I love my iPhone. It’s a great communications device. It’s got texting, Facebook, Twitter, email, and more. The only problem with it is the email doesn’t have push notifications. So if you want to check if you have new messages, you have to go to the Mail app. It doesn’t tell you if you have a new email, like Facebook or texting does.

GMail has a way around this. It’s not the perfect solution, but it works. I would really like to see Apple support push notifications from email right out of the box.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

One problem I have is falling in the lake. Does anyone else have this problem? This problem wouldn’t be that bad, except for I usually have a piece of electronic equipment on me and as you know water and electronics do not get along.

The first time it happened, people were telling me all kinds of ways to save the electronic. The easiest and best way I have found is uncooked rice.

First of all let me say that this does not work 100% of time, and does not save hard drives at all.

The first thing you need to do is if an electronic is wet, is remove the battery. I didn’t remove the battery in my cell phone and it fried it.

Next find a container and some uncooked rice. Fill the container with some rice, put the electronic in, and then cover it with rice.

Then comes the hard part, wait. Put the container in a dry place and let it sit there undisturbed for 48 hours, two days.

After two days have gone by, take your electronic out of the rice. Examine it and see if there is still any water in it, if there is, put it back in the rice for another day or so. If you can’t see any water, put the battery back in (which you should also put in the rice) and try to turn it on.

If it turns on, congratulations! You just saved your electronic from death. If it doesn’t turn on, put it back in the rice for another day. If it still doesn’t turn on, sorry, but your electronic is dead.

Some notes:

If you feel comfortable, tear down the electronic some and then put the parts in the rice. This will have a better chance of drying out completely.

Do you hate having to type google.com into your browser every time you need to go Google? Would you rather type something like g and have it go to Google? Good news, you can. There is a system file that deals with re-routing your internet traffic. It’s called the hosts file.

These instructions are specifically for Windows XP and up. This works on Mac and Linux, but the host file is in a different place.

To get started you need the IP Address of the server you want to make a shortcut to. You can do this by running a ping command. Go to Start then Run, when the Run Dialog comes up type in “cmd”. The command line will come up. Type in “ping url” replacing url with the domain name of the site you want. Something like this will come up:

Pinging google.com [74.125.53.100] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48
Reply from 74.125.53.100: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 74.125.53.100:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 83ms, Maximum = 83ms, Average = 83ms

The bold is the IP Address, remember this, as you need it to edit the hosts file.

The next step is to modify the hosts file. This is located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. The easiest way to edit is by typing C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in the Run Dialog. An open with file will come up, choose to open with Notepad. At the end of the hosts file there should be this line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

Now we get to add some shortcuts. It’s very easy to do, one a new line, enter the IP Address you want to go to then a space or tab and what you want to type in to go there. So for example:

74.125.53.100 g

Now when you type “g” into your browser, it should take you to Google’s homepage.

You can do this with any IP address. You can also have fun with someone and make a web site point somewhere else. I pulled this on my brother by making runescape.com point to a web page I made that said his account had been canceled.

Have fun with this one.