The Indian Premier League is turning into a damp squib with rain and Duckworth & Lewis deciding crucial games in far off South Africa. What was meant to be a great show of entertainment cricket is depriving Indians of all the fun and frenzy.

Yet fun is happening, but off the pitch — on the Internet. The Kolkata Knight Riders, headed by the Great Entertainer Shah Rukh Khan, has become fodder for gossip. Fans of Sourav Ganguly, deprived of the captaincy by yet another Australian coach, are peeved. This provides an ideal setting with everyone dying to know what is happening inside the dressing room.

So out comes a young boy claiming to be a member of the team, and begins spilling the beans on a blog at http:// fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com. The whole world wants to know who this “Deep Throat” is. (Deep Throat, you might recall, is the pseudonym given to the secret informant who provided information to Bob Woodword of the The Washington Post about the involvement of US president Richard Nixon’s administration in what came to be known as the Watergate scandal.)

The blogspot has become a must-read for anyone looking for a laugh and some insight into the lives of cricketers. The blog clearly says: “All characters appearing in this work (blog) are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.” So we have characters like Kaan Moolo, Lord Almighty, Vinnie or Badshah Dildo, Phoren Babas, Kishen Kanhaiyya, and several other hilarious names. I do not want to be a spoiler, and so I leave it to you to guess who these names refer to. Fake IPL Player’s incisive writing, keen sense of cricket and strategy and inside knowledge of the goings on in the team have got the Knight Riders franchise worried. There is a witch hunt to track down who is blogging, sometimes thrice a day on his MacBook Pro. In my first five days of reading his blog, I have seen his followers jump from nine to over a thousand. That’s how popular it is.

So how did I discover this blog on the first day it was launched?

I was scouting around for a free application to give me the match scores on my iPhone. I discovered this brilliant App called Cricinfo Mobicast in the iTunes App Store. In this app you have live cricket commentary, scorecards, news, photos and, podcasts by, among others, Geoff Boycott and Tony Greig. The Fake IPL Player blog was mentioned among the stories.

You do not have to own an iPhone to use Cricinfo Mobicast. Just go to http://ci.plusmo.com on your phone browser and download the application. You will find the list of supported phones at http://www.cric infomobile.com/india/mobicast-compatible.html. (I suggest you use your computer to go to this site). If your phone is not supported, you can still get the latest scores by going to http://wap. cricinfo.com using your phone’s browser.

If you are on Airtel or Vodafone you could use their cricket portal. But be warned that you will be charged anything between Rs 10 a day and Rs 49 a month for its use. Why pay them anything extra when you can get the live updates free? You are already paying them for the GPRS connection.

Another good place to get live scores and even streaming video free is the IPL official website. Open your phone browser and punch in http://m.iplt20.com.

For iPhone users who want to play cricket on their sets, there are some very good games. Cricket Game by Spinfast, Cricket T20 Super Sixers by Indiagames and iSpot the Cricket Ball by Jason Savage are some of the good ones. The first two cost 99 cents and the third one $1.99.

A Windows tip

A lot of people have been asking me how to hide their files and folders on a shared computer. So let us move on from cricket and mobile phones to this process that I have used quite effectively.

All that you have to do is go to this site, http://www.cleaner soft.com/hidefolder/free_hide_folder.htm. Free Hide Folder is a free computer security software that enables you to hide your personal folders. It is very useful for keeping your private files away from prying eyes. Other users of the shared computer will not even know where your personal files exist. They won’t be able to see them even accidentally. With a few clicks of the mouse your folders will be hidden and protected by a password. You can remove or change the password any time you please.

Download the program from the site and run Free Hide Folder. Locate and select the folder you want to hide, and then click the Hide Folder button. It is as simple as that.

Send in your computer- related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon.

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