If you aren’t yet aware, Adobe updated and patched their Flash Player last week, and fixed nine weak spots in the app - most of them rated “highly critical”, where malware and hackers can take advantage of vulnerabilities in SWF files. These weaknesses are present in Windows, Linux and Mac.

Two of the bugs were caught and reported by Google engineers, and two by people from Stanford U. The update, Flash Player 9.0.115.0, can be downloaded from the Adobe website. Folk who still use Version 7 are advised to get the patched version of 7 rather than 9.0.115.0.

Mac users need not fret, though. If you got the last Security Update (2007-009 V.1.1) released just before Christmas, you’re already covered, as the Adobe update was already incorporated into it.

(Via Computerworld US Online)

The Playstation emulator circulating in beta has officially been released at Version 0.1.0.

The emulator, psx4iPhone, of course needs PSX ROM files, like the other emulators out for Apple’s phone, and you’re on your own trying to find some. It looks a lot like the GameBoy Advanced emulator, and has roughly the same features, like game saves, etc. And like the others, it’s still a bit clunky, with poor audio and herky-jerky video, but it’s a great start.

You can download it from the Home of Homebrew ZodTTD and manually install it, but as of today, it’s been available via Installer. Load your ROMs in Media/ROMs/PSX.

(I’ve known this trick for some time and have actually been teaching it to friends ever since, but it never occurred to me to post the darn thing. Taught it to Game Magazine editor Howard Paw the other day and realized I haven’t even mentioned it here. Well, better late than never.)

Apple has left out cartloads of basic features, apps and utilities that should be no-brainers to add. Even worse, they even forget to mention things that are actually already there for you to use right out of the box.

One of the things they forgot is how to find out currency rates in real-time over the net, quickly and easily without going to websites when all you want to do find out what the rate today is. Don’t worry, there’s no specific icon for it; you didn’t miss anything. It’s built into the Stocks widget that comes with the iPhone.

Updating the rates of currency worldwide is done through Yahoo online. All you need do is run the widget and add the “stock” of your selected currency manually, and every time you update it’ll check the current conversation rate for your preferred coin. Finally, a use for Stocks that those of use who don’t dabble in the market will find way useful. (Remember, it’s not a currency conversion calculator, mind you - someone else can invent one; this just gives you the current conversion rate. You can use the built-in Calculator to find out how much you’ve made or lost, which is now a snap because you know the current rate.)

Run the widget, then tap on the “i” icon on the lower right corner.

Then tap on the “+” or add button on the upper left corner, which is supposed to let you add stocks you wish to monitor.

In the text window, type the currency equation in this format: yyyzzz=x, where yyy is currency you’re asking about and zzz is your home currency.

Thus, to use an example, to find out how many Philippine Pesos (PHP) one US dollar (USD) can buy, you type USDPHP=X.

The proper abbreviations for currencies that the widget understands can be found on the Yahoo!Finance Currency Converter page (where you can actually do this and calculate specific amounts - which is better, really - but that’s not the point of this tip.)

Once you type in the argument, the iPhone will locate the proper “stock” and show it in the window below. Tap on it and it will add the “stock” to your list of monitored stocks.

Tap on “Done” and you’re all set. Every time you run the widget, it’ll consult Yahoo!Finance and give you the real-time exchange rate of the currencies you’ve selected.

You can add as many as you want (and while you’re at it, you can remove the pre-installed stocks Apple put in to save on screen real estate - me, I left Apple on to see how Steve and the gang are doing, just out of curiosity.)

So there.

Long ago, to remove Digital Rights Management from my music tracks, I started with the rigamarole of burning them to a CD from iTunes then re-ripping them back to iTunes, fresh, sparkling clean and DRM-free.

After I had a accumulated a small stack of CDs I never used from this method, I thought of just reusing a CDRW, erasing and burning over and over, even if I just had one track to clean - I didn’t have to wait to fill up a CDR with DRMed songs just to save a little money.

5thirtyone.com shows us an even easier way that doesn’t involve burning digital media at all, and is so simple I smacked myself on the head and said, dang, why didn’t I think of that?

One caveat - you’d need to have iMovie HD on your system.

The basic idea, in a nutshell, is for your to import the DRMed track into iMovie as a soundtrack, export it to iTunes as AIFF, then convert it to AAC within iTunes then just manually adding back the meta data and artwork. A little tedious, but no more ripping and burning to CD. And easier, as 5thirtyone.com points out, to create an Automator sequence to do this by the numbers every time you need to strip DRM from a track.

More detailed instructions and explanations from 5thirtyone.

There’s apparently a hack to remove the arbitrarily-imposed 1K limit of SMSs that can be stored on an iPhone.  Since I got one I’ve come across this upper limit a few times already and I’ve always wondered why this has to be so.

iPhone Skinning tells us about a hack called “No SMS Limit” (heck of an imaginative title) that removes this block. Whether or not this will result in complications down the road remains to be seen, so hax0r beware.

To get it, just open up NullRiver’s Installer on your iPhone (assuming you’ve jailbroken your unit and are more or less used to adding third-party apps; if not, you need to go to a whole other post), and add http://iphone.totalmatrix.net to your Sources. Reload and look for it under Tweaks (1.1.1).

Be aware you’ll also need SMSD on your system to access the SMS archives (and you need to get this first before getting No SMS Limit), which in turn require Erica Sadun’s UIctl, a UI for launchctl, first. Both SMSD and UIctl are available on Installer already.

No SMS Limit will require you to cold-boot your iPhone, and will patch SMSD before it runs, so be forewarned.

As usual, Mac-A-Doodle just passes on the info; your risk, your call. I’ve installed it myself and will report back if it messes up or hoses my phone.