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As promised, here is a quick tutorial on creating ringtones for a Treo 700p on the Sprint network.

The Treo 700p on the Sprint use AAC audio format for ringtones. As some people know, AAC is the audio format used by the iTunes store and similar to the mp3 format. The main advantage of the AAC format is Apple's propriety DRM. Thus Sprint may sell protected ringtones to their subscribers.

The method described in this tutorial will help you convert audio files and install them on your Treo 700p. The tutorial does not focus on creating protected AAC ringtones, yet will help you to achieve professional level ringtones playable on the Treo 700p.

The tutorial centers on readily available tools, yet is slightly Windows centric and requires several off-shelf applications (listed below). I will focus on open source tools on multiple platforms in the near future.

Secure Shell, known as SSH, allows establishing a secure channel between a local and remote computer. SSH is a set of standards and network protocol used for authentication and data exchange. It uses public-key cryptography to authenticate the remote computer and the user. SSH provide an additional layer of confidentiality and integrity for data exchange between two computers. Public key authentication may be describe as two rosetta pieces the come together and allows authentication. It deciphers the data transmited between two machines. After SSH configuration, the two puzzle pieces are divided between the remote and local computer.

Traditionally, the user login the remote machine with SSH and executes commands. These commands allow tunneling data traffic through designated ports, X11 connections, transfer files. In addition SSH may use sftp and scp protocols and rsync.

This guide deals installing a popular open source ssh, called Openssh on Cygwin. It assumes that you have administrator privileges on Windows XP and know you basic Unix commands. You should also consider yourself an advance user. No, the DVD Recorder is not a cup holder.

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