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Continue reading Latest iControlPad prototype bulks up, gets handled on video

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Handhelds

Latest iControlPad prototype bulks up, gets handled on video originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Nilay Patel / Engadget:
Verizon takes another swing at AT&T, puts iPhone on the Island of Misfit Toys  —  AT&T might be suing Verizon for misrepresenting its network in ads, but that doesn't seem to have dissuaded Big Red from using that same map image in this new spot, which casts the iPhone away to the Island of Misfit Toys.

I haven’t quite settled on what service I’ll use as my main advertising platform but I am going to partake in the Amazon Affiliates program to build a store for my blog, filled with products my readers may be interested in. So I’m going to show you how to add a good Amazon eStore to your blog or site.

Firstly, let me set one thing straight. Your readers aren’t going to read a laptop review you did and suddenly make the decision to buy it in your store. It just doesn’t happen. Sorry. So the answer to the question on the tip of your tongue is no, you won’t earn 15% on a $2,000 laptop from your store.

I want you to to sit down with a pen and paper with your blog open in your browser and really ask yourself – what would I buy having read this blog?  If it’s a how-to blog with cool homemade gadgets, maybe you could have a store that sells cheap tools, LEDs, wiring etc. That people will actually buy because they want to build a project on your blog. If you run a gardening blog, rare seeds or weird tools would be good picks. All of this boils down to three rules.

1. Is it under $10? If not, most people won’t make a split-second decision and buy from YOUR store. They’ll think about it and then buy direct later.
2. Can they get it around the corner from their home? If they can walk into WalMart and get the item today they won’t buy from you. Try to add items you’d only find on the internet.
3. Would you buy it? Honestly – ask yourself. Having read a blog post about a product, would you really want that product enough to buy it?

Ensure each and every one of your products answers yes to these questions.

Now join the Amazon Associates program. It will take them a few days to verify your blog is worthy of bearing their brand. If you post more than once a week and the content isn’t questionable then you should get through no problem.

On the affiliates homepage, click ‘Create aStore‘. This will display the page below.

Click ‘Add Category‘ to add a new section to your store. For example, I entered ‘Electronics’. Then, click on the ‘Add products’ button seen on the right. This will take you to the page below.

Here, simply browse through the products clicking ‘Add‘ next to the products you want in your store. I encourage you to consult the three rules mentioned above while doing this. When you have all the categories and products added, click ‘Continue‘ to bring you onto the design and customization phase.

In the screenshot above you can see the page where you can customize how your store will look. To the left there is a sidebar where you can change the colours of the different aspects of your store using the dropdown menus or, for the more tech savvy, the colour codes (ex. #FFFFFF for white etc…)

You can also name your store and add a logo. When adding a logo, you’ll be required to enter in an image URL. A good idea is to make this the logo of your blog if you have one. Simply right click on the your blog’s logo and select ‘Copy Image URL‘. Then paste it into the appropriate box on the ‘Customize Store’ page. Then click ‘Continue‘.

The next page is further customization of your store. This is merely placement of the sidebar and selecting which widgets (advertisements) you want to appear in your store alongside your ads. You earn revenue from these as well. When you’re finished click ‘Finish & Get Link‘.

You’re then presented with three options.

The first is the most basic. You can simply copy the link to your store and place a button on your blog/site. Preferably in the main menu section. When a reader clicks this button they’ll be redirected to your store on Amazon.

The second is to embed your store using an inline frame. An inline frame is kind of like a mini browser within your website. To do this, select that option along the top of the page. Then, copy all of the HTML code that is presented to you and create a new page on your blog. Then copy the HTML into your blogging platform’s HTML editor and your store should appear when you save the HTML.

The third, and perhaps the most desirable, is to fully place your store on your site. However, this is for more experienced users only. The inline frame will work just fine for most blogs and is a lot easier to do. This is similar to embedding the in-line frame, however it will be wider and take up all of the webpage below the header and menu bars.

Here are the steps:

Select the appropriate option at the top of the page. Then:

1. Create a new frameset page using the code sample provided to you. You can alter the dimensions of this to fit your site better.
2. Place your site’s navigation in one of the frames and your aStore URL in another frame.
3. Add a “Store” link to your site’s main navigation and link it to the new frameset you just created.

Your store should now be live on your website.

Before I sign off – a few tips about integrating a new store on a blog:

• It can be very tempting to make a big announcement to all of your readers and pretty much beg them to buy from you. However, all this will do is turn your great blog into a blog that’s losing readers and annoying people. Nobody likes to be constantly asked to buy things. It’s annoying.
• Instead, make a short post informing your readers about the new store. Tell them it contains some good products and be honest about the fact that it earns the blog some income. Also, the odd link in a post when it’s relevant and actually helps the reader works wonders.
• Finally, resist the temptation to add products that don’t follow the three rules above. You won’t make much sales. Think like a reader of your blog!

What revenue streams do you have for your blog?   We have previously covered a few other possibilities such as e-cards and 5 Adsense alternatives.   Which other ones do you prefer?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• Turn Your Amazon Links Into Affiliate Links (6)
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The first worm written for Apple's iPhone has been unleashed and is infecting phones in Australia.

However, the worm, known as Ikee, is only a threat to users who have jaibroken their phones to let them run unauthorized software, security experts say.

