In what may be the boldest claim ever to hit iTunes users, the included image (via Flickr) are what claims to be the ‘perfect itunes equalizer settings’. Ah the internet, it’s funny how you find cool stuff without even looking for it. I randomly stumbled across this Flickr image and the claim was so outrageous that naturally I tried the settings out for myself. And here came the shock… it actually sounds WAY better!. So this may be a first for me, an outrageous claim on the internet that is actually true… wow. Check it out yourself!

Stacks is nice but it has long needed a scrollable list view option… well it actually has one it’s just hidden! Here’s how to enable the Stacks list view, which is now my new favorite way to use Stacks. Launch the Terminal and type the following commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool YES
killall Dock

Now when you right-click (control-click) a Stacks icon in the Dock, you’ll see “List” as an option. Try it out, it’s pretty great! If you want to disable the new list style and revert to the old one, type the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -bool NO
killall Dock

[ via Tumblr: FinerThingsMac ]

Recently the LAN at my office had been running slower than usual, and I couldn’t pinpoint what was using up all the extra bandwidth. I had a suspicion that P2P traffic was to blame but I just couldn’t see anything obvious on the offending machine. Using the lsof command line tool, we can pass the -i argument to list only the open internet connections on our Macs, and we can find out if there’s anything peculiar (or in my case, hidden) going on, and if so the process ID so that we can kill it.

I logged into the offending Mac and typed the following command
lsof -i

Here’s an example of the output displayed by this command:

MacMini:~ macuser$ lsof -i
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
SystemUIS 93 macuser 6u IPv4 0x04db27bc 0t0 UDP *:*
SystemUIS 93 macuser 10u IPv4 0x04db26e0 0t0 UDP *:*
iChatAgen 111 macuser 6u IPv4 0x07084734 0t0 UDP localhost:49490->localhost:49490
iChatAgen 111 macuser 10u IPv4 0x05666f28 0t0 TCP 192.168.0.101:53762->bos-m012c-sdr6.blue.aol.com:aol (ESTABLISHED)
synergys 129 macuser 5u IPv4 0x05f2f6b0 0t0 TCP *:24800 (LISTEN)
Safari 148 macuser 10u IPv4 0x06db46e0 0t0 TCP 192.168.0.101:57557->host29.prod.google.com:http (CLOSE_WAIT)
iTunes 644 macuser 21u IPv4 0x05f2f2a4 0t0 TCP *:daap (LISTEN)


In the above display there’s nothing unusual, but in my aforementioned network troubleshooting, I discovered a BitTorrent client running hidden in the background of one of my networks Macs, and it was seeding several large files! Naturally I killed the BitTorrent client, removed the application, deleted the files, and the Mac LAN is running at full speed again.

If you happen to want to only display the established connections, use this command:
lsof -i | grep -E "(LISTEN|ESTABLISHED)"
You can combine this with ‘watch’ to get an automatically updated list of established connections too.

Here’s a handy little command line utility that lets you set the screen brightness from the command line. It’s precompiled but the source code is available here if you are interested to see it. Once you have the precompiled binary in your path, just type something between brightness 0 (min) and 1 (max) to set it. Handy for us who live in the Terminal!

Download now

[ via MattDanger.net ]

There’s several ways to send free SMS text messages, here’s the best ways I know of to send free texts from the computer, using either the AIM protocol (with iChat or Adium), Google’s GTalk within Gmail, and finally a free website known as GizmoSMS. When using any of these methods, keep in mind the SMS messages may be free for you to send, but they are not necessarily free text messages for the other person to receive!

Send Free SMS Text Messages with AIM – we covered this in the past showing how to get free sms text messages on the iPhone but it’s certainly not just limited to the iPhone. Basically just send an instant message to a new screen name, but enter a phone number instead in the format +18885551212, send your instant message as usual but AIM will deliver the message through SMS and then you can talk as if it’s a normal instant message! This is my preferred method of sending SMS through the computer. (Works on Meebo too!)

Send SMS through Google Talk / Gmail – enabled last year, you can now add phone numbers as a contact in GTalk/Gmail and send free SMS text messages this way, it works quite well to send SMS through a browser. When the person responds to the text, it’s just like any other GTalk conversation within Gmail.

Free web-based SMS with GizmoSMS – this website is pretty straightforward and worked like a charm for every number that I tried it with. Basically just enter the phone number, the message, and the captcha code and away the message is sent. The downside to this method is that there is no way to specify where the message came from, so this is best for a last resort really. If GizmoSMS doesn’t work, try out TxtDrop which does basically the same thing.

After reading all the bad press for iPhone OS 3.1, I decided to hold out on upgrading, which means that I also can’t get MMS working, right? Wrong! The only thing you need to enable MMS on iPhone 3.0 (or 3.01) is the updated carrier file, which you can download from here. After you download the carrier file, type the following command in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

Do this with iTunes closed. Then launch iTunes again, and select your iPhone, then ‘Restore’ while holding down the option key, navigating to the .ipcc file you just downloaded. The update will take a few seconds, and then all you need to do is reboot your iPhone for MMS to work with 3.0!

Google Chrome for Mac is still very much in Beta, but the latest Dev Channel build is actually pretty decent (for web browsing, features are still lacking). The biggest advantage to Google Chrome is that each Browser Window or Tab is ‘sandboxed’, meaning if a website goes haywire and crashes, only that websites window or tab crashes and not the entire browser! Safari has a similar feature for plugins but not for tabs, I’d bet that in time they will though. Anyway check out the latest Dev Channel version of Google Chrome:

Developer home
Download now

There are two ways to enable the root super user account in Snow Leopard, the first is probably the quickest. Launch the Terminal and type the following command:

sudo passwd root

You’ll be asked for the admin password, then you’ll have to set a password for the root account. When you’re finished, the root account is now enabled.

The other way is through the GUI, which has changed for Snow Leopard because the “Directory Utility” application moved from the /Applications/Utilities folder to /System/Library/CoreServices

* Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices
* Unlock the application by entering the admin password and clicking the padlock icon
* Go to the Edit menu and scroll down to “Enable root user”
* Now choose Edit and select “Change Root Password” , and set a password for the root user
* All done! root user is now enabled

Note that enabling the root account can potentially leave your Mac vulnerable to some security attacks, so it’s best to keep disabled unless you know what you’re doing.

Here’s a cool trick I just learned. If you want to quickly change your sound input device, simply Option-Click the Sound menu at the top of your screen to enable an alternate menu pulldown list of input devices. For an audio geek like me this is a lot quicker than launching into the System Preferences and adjusting from microphone to line-in audio source. As far as I know this is new to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Enjoy!

Backing up your iPhone text messages is made extremely easy thanks to a freeware utility called Syphone. Since the iPhone has a limited number of text messages it can store at any one time, Syphone allows you to backup all the text messages and read through the archived text messages yourself on your Mac in an easy to read iChat-like interface. The full feature list is quite nice:

* View synced iPhone SMS messages on your Macintosh
* Archive SMS messages
* Import/export SMS messages
* View SMS messages offline in an iChat-like interface with selectable colors
* Open Address Book contacts
* View the number of sent and received messages for each contact
* Support multiple iPhones

Developer home
Download now

After downloading Syphone, all you’ll need to do is launch the program when your iPhone is connected and you’ll be able to start backing up all your iPhone SMS messages. The real question is, why does Apple not include this incredibly useful feature by default with iTunes?

Note: Syphone has not been updated to work with anything beyond iPhone 2.0 which sort of makes it useless for the time being, thank you to Jack Frost for pointing this out

You can also choose to manually backup and read iPhone SMS backup files from your Mac or PC