Pierow’s Prattle

Retrevo’s index of user manuals is over 100,000 entries strong and covers everything from dishwashers to scanners, calculators to routers, and everything in between.

[Retrevo Manual Index]

Uneasy silence published a great write-up on how to put a stronger unlock passcode on your iPhone than the standard four-digit code that is used by default:

First Download the iPhone Configuration Utility from Apple (for Mac or PC, and connect your phone.

Then launch the utility, go to “Configuration Profiles”, “New”. Give it a name and identifier, then go down to Passcode, enable it and set your own options.

Once you’re done, go to your phone in the left pane, “Configuration Profiles” tab, and click install next your profile. It’ll pop up on your phone and you can install it!

Simple and secure way to lock down your iPhone a little more.

Update: iClarified has a more detailed write-up on the procedure.

[Uneasy Silence] [iClarified]

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

[Full Story]

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.

The manager also revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated “pings” to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone.

[Full Story]

Zillow.com has a listing of famous houses ranging from the Beverly Hillbillies mansion to the Playboy mansion, the Brady Bunch house, and the Beverly Hills 90210 home. All of the write-ups have aerial photographs, an estimated value and some general information about the property.  You can also take the addresses from Zillow and feed them into Google Maps to get a street view, overhead satellite view and more.  For example, here’s a Google Maps view of the Beverly Hillbillies mansion at 750 Bel Air Rd    Los Angeles  CA 90077.

Zillow also has some Famous Homes of U.S. Presidents – though for some reason they’re less interesting.

[LINK]

There are a ton of recipes on the ‘net for homemade mouthwash.  Some sound like they would taste horrible while others are more like cocktails than mouthwash.  Since drinking actual store-bought mouthwash is terrible for your health, maybe mixing up your own cocktail mouthwash is actually the way to go if you’re trying to get drunk off mouthwash.  This example from Pioneer Thinking is a fine example of a cocktail/mouthwash mix:

Lemon Mouthwash Recipe

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