should see a choice for “Samsung CDMA Technologies”. Go ahead and choose it, and click CREATE. it should populate itself on the left-hand pane now.

Highlight the new Samsung Entry, and on the right side make the following entries:

Configuration: Default

Telephone Number: wap.cingular

Account Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

Password: CINGULAR1

Now click Advanced…

On the Modem Tab, make sure Vendor is Samsung and Model is GPRS (GSM/3G)

On the PPP tab:

For Session, Uncheck “Redial if Busy”

Next to Settings, choose CONFIGURATION and select “Send PPP echo packets” and uncheck: Use TCP header compression.

Apply all these changes and lock the Network Preferences, and you’re ready to test.

Its a good idea when testing to disable your Wi-Fi so you can be sure you’re genuinely using your mobile devices WAN.

Now, highlight the Samsung modem, and on the right side, click CONNECT. If all goes correct, you should see a little meter with your connection strength, and you should now be able to surf the web. Go for it!

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

When I ran ifconfig only lo showed up. No eth0 to be seen anywhere. After hunting around the net for a few minutes I came across some tips that helped.

First I ran:
ifconfig -a

This showed me two adapters – lo and eth2. Aha!

sudo ifconfig eth2 up brought the interface up for me, and sudo dhclient got me an ipaddress, but after rebooting the problem came back.

Next step was to edit this file:
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Looking at that file, I could see my adapter listed as well as a couple others. I commented out the ones with the wrong MAC address, found the correct one and changed the entry for eth2 to eth0.

I rebooted and everything was gold.

Thank you Google.

According to Trend Micro’s summary:

Two things can be summed up from the events that transpired:

1. As expected, the P2P communications of the Downad/Conficker botnet may have just been used to serve an update, and not via HTTP. The Conficker/Downad P2P communications is now running in full swing!
2. Conficker-Waledac connection? Possible, but we still have to dig deeper into this…

Here’s a link to more information from Trend Micro

Here’s a link to the conficker “eye test” – it’ll let you know if your machine is infected or not.

http://www.talkbiz.com/confickertest/

There are several ways for you to enjoy the Pandora service while away from your computer’s web browser. Here are a few:

1) IPhone application- You can get more info here. Basically, its just like the website. All the major functions available on the web are right there in the application – creating playlists, approving songs, getting info, etc., It’s FREE, of course.

2) Windows Mobile Application – great for your Tilt, BlackJack II, or Fuze.  This WinMo app let’s you listen to your stations, create new ones, view album art, etc., More info here

3) Boxee – Popular media center software Boxee now has a native application available for free download.  Great cover art, station creation, song approval, and slick graphics.

4) Chumby – Raise your hand if you’ve got a Chumby. No, me neither. If you’re one of the two people who has one, you’re in luck, because Chumby officially supports Pandora.  There’s more info on their website

5) Sprint Instinct – Digital Lounge now has Pandora available. Just log in to your Digital Lounge and search for Pandora. Get ready to pay $3 per month, however. ouch.

There are a few other devices out there that will play friendly with Pandora. If you’ve tried them, let us know…

From Microsoft: Conficker infects other computers across a network by exploiting a vulnerability in the Windows Server service (SVCHOST.EXE). If the vulnerability is successfully exploited, it could allow remote code execution when file sharing is enabled. It may also spread via removable drives and weak administrator passwords. It disables several important system services and security products.

Once your computer is infected, it is now “owned” by the Conficker worm and its creators. It becomes one of millions of infected PC’s making up a massive “army” of infected machines that could possibly be used to implement the author’s bidding at any time.  Here’s the scary part- all these infected machines ( or “bots”) are currently programmed to “check in” with their master on April 1st to get new instructions. No one knows exactly what will happen on that day.

Pundits have speculated a variety of different malicious deeds this massive bot army could undertake on 4/1. One possibility is that the author’s will grab sensitive personal data off all these machines. Another thought is that they will launch massive denial of service attacks on major websites.  Still others believe that this bot army will be sold off for the purposes of sending out Spam worldwide.  No one, except the authors knows for sure.

Regardless, make sure your machines have AntiVirus software, and that its up-to-date. If you’ve just recently installed AntiVirus, make sure you do a full system scan. Make sure Automatic Updates are turned on.

The Honeynet project just released a new python script you can run to scan your network for infected machines. Here’s a link to it:

http://honeynet.org/node/388

For more info about this worm you can check out any of the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker

http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_153464.htm

This one’s REAL technical but a great read if you have the time:

http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

Let’s be careful out there….