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Americans must play moisture farmer

A British movie prop maker who crafted the Stormtrooper uniform for the original Star Wars movie can continue selling replicas of the costume throughout the galaxy — the US excepted.…

AP - SHAREHOLDER FURY: Although Yahoo Inc. made peace with dissident investor Carl Icahn, other shareholders are expected to attack management Friday at the Internet company’s annual meeting.

CNET - Microsoft filed its quarterly report with the U.S.

AP - Yahoo Inc.’s recent truce with investor Carl Icahn didn’t pacify many shareholders who remain on the war path heading into the Internet company’s annual meeting Friday.

iPhone 2.0 only: Want to save that string of flirty text messages for posterity (or evidence)? While there’s no super-easy way to get your SMS history off your iPhone, with some elbow grease it’s possible. While this method is a bit complicated and more proof of concept than anything else, let’s take a look at how you can FTP into your iPhone, transfer your text message database to your computer, and open it up in a spreadsheet application like Excel.

Nerd alert! This method requires a jailbroken iPhone and some FTP and DB skills. The end result does give you a spreadsheet-friendly file that includes your entire history of text messages in it, but no names of the people who sent the message (only the phone number). File this post under “proof of concept” instead of “must actually do.”

As per a helpful tipster, I tested Syphone , but try as I might, it would not see my iPhone (and, it’s Mac-only). If anyone knows of an iPhone application that saves text messages to your computer without going through this rigmarole, post it up in the comments and I’ll add it here.

Here’s one messy way to do it:

1. Jailbreak. First, you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone using these instructions (here’s the Windows user version). Make sure you install OpenSSH (here’s how) to make your iPhone accessible via SFTP.
2. SFTP into the phone. Go to the phone’s network settings, and view the details of the active connection. Write down the device’s IP address. Using your favorite FTP client, SFTP into that IP address using the username root and password alpine.
3. Download sms.db. Your text message database is located in /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db on your iPhone. Download that file to your computer.
4. Open the SQLite database. That sms.db file is a SQLite database, which you can edit and view using free tools. Download one of those tools—the SQLite Database Browser—and install it on your computer. Open up the sms.db file, and click on the Browse Data tab. Choose the message table and you’ll see your SMS history, and it’ll look like this:
5. Export to CSV. From the SQLite Database Browser’s File menu, choose Export > Table to CSV file. Save the resulting comma-delimited file, and open it using your spreadsheet of choice (whether it’s Excel or OpenOffice.org).

Now, the big problem with the resulting file is that while it includes the messages themselves, the name of each person who sent each message is not there. (If any database wizards more hip to Apple’s DB structure know how to get that info there based on ID’s, I’m all ears.) Like I said—proof of concept. On closer inspection, it turns out that the “address” field displays the phone number of the message sender. Given that, you can easily grok who’s who (and add names based on that number into your spreadsheet).

You can also jailbreak your phone and download your voicemail messages this way. Is this living to geek instead of geeking to live? Yes it is. But I don’t judge how people get their kicks, so you shouldn’t either.

CNET blogger Gordon Haff found that purchasing electronics cables online is consistently and significantly cheaper than at brick retail stores, and speculates all the possible reasons why—like the fact that consumers are less likely to comparison shop when they’re dying to hook up the shiny new Thingamabob 5000 they just bought.

PC World - McAfee plans to buy DLP vendor Reconnex for $46 million.

Investor’s Business Daily - The huge chip industry has underperformed the stock market for most of the past four years, but one chip sector has been on a roll for much of this year: smaller and midsize analog chip companies.

Cheap knock-offs, big profits

A hardware reseller from New York state has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for passing off cheap Chinese networking gear as genuine Cisco products.…

Handy do-it-yourselfer computerguru365 turned a network-capable laser printer into a wireless printer by mounting a small Wi-Fi router inside its case. This is a really cool mod: After installing a network card, he found space inside the printer to mount a small router (running the DD-WRT router firmware, no less), wired up and mounted LED lights, and tucked both the power and Ethernet cable hook-ups inside. This project’s not for the timid, and not really necessary, as you can just set the router on top or near the printer—but the result looks really good. (Of course you’ll get better bandwidth by keeping the antenna outside the printer.)