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The Blackberry 7100x. Source: www.mobilegazette.com

Ok, I’m fairly certain the Blackberry doesn’t provide any simple way for people to transfer their mp3s into it for the purpose of being ringtones. So, either you’re limited to whatever tasteless drivel your wireless provider deems most profitable, or you can work around the stupidity.

Now, I love Shakira and all, but with my provider, Verizon, I couldn’t even find where to buy mp3 ring tones, so I was left instead with a meager selection of free MIDI crap. It was time to work around the stupidity.

For this recipe, you’ll need some web space. There’s plenty of ways to get that for free, mostly involving allowing the hosting service to cover 90% of the screen with their branded crapola. Or, consider that a domain and hosting for a month at godaddy.com can run you as low as $10, and offers the prospect of loading unlimited mp3s on your phone, and the investment starts to sound pretty good.

Anyways, once you’ve got your web space, all you have to do is create a nice, simple HTML page. Here’s some help, in case your normal OS is Etch-a-sketch:

Now, here’s the key. You need to put the mp3 on your web space as well, and it’s also wise to name it the same thing as you’re referencing in your HyperText Markup Language. If links confuse you, just make sure to put the file in the same folder as the .html file, then put the name of the file between quotes after the a href part.

Now, go to your newly created page (name it something short like bb.htm–it will become obvious why when your giant fingers try to type in the URL on that tiny keyboard). Select the link and open it on your blackberry, and voila! Your PDA downloads the file, saves it into the Tunes folder, and you can make it a ringtone or play it to annoy your friends. Unless you get an error like the following: HTTP Request failed: Item too large. Then, it’s time to go back and edit down your mp3, because it’s obviously over 500 kilobytes in size. That’s right, you can’t request an object much larger than that, so you’re SOL if you can’t get your file smaller than that.

So, you ask, how do I do that? Well, the first step is Audacity, the free audio-editing software that packs a serious punch, runs stably, and must therefore have been programmed by the nicest, bestest people on Earth. Once you’ve got that downloaded, follow the included instructions on obtaining the LAME mp3 encoding codec, or any other mp3 codec you want to use. The Blackberry doesn’t much like songs encoded under 32kbps, but even so, you can get almost 2 minutes of audio in under 500k at that bitrate, and by fiddling with stereo/mono settings, you might get even more. Remember, if you wanted something that could play real, whole songs longer than 2:00 long, you should’ve gotten a Treo. And if your $500 Blackberry left you too poor for another ‘smartphone‘ or an iPod, just learn to love punk rock.

The temporary flaw in ESPN360.com’s security, which was fixed on Monday night, might have temporarily dissuaded some from the notion that they could watch their beloved teams compete in the World Cup online. Thankfully, a company in China has a much better notion: P2P TV channel streaming.

TVUNetworks, based in Shanghai, has a beta download of their TVUPlayer available on their website, www.tvunetworks.com. The player works in a simple, yet ingenious way. Utilizing concept similar to that employed in peer-to-peer downloading software such as Kazaa, TVUPlayer streams the TV channel to you from another user who is running the software, and in turn utilizes your extra available bandwidth to serve the video stream to others. The result: no matter how many people connect, the video plays smoothly, with little to no lag. Quality’s not the greatest, but it’s free, and you’re probably at work, so it beats the hell out of nothing at all. To give an idea of how effective this is, consider that the download of the software (from TVUNetworks‘ servers) is currently proceeding at a mere 8-9kBps on most people’s computers, probably as a result of high demand from World Cup viewers. The streams, however, run great, and often actually improve in quality as the number of viewers increases.

TVU is currently trying to secure contracts with TV channels to broadcast through the TVUPlayer, but until then, bless their hearts, they’re just offering a bunch of streams for free. In addition to the ESPN and ESPN2 available, there’s CNN and some other (often international) channels. Kind of makes ESPN 360 obsolete…