You can use your iPhone as an external USB flash drive using this (currently) free software from myPodApps. Called iPhone Explorer, it’s a simple and lightweight program that lets you browse through your iPhone through it’s interface which works pretty well as a file manager. You can rename, create, delete, drag and drop, both files and folders on the iPhone using this app.

iPhoneExplorer developer home
Download iPhoneExplorer now

At the time of this writing, iPhone Explorer was a free download for Mac OS X and Windows, but based on our past experience covering software by the authoring company, myPod Apps, this could change at any time. So if you want to use your iPhone as a flash drive and want to do it for free, I suggest downloading this now or it might go the same pay model as PodToMac when we discussed getting music off your ipod.

This is stupid enough that I had to post it. First there was the iPhone, then the iPad… what’s next? The iBoard… then the iMat!

[ via BeGeek ]

This is one awesome music studio based on an iMac. I wouldn’t know how to use half of the equipment here, but it sure looks fun.

[ via Flickr ]

“iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000065)”

Ahhh! That’s the message I got earlier when trying to connect my iPhone to my iMac, something I haven’t seen before. I searched around a bit online and found out that this is not a Mac OS X specific problem, many people running Windows XP and Windows 7 encounter the same error. While I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what causes it, I have my own speculation: power issues.

Many of the complaints and descriptions regarding the error describe swapping around USB connections and ports to resolve the issue, and I think this helps to corroborate my suspicion with power management. With this is mind, here’s how I got the ‘unknown error’ to go away and finally connect my iMac to my iPhone again: I just let the iPhone charge more. The battery had been very low, and I have auto-sync enabled, so I imagine the iPhone just didn’t have an adequate charge to maintain a connection.

Now again, all of this is just pure speculation based on my experience and reading other peoples encounters with the same problem. So if you’re running into this “0xE8000065″ error with iTunes and your iPhone (also some people report problems on their iPod Touch…) try the following to troubleshoot:

* Change the USB port the iPhone is connected to the computer with
* Let the iPhone charge sufficiently before trying to access it through iTunes
* Turn the iPhone on and off

If it’s persistant, you could even try resetting the PMU/SMC controller on the Mac.

Anyway, if you encounter this error hopefully these tips work to resolve it for you as well, let me know!

Using a Keyboard option you can allow the Tab Key to switch between dialog buttons, fields, and anything else in a dialog box within Mac OS X. This can greatly enhance the speed at which you use your Mac, and I’m a bit surprised Apple has never chosen to enable the feature by default.

Enable Tab Key for Navigating Mac Dialog Boxes & Buttons
* Launch System Preferences
* Click “Keyboards”
* Select “Keyboard Shortcuts”
* Near the bottom look for “Full Keyboard Access” and click the radio button next to ‘All controls’
* Close System Preferences (if you are confused see below screenshot)

Now anytime you have a dialog window pop up you can quickly navigate to the alternate choices and options by simply hitting the Tab key, very useful!

While everyone continues to wait for an official Hulu app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/whatever, you can beat them to the punch and get Hulu content on your iPhone now for free, using Snow Leopard!

This is a pretty crafty approach and it requires several things:
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed
* Latest version of QuickTime Player (with Screen Recording support)
* Hulu Desktop client for Mac (for easy full-screen mode)
* The audio recording utility called SoundFlower (so you can record system audio while a screencast is going on)

In case you hadn’t guessed it yet, after you’ve met the above installation requirements, you basically just set your audio output device to SoundFlower, launch the Hulu app and get your show queued up, then from within QuickTime Player you start a new screen recording and start playing the Hulu show… afterwards simply go through the saved screencast and trim out the desktop stuff you don’t want, and then save the file as iPhone format… crafty huh?

You can see the full walkthrough at SampleTheWeb: How to use Snow Leopard to Record Hulu Content on your iPhone [ screenshot borrowed from SampleTheWeb ]

Want to go to MacWorld Expo 2011 for free? Me too! The expo is from January 27th to the 29th of 2011 in San Francisco, California. You can sign up online for a free expo pass to the MacWorld exhibit until March 8th of this year, so if you think you can make it, register now!

Get your free MacWorld Expo 2011 pass here

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. Resolving the backup delay is easy to do, just pull down the Time Machine menu and select ‘Backup Now’, as long as you have the Time Machine drive attached, your backup will go as usual.

Common reasons to have the ‘Time Machine Backup Delayed’ message:
* You have manually stopped the Time Machine backup process several times
* You have detached the external device that Time Machine was backing up to
* You have recently changed the Time Machine backup drive

If you have recently changed the Time Machine device, make sure Time Machine is aware of the new disk location by checking out the Time Machine preferences within System Preferences > Time Machine. The name of the backup disk will be listed, if it’s an old drive or you want to switch it, just hit the ‘Select Disk’ button and select your new backup disk.

I recommend to just let Time Machine run on it’s regular backup schedule so you can prevent delays and keep your Mac backups as accurate and relevant as possible. You may not need them often, but when you do, you’ll be glad you have a recent Time Machine snapshot to revert back to.

Recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason, I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it. I know the images are fine because they open fine in Windows and even in Photoshop, so how can I force Preview to open the images? Pretty easy really: hold down Command+Option keys while dragging a file onto the Preview icon, this will force any file to open through Preview (you could force a text file into preview if you wanted with this, but obviously preview will only render compatible files).

Using this method, the images worked fine, I was able to resave them, and now they’re back to opening in Preview as usual. I’m not sure what the cause of this problem is, perhaps the image EXIF or meta data was corrupted. I remembered this trick from a post a few years back by our very own David Mendez, how to force open a file in Mac OS X, and this actually will work with nearly every application and file, so if you want to force an image file into TextWrangler, you could do that too.

There’s no shortage of DNS Server options out there, with Google DNS, OpenDNS, your own ISP’s, and the gazillion of others available to use. The question remains though, which of these DNS servers is going to be fastest for you? And how do you know which is fastest? NameBench is a free application that will run a set of benchmarks based on your web browsing history and tcpdump, and will report back the fastest domain name server for you to use. In some cases, switching to the suggested domain name server can be a considerably speed increase, with noticeably faster page loads. Check it out for yourself.

NameBench home

[via TechCrunch ]