So yeah, my server decided that after months of trouble free operation, it too should have Thanksgiving off and took a dump just as I was incommunicado. Sorry for the outage. Things do appear to be stable once again though.

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As we all know, a vegan can’t really fully enjoy the customs and traditions associated with Thanksgiving, because of course, the idea of a holiday centered around the slaughter of millions of turkeys would no doubt repulse their activist little brains. Imagine the fun and exciting arguments that must ensue when these folks head home to family and sulk in misery as everyone eats dead bird while they nibble on peas.

Well, misery no more! Now Vegans, too, can enjoy Thanksgiving with their own turkey facsmile. Behold! Tofurky:

And it even comes with its own leftovers, “Tofurky Jurky.” Yummmy yum! Nothing says “day after Thanksgiving” like dried bean curd!

Of course, it probably tastes blander than cardboard, but considering few people really know the correct method for cooking a turkey, it’s probably not far off from the real thing at most feast tables.

Yeah I know, I said no updates, but this came up before I left Wednesday, so I figured I’d give you something to look at while I was gone. 🙂

As we enter the holiday shopping season, it might be prudent to double check the quality of what you’re buying for your loved ones. Especially if it’s a cell phone:

WASHINGTON – Curtis Sathre said it was like a bomb going off. His 13-year-old son Michael stood stunned, ears ringing, hand gushing blood after his cell phone exploded. Safety officials have received 83 reports of cell phones exploding or catching fire in the past two years, usually because of bad batteries or chargers.

Now that’s a picture you want in your mind as you’re paying for that Kyocera pre-paid phone for your chatty relatives, eh? By they way, the reason I pick on Kyocera is because two of the three major battery recalls over the past two years have come from Kyocera. Nokia shares in the notoriety.

But it looks like for the most part, cell phones aren’t too prone to exploding as long as people don’t cheap out and buy knock-off batteries instead of original equipment. I too used to think cheap couterfeits were just as good, but let’s face it, Lithium Ion batteries are really effective incendiary devices if they’re not properly constructed or charged.

I am a little irked by by the last paragraph of this story though, talking about the same kid mentioned in the lede:

“It took my son two months to decide to even be near a cell phone,” said his mother, Cris. “But he needs one.”

Call me old school, but does a 13 year old really need a cell phone?

I’m flying out of town for the entire Thanksgiving holiday weekend (left yesterday in fact… ahh the wonders of delayed automated posting), and will probably not be near a computer very much during this time. As such, the site won’t be updated until either late Sunday afternoon or Monday. I hope everyone reading has a wonderful and happy holiday. 🙂

We at scaredpoet.com know that quite a few of our readers are Sprint PCS users. Many of them use a product known as PCS Vision for mobile data service. And while the service is intended for trivial little things like downloading ringtones and sending short messages with low-res photos attached, there are ways to hook up your Sprint PCS phone to certain devices, like laptops, and with the proper installed drivers turn said wireless phone into a fully functional portable modem that gives you data speeds equivalent to and sometimes faster than dialup. While it’s not as fast as WiFi, the service is much more widespread and works well in places where a WiFi hotspot isn’t available… or the hotspot isn’t free and you’re unable or unwilling to shell out the dough to connect with it.

Of course, we must remind people that such a practice officially violates the Terms and Conditions of said data plans. The reason being that while the data plans are “unlimited,” the assumption is that surfing from the strict and tiny confines of your cell phone’s 1.5 inch screen would never generate gobs of traffic, while a bandwidth-hungry power user on a laptop most certainly would.

In spite of the official frowning on “tethered” connections, as they’re known, users do report that they continue this practice. When the SonyEricsson T608 was introduced sporting Bluetooth capability, tetherers snapped up the extremely limited supply of phones quickly because it made the practice even easier. Sadly, lore has it that only 10,000 of these phones were ever made before SonyEricsson decided to leave the US CDMA market. Of that number, many of the units, which never underwent full testing and development, ended up dead on arrival. And of the handsets still in existence, everyone agrees the phone is very slow to respond to commands and keystrokes and operates with bug-riddled firmware.

Even so, the T608 made tethering phenominally easy. So it was no surprise that when the next Bluetooth phone arrived on scene, the ability to tether over bluetooth was disabled. There was outrage when word of this hobbling first came out, especially because this new phone is not cheap, and people generally don’t take it well when an expensive piece of hardware is hobbled in some way.

The outrage caused Sprint to backtrack significantly. Yes, they said, bluetooth tethering would be disabled on this phone when it first goes on sale, but a future patch would re-enable it, once they’re sure they can figure out a way to uhm.. prevent abuse.

Well, two days after the launch, someone found a way to re-enable tethering… without having to wait for Sprint to get around to it.

Now, we must repeat, at scaredpoet.com, we do not condone abusing PCS Vision service by tethering. Therefore, owners of the Treo 650 should not download this patched file and install it on an SD card. Nor should they use this utility to then copy that patched file to the Treo’s RAM, thus enabling the Dial-Up-Networking profile on the Treo.

We at scaredpoet.com do not encourage such unethical behavior. No sir. That would be, well, unethical.

Also, please note: If you decide to be, erm, unethical, be aware that Sprint could contact you and force your account off the “unlimited” data plan and onto a $0.01/kb plan instead. While 1 cent pet kilobyte sounds cheap, those pennies add up when you consider that if you download a 50MB file under this plan, you’ll find a $512.00 charge on your next cell phone bill. Even so, many users have reported that as long as the abuse isn’t egregious (i.e. downloading more than a couple GB of data per month, using P2P programs, etc.), Sprint won’t bother. However, the risk of enforcement remains, and Sprint could tighten up its standards for enfrocing the TOS at any time.

Lastly: This updated profile (which you shouldn’t download, ahem) is not guaranteed to work with the Cingular Version of the Treo 650. Early reports indicate that the profile will not function correctly, so definitely do not do this if your Treo 650 comes from Cingular.