Yeah, I said that I wasn’t going to blog for a while because I was sooo busy, but I couldn’t help myself.
Using a coupon, I bought a Dell XPS M1330 for a pretty decent price ($1000 with upgraded screen, battery, and network card, and a 20% off coupon). I left all the other options at their minimum levels because I wanted to make this laptop as cheap as possible. Plus, because it’s primarily going to be for mobile use, I don’t need to worry about making it a powerhouse.
A few of my friends have asked me for some advice on choosing a good laptop for college. Picking a laptop can be tricky, so I decided to write an entry with some general recommendations on how to choose something that suits your needs. The truth is that there are just as many ways to purchase computers as computers themselves. This is the process that I’m going through right now; maybe it will help you and maybe it won’t. I hope it gives at least a few tips, though.
I learned a few things today:
After downloading the latest version of Opera Mini to my BlackBerry and enjoying its awesomeness, I decided to do a little research to find out what exactly allows the app to directly access the WiFi connection. As it turns out, a user by the name of Kit discovered that a simple connection string injection is all you need to bypass BES/BIS:
;DeviceSide=True;ConnectionUID=S TCP-WiFi;ConnectionSetup=delayed;retrynocontext=true
I first read about this neat hack at the BlackBerry Developer SideShow blog.
I had tried LogicMail a long time ago, but back then, it didn’t natively support WiFi connections. At first, I used this injection technique with the newest version; later I discovered that there’s a built-in option for accessing WiFi directly. So, I didn’t get to use the cool hack on that program. Now that LogicMail works, however, I don’t need to worry about creating a web-based mobile email client, which is both good and bad, I guess.
Hmm… What other kinds of applications would I typically use on a mobile device? How about SSH? MidpSSH is an awesome client for mobile phones. The BlackBerry version supports ridiculously tiny text (anti-aliasing finally has a use in a terminal app!) and has a variety of other cool features that would be beneficial if I needed to suddenly access a BASH prompt. It doesn’t natively support WiFi, so I got to use the injection. It worked!
I’m still looking for more applications to use this hack on. Some apps don’t offer a place to insert this injection, so I wonder whether or not a quick edit with a hex editor would work on some. I took a look at the .cod files for Google Mobile Sync and found several connection strings listed, always separated by the same sequence. When I get some time, I’ll try to modify them and see what happens…
Or… perhaps I might bite the bullet and decide to learn Java, despite having had spent years criticizing it…
This summer, I’m working as an intern, doing what I love–programming and web development. I don’t have the freedom to readily use programming languages of my choice; I’ve quickly discovered that this puts me at both a disadvantage and an advantage at the same time.