In fact, Ikee doesn't do anything particularly bad -- it changes the victim's wallpaper to a photograph of 80s singer Rick Astley and then seeks out other phones to infect -- but it could be modified to do something more dangerous such as stealing sensitive information from the iPhone. "There is a real danger that someone could take this code and make it do something malicious," said Graham Cluley, a technology consultant with security vendor Sophos.

The worm does not affect most iPhone users; only those with jailbroken iPhones that are running a Unix utility called SSH (Secure Shell) with the iPhone's default password, "alpine," still in use. SSH lets someone connect to the iPhone remotely over the Internet, so installing this software with the default password in place is akin to adding an unlocked back-door to the device. It doesn't affect users who use the phone in conjunction with Network Address Translation (NAT), a popular networking technology that lets many users share the same IP address.

Security experts have known about this particular risk for some time now. Last week a Dutch hacker started hacking into iPhones that were vulnerable to this attack and demanded €5 (US$7.43) for instructions on how to fix the problem.

The worm was written Wednesday by Ashley Towns, a 21 year-old unemployed programmer from Wollogong, Australia. He hadn't heard of the Dutch incident when he released his worm, he said Sunday in an instant-message interview. "It was supposed to be a small prank i definitely wasn't expecting it to get as far as it did," he said.

Towns wanted to make the point that people should change their default iPhone passwords, especially if they're using SSH . "A lot of people especially at first thanked me," he said. "I think most people are relieved its not out to destroy their phone. I have had a few people abuse me though."

He didn't really consider the possible legal ramifications of releasing the code, something he said was "quite naive of me," Towns said.

Once the worm adds the Rick Astley wallpaper, it disables the iPhone's SSH daemon and then looks around and then looks around on the Internet for other vulnerable iPhones to infect.

Tricking victims into playing a video or looking at a picture of Rick Astley -- best known for his hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" -- is a popular Internet prank called Rickrolling.

It's not clear how many people have been affected by the worm, but Towns said that his phone alone infected about 100 other devices.

On Sunday, security vendor F-Secure said it had no confirmed reports of the worm spreading outside of Australia. F-Secure advises jailbroken iPhone users who want to secure their phones to follow these instructions.

News of the worm first started spreading several days ago, when users on an Australian technology discussion board complained that their iPhone wallpaper had been changed without authorization.

The worm's code was published Sunday by Joshua "JD" Davison, managing director with Australian ISP reseller JelTel, who earlier published a technical interview with Towns.

The worm may have upset iPhone users, but Apple may not mind. The iPhone's creator has been trying to put an end to jailbreaking for years, saying that it causes security and performance problems.

"They might be a little bit pleased to hear that people have got themselves into hot water," Cluley said.

Filed under: Podcasts

Engadget Podcast 170 - 11.08.2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Help Net Security:
Battle of the anti-virus: What is the best software?  —  AV-Comparatives.org recently released the results of a malware removal tests with which they evaluated 16 anti-virus software solutions:  — Avast Professional Edition 4.8  — AVG Anti-Virus 8.5  — AVIRA AntiVir Premium 9.0

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So it was with me when I had to convert a delimited text data file to Excel and format it within the columns and rows. That’s a rough challenge for a guy who has a chronic fear of anything that resembles figures. The raw file that I had in my hand consisted of higgledy-piggledy blocks of text and numbers. My simple task was to make sense out of this jumble by importing it into Excel and sorting the data into columns and rows.

Thankfully, many web tutorials came to the rescue of my dead brain cells.

Delimited files are a simple way to store data and import or export it between various applications. Delimited in essence means, data that’s separated by specific delimiter characters. Common delimiters are tab, comma and semicolon.

Think of delimited files as the most basic file format that’s almost uniformly accepted by most spreadsheet and database programs. For those of us who don’t go down that road, a common example is the CSV (Comma Separated Value) files or Tab-separated files we come across in the Import Export wizards of email programs like Outlook and Gmail.

A delimited file is of no actual use unless it is converted into some form suitable for analysis and study. Microsoft makes it easy to convert a delimited file to a spreadsheet in three easy steps.

Let’s start with a text file with some data separated by commas.

To bring the data into Excel –

1. Open Excel and copy-paste the text contents into a spreadsheet. The contents take up one column and several rows.



2. Click on the column header to select the entire column. Click on the Data tab in the ribbon and then Text to Columns in the Data Tools group.



3. Clicking on the above command opens the Convert Text to Columns Wizard.
4. Alternatively – You can directly import a text file into Excel. Excel handles file types – Text, Comma Separated Values and Printer Text File. Make sure to dropdown to All Files or Text Files in the File Open dialog while selecting the file to import. If Excel recognizes it to be a delimited file, it opens the Text Import Wizard which is similar to the Convert Text to Columns Wizard.



In the Wizard, choose Delimited and click on Next.

5. In the second step, choose the Delimiter for you particular file (comma, in our case). For some other character, check Other and enter the character in the little field. The Data Preview window gives you an idea how the contents get separated into columnar data. Click on Next.



6. In the final window, you get to set the data type for each column by selecting it in the preview. The default data format is General. Date and numeric values can also be handled here.



7. Click on Finish to exit the wizard and get your neatly arranged spreadsheet.

It’s just three easy steps courtesy of a wizard. This simple utility gives us the ability to import delimited text files into Excel and apply its number crunching tools on it.

Liked this? We have other Excel tutorials to make an analyst out of you.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Steve / The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs:
Why the mainstream media is dying  —  Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other.  This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.