Ahh springtime. The weather begins to warm, the birds begin to sing, and NFL junkies gather around the picture tube to see which ridiculous draft pick Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders will make this year. Well now it’s possible to follow the “Team of the Decades” as well as the other 31 clubs with the new NFL Mobile App for Verizon Wireless. The carriers says that the app features:

Exclusive coverage of the 75th NFL Draft including prospect profiles, mock draft and analysis. Get news, headlines and updates as well as NFL Network programming including Path To The Draft, our daily inside access news show NFL Total Access, and Live NFL Network coverage.

Because the NFL Network just isn't enough

For the first time ever, the NFL Draft will be held over the course of three days, with the first two days aired live in primetime. So go download the app, follow along, and scream in agony as your favorite team passes over a future Hall of Fame QB for an underachieving, overpaid crybaby.

Via: CrackBerry

We started counting since it was submitted to the app approval process at Apple, and our wait has now come to an end: Opera Mini for iPhone and iPod Touch has been approved by Apple.

Roughly 3 weeks ago, we started counting with Opera Software to see if and when Opera Mini was approved.

It seems that Opera Mini was officially approved by Apple on April 12 at 20:56:00 UTC, so you can now visit Opera Mini site and download it, or simply look for the app in the iTunes Store and get it.

iPhone 2G users will be really happy for this, but we are sure that also later generation iPhone users will be glad to give the browser a chance.

Via: Opera

As some of you may know, I’m currently rebuilding my dad’s late 2008 15" MBP.  He had a really weird problem that prevented him from surfing to ANY website with ANY browser.  I know…I had him install 3 of the 4 major browsers on his PC and try them all.  Nothing worked.

So, he shipped it to me with the idea that I would be blowing the Boot Camp partition and replacing XP with Windows 7 Professional 64bit.

After I backed up all of his stuff and had Windows 7 Professional installed, I went to activate it.  It wouldn’t activate. Nothing that I did would work.  I kept getting an annoying error message from Activation that said something to the effect that you couldn’t use upgrade media to do a clean install.  If that was the case, why in the world was the option available to me?!  It really ticked me off.

The right key…the wrong error

Thankfully, I have a few resources available to me, having been in the industry for 15 years.  I gave my good friend, Paul Thurrott a phone call.  I thought I saw, but couldn’t remember an article that he wrote about this particular subject.  Paul was right there, and Johnny on the spot with the solution.  If you’re bumping into problems with your install, you really need to give Paul’s article a read.  Its got a lot of great information in it.

What a great guy he is.  He took the time to walk me through his article and to help me get the right solution for me. 

So, thanks, Paul. My dad and I really appreciate your help.

Friday upon arriving to work I was surprised to find that I could no longer view my Gmail account or the JAMM site or any other site of their type for that matter.  For years I have been able to browse any site that I wanted from my Smartphone connected via Wi-Fi with absolutely no problem.

Two weeks ago I received my Lenovo s10-3t and a week later received my screen protector and a slipcase so as to make it travel to work ready.  For the first week I had no problem as they didn’t block all to0 much (really only porn and the like which is fine by me), as I would expect, because there are a lot of vendors and outsiders that come in and need to use the wireless network to do their job.  Apparently since the net-book downloads a lot more than a Smartphone and is easier to get around quickly they are seeing a big spike in the I.T. department.  Now I get why they would be mad if I was downloading stuff on a work computer and risking viruses on the network, but I’m not.  It’s my personal computer and used mostly during breaks.

You see I am a machinist in a large plant.  So I program my machine and have time to kill.  Obviously this would be looked down upon if I where to do it out in the open so I don’t, except at break time so as to not make anyone mad.  My extended battery keeps it ticking for just under 8 hours and a lot of the time it goes into hibernation mode anyway.

So as I see the sites I visit regularly being blocked left and right, the list added to them everyday, I cannot help but take this personally and retaliate, which brings me to what I believe is a must if you are mobile often with your laptop or net book:  HTTP-Tunneling.  I knew that there must be something I could install on my device to get around the newly required restrictions.  So over the weekend I found that HTTP-Tunnel is just what I needed.  This one did require some setup but was fairly simple by just following their step by step guide specific for the program you are using.  It also come with a free version which is a little slower, but not that bad considering I can get everything that was previously blocked for free.

If you need a faster solution I also installed PingFu Iris on a three day trial basis which was a little faster because it is totally a pay app.   The pluses here are that it completely sets up for you and it just looks a little nicer than the previous, but again I won’t complain because its free.  They both run 5 bucks a month if you want to pay by month or 4 bucks a month for the whole year.

I would not recommend installing this on your work pc (because you could get fired) but for anyone using their personal mobile pc’s I believe it is a must.  A key feature for me is that it also makes you anonymous so now the dude they where watching and blocking everywhere, he just disappeared.  It also apparently boosts your security so while you are doing banking at the coffee shop, switch this on and  you can be at ease that you are better protected than the guy next to you.

I am also looking into a version of this for Windows Mobile so I will let you know if I get that one working too.

So this was my weekend of beating the man.  I hope it helps.  If you are a boss and hate that I shared this feel free to let me know, but please explain why, because I just don’t get it.

Any other thoughts or stories?  Please comment below.

Today’s JAMM Store Deal of the Day is Lyma Word Puzzle for Windows Mobile.  You can register Lyma Word Puzzle for half the regular registration price, so be sure to check it out.  You can read the details and specs below, and download a trial or register here.

Guess the letters of the given word. Each time you choose a correct letter it will show. If you choose a wrong letter you will lose a chance. If you lose all chances before you guess the word you lose

Features:

• Add your own categories and words
• Includes over 5000 words
• Supports Landscape, Portrait and Square devices.
• Easily Edit word database
• Choose to show word when all chances are used
• Select personal Color Scheme.
• View user statistics

Minimum Requirements:

• Windows Mobile Pocket PC
• .Net Compact Framework v2

Display Dimensions
240×240, 240×320, 240×400, 320×240, 320×320, 400×240, 480×480, 480×640, 480×800, 640×480
Operating System
Pocket PC 2003, Pocket PC 2003 SE, WM5, WM6, WM6.1, WM6.5