I would probably be better of writing my history paper now instead of this blog post, but I have until Wednesday, so…

I was just browsing dealextreme’s most popular products today

I came across the iFone (yes, iFone, not iPhone). It’s unlocked, so it can be used with services other than AT&T.

*I am not affiliated with dealextreme in any way. I just think they have many interesting products.

The two are similar, aren’t they (the second one’s the real one)? I was considering getting an iPhone after the price drop to $400, but it still seemed a little overpriced to me. After all, it’s just another PDA phone with an Apple logo. The reason most people buy gadgets is for show. Within a couple years, it will be out of date.So now, I’m thinking about buying the “knock off” version. My only concern is that since it’s from China, it has a high probability of breaking after a few months. According to the reviews on the site, however, it seems to be solid. If it just lasts between one and two years, it would be worth it to me, because something newer and cooler would be out by then.

The exterior of this “iFone” looks very similar to the real iPhone, but the operating system is completely different. From afar, I can probably fool people into thinking I have the real iPhone, especially if they can’t see the screen very well. Even when they see that it isn’t, they’ll still think I have a cool phone, because this thing is still pretty cool. All the fun functions are present: MP3 and movie player, camera, video camera, internet browser, java, etc. The only part that’s slightly less cool is the fact that it’s not made by Apple. Another con may be the fact that it runs on MicroSD cards instead of internal memory, so one MicroSD card might not be enough to hold everything I may want at once. The overall functions are similar, though. It even comes with two batteries, so I can carry a spare charged one with me if I wish to (I’m the type who likes to have spare batteries).

If I get an “A” on the stupid Nationalism essay, maybe I’ll reward myself with one of these.

Perhaps you want to hack into your enemy’s email account and send an email to his girlfriend telling her he wants to break up;) Perhaps you just wish to keep your online accounts secure. Either way, here are the top 10 most common passwords. I highly suggest against using any of these, especially for anything important. Yes, there are people who are bored enough to try to guess passwords.

*I’m not promoting hacking into somebody else’s account

password - Well, this is an obvious one for someone who isn’t very creative
123456 - A classical first password for beginners

qwerty - Lazy? Just hit some keys that are conveniently next to each other
abc123 - A little better than 123456 but still unoriginal and guessable

letmein - I’m not too sure about this one, but it is on the list

monkey - A very popular instinctual password if you just try to think of a random word

myspace1 - Common password for myspace where you have to have at least one number and letter in a password

password1 - Need a number in the password? Just add 1 after your unoriginal one.

blink182 - I’m not too sure about this one either, but somehow it’s also on the list. They’re fairly well-known, but probably not the first band that comes to mind.

Whatever your first name is - Well, this one should be obvious to avoid

Wow, it’s been a while since my last update. From now on, I think I’ll slow down to the pace of a normal blog. Just one post every couple days.

You may have heard of the term lifetime email. A lifetime email is an email alias that forwards to whatever email you want. For example, if I have a lifetime email, name@domain.com and people send something to it, the actual emails that they send will go to whatever “real” email account I choose, may it be gmail, yahoo, whatever.

The purpose of this is so that if I decide to switch to a different email provider, I can just change the forwarding location of the lifetime email and do not have to go through the hassle of telling everyone that I have changed my email. It’s easy to change your “real” email frequently but still be able to receive all old mail. Most universities offer it to their alumni, so everyone can keep in touch with former classmates forever, but you can also get one for free from www.fanmail.com.

A company called pobox has a service like this, but they charge for it. There are also several other free lifetime email services, but they usually put tags on the end of your emails or sell your address to spammers. So far, fanmail is the best one that I’ve found, because they do not put ads on your emails, nor do they sell your address.

Fanmail allows visitors to create a free lifetime email that can be customized to any one of their dozens of domains. If you love a particular sports team, then this is more than perfect for you, because their domains have primarily a sports theme. If you look hard enough, you could find a couple that seem generic. If you use one at national-champs.com (that’s the one I use), for example, very few people would associate it with sports.

