Water, coffee, and soda are among your laptop’s worst enemies. Just a little bit of such a liquid on your laptop keyboard can damage or destroy your machine or cause you to lose data. The best way to prevent damage from a mix of liquid and electronics is to keep them as far apart as possible. Keep your laptop far away from cups of coffee, glasses of water, and cans of soda.

But in the real world, stuff happens. If you have a choice of poisons, take the water spill. A hot cup of coffee, a cold glass of soda, or a glass of wine are each bad news; all of them are slightly acidic. Acidic liquids are nastier than nearly neutral water because the acid can corrode metal contacts. And both coffee and soda can become gummy and sticky as they dry. Here’s the drill for an emergency recovery from a spill.

With Bluetooth wireless features fast becoming commonplace on mobile devices, users need to be aware of the security vulnerabilities linked to the technology, said a Symantec executive.

A study by research firm InsightExpress revealed that 73 percent of mobile device users are not acquainted with security issues that could put at risk mobile devices such as cell phones and Bluetooth-equipped notebooks. To these users, terms such as “bluejacking,” “bluesnarfing,” or even “bluebugging” would probably be unfamiliar.

Resco has announced the availability of the new version of its file explorer on the mobile market–Resco Explorer 2007. Resco Explorer 2007 for Smartphone and Pocket PC focuses on aspects that made it so popular amongst users while adding many new features that will certainly be appreciated. One of the most highlighted new functions is the FTP client for the Smartphone version and support of decompressing RAR archives in both versions. It also offers support for Windows Mobile 6 and customizable keyboard shortcuts, among other new features.

3Guppies announced the availability of its mobile blogging widget, giving consumers the ability to instantly update social networking sites like MySpace and alert friends via their mobile phone. The new widget, available for free at 3Guppies’ Web site, makes sending and receiving content to and from cell phones and personal Web pages simple. The newly enhanced 3Guppies widget includes an option for friends to subscribe to SMS alerts anytime a moblog is updated and immediately check the latest entries on the mobile Internet. 3Guppies is the first mobile social networking service to capitalize on the cell phone as both an origination point and destination for user-generated content.

Agendus Mail is an intuitive and powerful email client that brings ease of use, full attachment support, unlimited POP/IMAP/SMTP email accounts, desktop synchronization, SMS capability and much more on Palm OS PDAs and smartphones. And, it’s an ideal companion of the Agendus for Palm OS line of solutions.

This update includes improvements centered around message storages, message rendering, user preference migration during upgrades, and numerous localization refinements.

Data warehousing is always considered the province of big hardware. But in this fascinating article, Harikrishna S. Aravapalli explains how very small devices, even iPods and smartphones, can provide miniature data warehouses wherever you go.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Recent advancements in the computing industry have made wireless networking an important technology. Current technologies can support wireless communication on various different platforms. Laptops with WiFi cards are available; hotspots can be found at airports, hotels and shopping malls; businesses are converting existing local area networks to a wireless network. Contributing Editor Humayun Bakht show you how to use distributed applications to run these networks on multiple computers.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

A lot of people will be buying shiny, new copies of Halo 3 this week, but some of them will get home to find scratched discs straight out of the box.

Early reports from lucky early owners of the Halo 3 Limited Edition on gaming forum NeoGAF found that the game discs have broken free from the hubs that were supposed to secure the discs into place.

Unlike the regular Xbox 360 green game boxes, the Halo 3 Limited Edition ships in a black tin box with center hubs too shallow to adequately hold the DVDs in place. As a result, consumers may find discs that have been freely floating around inside the box that have been scratched up by the very hub that was supposed to keep it in place.

Although Halo 3 has yet to launch to the public, forum participants who work at game stores have chimed in with their own experience after examining (by shaking and listening for loose discs) their inventory. So far, reports of scratched discs apply only to the $69.99 Limited Edition, but not to the $59.99 Standard Edition or the $129.99 Legendary Edition.

After being absent for over a month, Palm’s revised ROM update utility for the Verizon version of the Treo 700w/wx is again available for download. The Verizon-specific versions of the Treo 700w/wx ROM updaters were originally made available on July 12th but only remained live for one months’ time. The 700w/wx updater was pulled alongside the Treo 700p version last month due to the infamous “Error 3000 bug” being present on updated devices. Despite an embarrassing mishap yesterday in which Palm sent out alert emails to users advising that all versions of the update were available to download, the 700p ROM update remains unavailable as of this writing.

Shape Services have released a new version of their Palm OS multi-service instant messaging application. IM+ All-in-One Mobile Messenger now combines six IM service providers in one application. IM+ now supports AOL IM, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN Live/Messenger, ICQ and Jabber. Key features include SSL support, full presence status support, groups, detailed contact info, configurable sound and vibra notifications, 5-way support and background operation for use while in other apps.