Step 1: Go to Gmail Settings –> Labs and enable “Canned Responses” as well as “Inserting Images.”

Step 2: Compose a new message in Gmail and create a signature just like you would compose any other email message. Be creative!

You can either upload logos and icons from the computer or use ones that are already on the web. I suggest the former style as that will permanently embed the image into your email signature.

Step 3: Once your happy with the formatting and layout of your new “HTML signature,” go to the Canned Response menu and Save – give some logical name like “Personal” for a signature that you want to attach to your personal emails.

Now whenever you are composing a new message in Gmail or replying to an existing message, just select the relevant signature from the Canned Responses drop-down and it will be inserted inline as in this screenshot.

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.

1) Jailbreak  your Iphone 3GS (if you haven’t, click here for instructions)

2) Once you have Cydia installed, open it, and search for Backgrounder, and install it. Make sure you get the 3.0 version.

3) Close Cydia, reboot your iphone and launch Backgrounder. Once you reboot, its actually already running.  Read the “how to use” and the Release Notes, as well as Known Issues.

4) there are no “settings” or configurable options for Backgrounder on the 3GS.  To keep a program running in the background, simply hold down the home key until Backgrounding Enabled appears. the app will go away, but if you’re streaming music it will continue to play. OPen and close the app as usual to continue to keep it running. When you’re ready to fully close the app, repeat the enable process- hold down the home key until Backgrounding Disabled appears briefly. The app is now closed.

5) Some things to be aware of:

• If you open too many apps simlutaneously you can crash the apps or the iPhone itself. I try to limit to 1 or 2 apps running in the background only.
• There’s no easy way to tell what applications are open in the background without using another utillity like SysInfoPlus, which you can also grab through Cydia.
• I’ve read that there are issues with apps that use voice control like Skype running in the background.

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

By December 31, 2010 and on a going forward basis, all level 1 and 2 merchants must validate PCI DSS compliance via an annual onsite assessment conducted by a PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) certified Qualified Security Assessor (QSA).  Level 1 merchants who previously conducted onsite assessments using internal resources will no longer be permitted to do so.  Level 2 merchants who were previously permitted to validate via a Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) must now also begin validating with an onsite assessment by a QSA.  All level 1 and 2 merchants must submit a fully compliant Report on Compliance (ROC) from their QSA by December 31, 2010.

While this is surely a boon to the Network Security consulting industry, its a move that is going to cost alot of companies a great deal of money. Previously, Level 2 merchants were only required to submit to a quarterly external network scan and a yearly self-assessment questionnaire.  Now, they, like Level 1 merchants, must have a yearly onsite assessment performed.  For many companies, depending on the size, this are going to be in depth audits that may force them to change man of the ways they do business.

PCI-DSS, unfortunately, is a useless standard. Companies should perform best practices, and if they don’t, they should pay for it.  The fact that they have to be beaten into submission through scans, audits, and fines is silly. All of the recent major breaches of credit card data were all from PCI certified companies. So what does that tell us?

Here’s a great article about some of the problems with the PCI standard:

http://securitybuddha.com/2007/03/23/the-problems-with-the-pci-data-security-standard-part-1/

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!

Overall, this machine performs as you would expect from this popular class of notebooks.  The 1.6Ghz processor is fine at handling most basic tasks, as well as watching standard def video.  The model I got has 2GB RAM installed out of the box, so it takes quite a bit to slow it down.   The 10 inch screen is 1024X576. The colors are bright and pop nicely against the black finish.  The included 3 Cell battery gives 2.5-3 hours of use which is plenty, and keeps the weight down to an acceptable level. The 160GB hard drive left plenty of room to add a couple more operating systems like OSX and Windows 7. (more on that later)

There are a couple features that really make this netbook stand out from the crowd:

1) The keyboard is at least 92 or 93%. Its very comfortable to type on, with full size shift keys in the appropriate places. Nice to see a good size keyboard on a netbook. Very small form factor for such a large keyboard.

2) There’s an express card slot for expansion

3) Drive protection technology from HP – built in accelerometer can disengage hard drive if the computer is dropped.

4) VGA output

The only negative I can see is the tiny little trackpad, which seems to be the biggest problem with netbooks. Its a bit too small vertically to properly traverse the screen. Also the left and right mouse buttons are on the left and right , rather than below the trackpad. This makes on handed navigation next to impossible, without utilizing the trackpad tap-to-click feature. Certainly not a deal breaker, but something to definitely be aware of.

All in all this is a great little netbook. Apparently there’s a newer version out with HD video. I imagine, its much the same, but with a prettier screen and a bit more horsepower.

Accepting an untrusted Exchange server certificate results in storing an exception on a per-hostname basis. On the next visit to an Exchange server contained in the exception list, its certificate is accepted with no prompt and validation. This may lead to the disclosure of credentials or application data. This update addresses the issue through improved handling of untrusted certificate exceptions.

and this interesting one:

A logic issue in the handling of ICMP echo request packets may cause an assertion to be triggered. By sending a maliciously crafted ICMP echo request packet, a remote attacker may be able to cause an unexpected device reset.

So, in case you’re waiting for some reason to update, go ahead and take the plunge and do it. Its my belief, that as users become more mobile and start keeping more of their private information on these devices, the attempts at hacking mobile devices will become more common.

Here’s a link to more info straight from Apple regarding these fixes:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3639

Let’s be safe out there…