Peter Vatistas

For the last week I have been getting flooding with emails from CNN and since yesterday MSNBC. Obviously these are new spam campaigns geared to trick people. I recommend deleting these emails immediately and I can confidently say the by next week it will be another news site, probably the BBC.

What you don’t want to do is click on any of these email to unsubscribe. By clicking unsubscribe you are notifying the spammer that you have a valid email account (and your dumb enough to click their spam) and you can bet your ass you’ll be seeing a lot more spam from now on. I’ve heard that there are viruses attached to these emails, I haven’t seen any. It may be due to my kick ass Antivirus - Nod32 by Eset. If you’ve noticed any viruses or spyware please let me know.

BTW, I have about 20 different email accounts across all service providers (gmail, msn, yahoo, exchange, etc…) and the only account that blocks all of these emails as well as all spam in general is gmail. I use Google Apps for my main email addy and it rocks, 0 spam in my inbox 100% of the time. If you’re having issues with spam it may be time to either look into gmail or adding a service like Postini to your email account.

Good luck!

Finally a solid and customizable alternative to Apple iTunes! Just like Firefox, Songbird is community powered, open source, cross platform media player from the creators of Firefox, supporting a variety of media devices including ipods and MTP devices.

Personalize your player:

Discover music:

Sync your device:

Click here to learn more and download Songbird.

For those of us who have the older versions of the iPhone (1.1.1 - 1.1.4), Apple wants us to wait until tomorrow before we can upgrade to 2.0 firmware. Well, here’s how to backdoor the upgrade process and get 2.0 installed on our iPhones NOW!!

Before we start this process, please sync your iphone with the current version of iTunes to make sure all your data is backed up.

1. Open iTunes and click Help, then Check for Updates. Let iTunes upgrade to 7.7.

2. Download the iPhone 2.0 firmware (225MB - .ipsw file ). If by chance it has a .zip extension at the end (after the .ipsw extension, just remove it).

3. Connect your iPhone to your computer and select it in iTunes. Hold down the shift button (Windows Vista) and select the restore button.

4. Once the browser window pops up, browse to the .ipsw file you just downloaded and select it.

5. Now iTunes will upgrade your iPhone and should take 15 +/- minutes.

6. After the iPhone has been upgraded, iTunes will ask to setup as a new iPhone or restore from a backup, click restore (will use your most recent sync data).

Your all set!! Now head into the App store in iTunes and download all the killer apps!!

For those of you who are serious about building extremely quality links and have a padded budget, I recommend checking out a service called Hosted Marketing Pages by Text Link Brokers.

Hosted Marketing Pages are an extremely powerful link-building method that are optimized pages with content relevant to your keywords. The Hosted Marketing Pages are hosted in Text Link Broker’s partner sites which are all above a Google PR5 and have between 10 and 10,000 links pointing to them.

The great thing about this service is these pages are optimized content based on your keywords. They contain embedded links that are natural looking - much more powerful than links located on the side of bottom of a page.

HMP’s (Hosted Marketing Pages) also give you more control over your online reputation. Because your adding many HMP’s across many domains with your optimized content, you build a stronger presence for your site and your reputation, helping to lower other (not so nice) pages in the SERPS along with your competitors.

So what do you guys think? Who here has tried HMP’s before and what was your level of success? Click here to learn more about Hosted Marketing Pages.

Want to talk about Hosted Marketing Pages in detail? Check out this thread in the Peter-V Forum.

Microsoft has announced that they will end retail sales of Windows XP on June 30th, 2008. Per Microsoft, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) may include Windows XP on low-cost PCs through June 30th, 2010. In addition, OEMs may offer Windows XP on other computers with the use of downgrade rights.

I’m not a fan of this decision; there are few companies I consult for who actually plan to migrate to Windows Vista. Most IT professionals I speak to say they plan to wait until Windows 7 releases before they migrate away from Windows XP.

Here is a quick and easy fix for an issue I have been running into with my newly upgraded Firefox 3. I noticed that every time I visited www.msn.com my Firefox 3 browser crashed. After some basic troubleshooting I realized that upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft’s Silverlight fixed the issue.

Click here to download the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight.

I hope that helps! Let me know if Firefox 3 still crashes on www.msn.com after installing the lastest version of Silverlight.

Since the Mozilla website will be crushed today with traffic, here is the direct link to download Firefox Version 3.0 now:

Click here to download Firefox 3

Here’s the quickest and easiest to jailbreak, unlock and activate your iPhone or iTouch with any firmware version including 1.1.4. ZiPhone was created in 3 months by Nick (Zibri), an extremely talented iPhone hacker. The Windows XP & Vista version of ZiPhone was developed by Fredrik Grevstad.

ZiPhone is by far the most complete jailbreak application I have ever seen and it is compatible for Windows (XP & Vista) as well as OS X. Normally I write tutorial type posts, walking you through step-by-step on how to do various technical things. Seriously all I can say here is just install ZiPhone, connect your iPhone or iTouch and then click the button for what you want to do - THATS IT!

Within ZiPhone you are given 4 basic options:

Do it all!: This button will jailbreak, activate and unlock your phone. It will also downgrade the bootloader if it’s v4.6. If you bought a new iPhone and want it to be completely independent of any operators, use this button.

Jailbreak: JAILBREAK (iPhone/iPod Touch): This will open the whole file system for read/write access, so that you can install third party applications, tweaks etc. Installer.app will automatically be installed when this option is selected.

Jailbreak + Activate: Same as above button, but it will also activate the phone.

Prepare for Upgrade: If you want to upgrade or restore your iPhone, use this button to set the phone in DFU-mode first then use iTunes to restore your phone to wanted firmware.

Good luck with your jailbreak!

Download ZiPhone 3.0 for Windows

Download ZiPhone 3.0 for Mac

Make sure to check out the following sites:

ZiPhone Homepage | GeoHot’s Blog | iPhone-Elite.org | Hackingt0sh Forum

If you run into any issues during your jailbreak make sure to click the Help & Info button in ZiPhone!

Here are a few quick and easy steps I suggest to optimize your WordPress blog:

Permalinks
Permalink Settings > Custom Structure
/%post_id%/%postname%/

Mod Rewrite (Make sure you have Mod Rewrite enabled on your server)
Permalink Settings > .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Ping your posts
Writing Settings > Update Services
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

In a following post I will provide my list of WordPress plugins that I use and recommend.