Now that I have a shiny new iPhone, one of the many things I’m doing is finding cool free apps to extend my phone’s funtionality. There are, of course, an incredible number of paid apps as well, but being a poor college student, I’ll focus on the free ones that you may not have heard of.

There are certain free apps that everyone should already have by now, so I’m not going to cover them in great detail. Facebook, one of the Twitter clients, and any IM services you use (AIM and Y! both support push notifications, by the way) are must-haves. Read more »

Just to let you guys know the resolution of my AT&T saga: the phone did eventually come, and I’ve had a few minor issues, but I’ve been generally happy with what I’ve received.

The activation process didn’t work correctly and I had to call and read numbers to them that their automated system should have prompted me for. A couple weeks later, I got a text message saying that my phone had “exceeded $20 in text messaging charges this month” so I called them up and apparently the text messaging plan I’d selected was never actually applied to my account, but that was easily taken care of and retroactively applied. Read more »

This continues (and with any luck, concludes) the saga started in My Trouble With AT&T. You may want to read that for background to this story.

Today, June 30 at 12:30 PM (afternoon), I received an email from AT&T stating the following:

Unfortunately, we cannot validate your credit card number. Please call us at your earliest convenience with a different credit or debit card number so we can complete your order: 1-866-499-8008, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

So I called the number listed there, which apparently the number for their web services division or something along those lines; the part of the company that deals with orders placed through their website. Their system has an hour hold time, as opposed to the general support number which had a (generally) very short hold time. Read more »

Update (June 30 @ 9 PM): much has happened since I posted this, and my issue has been resolved through many, many hours on the phone with AT&T. I am in the process of writing that up.

I’ve had Verizon since August 2004, and after several years of mediocre service (that is to say, nothing horrible or particularly exceptional happened) I decided that I wanted an iPhone, which meant switching to AT&T. Now, I have particular reservations about using AT&T as a service provider for anything due to delivering your world… to the NSA. However, the allure of the iPhone and my several iPhone-toting friends won me over. Read more »

We’ve all been somewhere (be it Starbucks, your work, a hotel) where we didn’t have access to the router to allow certain ports through. Some programs or tools require a direct connection or LAN access. Here’s the solution: Hamachi. It allows you to set up a ‘virtual network’ of several computers, allowing you to connect as if you were on a LAN with the other computers. Download Hamachi

Some obvious uses for this include file sharing (provided it is enabled); multiplayer PC gaming (Age of Empires 2 comes to mind), and the point of this post, remote access. There are a few methods; if I am the only one using a computer, I prefer Remote Desktop. If you’re viewing someone else’s computer while they’re using it (to troubleshoot, share things, etc) I prefer VNC. Now you can share your desktop with anyone, no matter what crazy network setup you have. Download TightVNC