Back in 2011, I created a pretty popular post (that now redirects here) that contained the WEP key for Softbank’s “mobilepoint” wifi hotspot on the Shinkansen. For some reason, both docomo and Softbank encrypt their public wifi connections with publicly accessible keys which doesn’t prevent eavesdropping on connections at all. Docomo even sells “visitor” access passes via their mobile portal, only accessible if you know the wifi password in the first place!

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

I have used Microsoft Money to manage my finances for coming up 6 years now and still find it the best personal finance app around. The last version in the UK was 2005 after Microsoft cancelled the product and let Quicken take the market. Microsoft then discontinued the international versions in the wake of Mint.com and other Yodlee-based web applications. Mint.com appears to be the most successful of the bunch and was bought by Quicken to replace their terrible Quicken Online.

Just noticed on The Register that Lexmark have added Twitter to a new range of All In One printers. See They have actually written a client for the tiny little touchscreen display on the scanner. Are people really that addicted that they need to use Twitter while waiting for something to copy or scan? Why not use their phone? Because this way it looks like you are “fiddling with the settings”?

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

O2 in the UK butcher images while using GPRS/3G/EDGE – seriously effecting the iPhone. Images are recompressed to horrendous levels – look at the App Store here: As you can see, the Facebook and Super Monkey Ball banners have been recompressed. This effects webpages aswell – meaning downloading new wallpapers or browsing Flickr is a waste of time. However, if you change the username for the O2 access point under Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network to “bypass” from the default “vertigo” like so:

At work I am currently tasked with redeveloping an intranet application used to track customers, products owned, support contracts, support records and all sorts of other CRM-esqué functions. The version used at the moment is a very fast Perl/MySQL/Mod\_perl/Apache setup built over a few years. Its got to the point where the company needs more functionality and hacking extra functions into the current code is getting more and more difficult. Why Symfony?

Wow. Microsoft has just launched “DreamSpark” – a programme that lets higher education students download pro Microsoft development tools – not the cut-down Express versions of Visual Studio, but the full Professional editions. UK Microsoft student champ Ed Dunhill sums it up the best on his blog here. You get access to: Visual Studio 2008 Pro The whole Expression suite SQL Server 2005 Developer edition Windows Server 2003 Standard (and hopefully soon 2008) The best bit is a whole years XNA Creators Club subscription FREE!

UPDATE: No need to do this now, its fixed! For edngames.com I use Facebook, Yahoo! and Windows Live as sign on solutions. However, Windows Live is the only system with a restriction on the domain names you can register. For instance, because of the word “games” in my domain, I get the error message “The Return URL field contains a forbidden word or domain. Please use a different Return URL and enter the HIP solution again.