Just a little tip: be careful who you give your lifetime email to, if you decide to create one. You keep all the messages that get sent to it forever, but that means you also keep the spam. I recommend giving the lifetime email address to friends or using it to sign up for things that you can trust. Give everyone else who might spam you your real email addres (@gmail.com @yahoo.com @hotmail.com, whatever). That way, if you get spammed, you can just move to a different email address and change the forwarding location. That way, you keep all the real mail, but all the spam stays in the old email account.

My blog is finally up again after losing hours of potential visitors. My free host doesn’t seem too reliable, so the databases, or sometimes even the whole sites, are down quite frequently. Oh well, I’ll still stay with them for a while, mainly because they’re free and claim that they’ll have 99% uptime by the end of February.

Anyway…

So, you might be searching for a download accelerator. You will be making a tragic mistake if you just do a google search on “download accelerator” and click on the first one you see, Download Accelerator Plus. Do NOT download this accelerator. Remember, if you download something for fre (and legally), there is almost always a tradeoff if you actually use the software. I made this mistake, and it’s costing me many hours of time. If you download this accelerator, then your computer will be infested with so much adware and spyare that it won’t even be able to run anymore. They claim that they have all these great features without spyware, but they actually do put spyware on your computer. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Go to download.com’s user reviews page if you don’t believe me.

They will load a lot of shit to your computer including something called Netzip. Netzip is one of the most dangerous spyware programs that watches the packet traffic from your machine when you download files from the internet. They tag your computer with a unique ID, and anything you download, including all the html files while you’re browsing from anywhere on the internet, is reported back to their program’s source where the log it and record it with your machine’s unique ID that they previously assigned you. Because of this program, and some adware that they loaded on my computer, I now have to do a re-format. I’m thinking about cleaning it, but the spyware cleaning programs don’t always get rid of everything.

Even spybot, one of the most highly acclaimed spyware removal programs, says that download accelerator plus loads malicious software to your computer. In addition, just starting it opens half a dozen connections to ad servers, including Cydoor. That page on spybot lists some download accelerators and whether or not they come with bundled software, so I recommend that you visit that page before downloading any download accelerators.

The current one that I’m using and is spyware free is called Download Express. Spybot says that it is spyware free, and I have not experienced any spyware with them yet. It is definitely my best recommendation right now, because it is free as well as clean. Although it may not speed up downloads as much as some of the other accelerators do, it is a much better and safer alternative.

I first got introduced to Opera, because I was just browsing betlik’s general discussion forum. Somebody advertised it as the fastest browser, so I decided to try it. Why spend exta time waiting for things to load when you do not have to?
Compared to Firefox, Opera didn’t seem bad for loading pages. When I tried to download large files, however, it actually seemed slower. I’m probably still going to use Opera in the future for its other features. It seems to be more complicated and has more built-in features than Firefox does in addition to some widgets that you can add on.

One thing I like about it is that it’s smarter when you’re using a WYSIWYG editor and you press enter, you go onto the next line do rather than going on to the next paragraph and skipping a line. One thing that drove me nuts in internet explorer and Firefox was needing to open the html editor and waste time letting it load just so I could add one little thing to a new line in a post but not start a new paragraph.

I also like how you can start browsing from how you last left the browser rather than starting at a home page every time. I can even have multiple tabs opened with my favorite sites whenever I start the browser.

Opera is also smarter in opening things with the target “_new” or “_blank. Instead of opening those in a new window, you just get a new tab. I hate having too many windows open at the same time, so this feature makes my life easier. Now I don’t have to keep right clicking and clicking open in a new tab whenever something’s target is a new window.

Another feature, although not that important, is the hover over thumbnail feature. If you are browsing with tabs and you put your cursor over a tab, then you get a thumbnail of the page of the tab that you are hovering over.

There is bittorrent support so you do not have to download torrents from a regular torrent client, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet. I think I would probably still prefer bitcomet.

Those were just a few examples of the features. If you are interested in this browser, then visit Opera’s page.

Some potential drawbacks are the fact that it uses more CPU power and that all pages may not be designed for it. Some template designs do not look the way they are supposed to in Opera. Since it’s not that popular of a browser, I doubt many webmasters optimize their pages for it. I have not had a huge problem with this yet, but since things do not look exactly the same in Opera as they would in the more popular browsers, some templates could be distorted. Overall, Opera is still a nice browser that should be worth trying.