Some pretty big news today on the iPad front, two reports on AppleInsider indicate that the iPad is already a wild success. The first report states that Apple is now selling over 200,000 iPads a week in the United States alone, which is almost twice the number of 110,000 Macs sold every week in the USA. Analysts are revising sales estimates, and also predict some product cannibalization:

…Abramsky believes Apple will sell 8 million iPads in calendar year 2010. That’s up from his previous prediction of 5 million iPads in calendar 2010. The analyst believes the product will result in 25 percent cannibalization, but increase revenue to $59.7 billion…

If that’s not impressive enough, the findings of this second report might be. The iPad has an amazingly high consumer satisfaction rating of 91%

Only 2% of iPad owners say they are unsatisfied with their purchase, and I’m really not too surprised by this. Having used an iPad a fair amount myself, I have to say I am thoroughly impressed.

I truly believe the iPad is the consumer level computing device of the future – except that it’s here now. Of course, buying an iPad right now is a different story. Apple Stores are continuously sold out of the device and trying to buy it online from Apple reports a 7 to 10 day wait time. You can still purchase the iPad on Amazon but many sellers are attempting to fetch prices higher than the MSRP, and the situation on eBay and Craigslist is even worse. So if you’re in the market for an iPad, you might have to wait a little while.

I recently bought this Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter from Amazon for my MacBook Pro. It cost less than $8 including shipping, and it arrived at my house in about four days (for comparison Apple’s official adapter is $29 + shipping).

So how does a cheap third party MiniDisplayPort to DVI adapter work compared to Apple’s official adapter? Identically. A coworker has the Apple model and other than some graphic printed on the adapter itself I can’t tell a difference in either the build quality or the performance, even the packaging is really similar (see picture below). Setup is as easy as it gets, plug the device into your MacBook Pro and connect it to your monitors DVI cable, it’ll instantly work.

I’m really happy with the purchase, I saved a couple bucks with the third party cheap adapter but there’s certainly nothing wrong with Apple’s version. Considering the huge value of having a second monitor I consider this and an external display an absolute must upgrade for any MacBook or MacBook Pro owner. So what are you waiting for? Grab a good LCD monitor (be sure your MacBook supports the maximum resolution), the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter, and enjoy the screen real estate!

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Brian asks: “I need to add line numbers to a text file. I don’t mean line numbers in the text editor, I mean adding a number next to each item inside a text file. Is this possible to automate or do I have to manually edit the file typing 1, 2, 3 and going insane?”

Yes, you can easily hardcode line numbers into a text file…

Update: Several readers chimed in the comments to provide easier solutions to numbering lines within a text file. In order of simplicity:

Using cat (by far the easiest method):
cat -n file > file_new

Using the nl command:
nl -ba -s ‘: ‘ filename > filenamenumbered

Thank you Steven and Bernhard!

–

You can also use the command line tool ‘awk’, but it’s a bit more complex than the methods mentioned above, if you’re interested launch the Terminal and away we go.

First, be sure to backup your text file in the odd event something goes wrong (like a syntax error). Now that you’ve made a backup of the text file in question, let’s write line numbers directly into it:

awk '{printf("%5d : %s\n", NR,$0)}' filename > filenamenumbered

filename is the original file, and filenamenumbered is whatever you want to call the output of the awk command with line numbers attached to it. Your output text document will now have a number followed by a colon before each line item:

1: line with words
2: line with words
3: line with words

Your original text file should be unchanged, but if you made a syntax error than the backup file you made will save your day. This command will work in any Unix OS that has awk support, so feel free to run this command in FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, or whatever other variant you can think of.

You can remove the surface scratches on the back of an iPhone case by using a mildly abrasive rub or fine sandpaper. The anti-scratch coating is actually where many of the smaller finer scratches on iPhones are shown, which makes them relatively easy to buff out with some care. Whether you are using the toothpaste or sandpaper method to repair the scratches, you will want to be careful as to not rub the anti-scratch coating off of the iPhone case.

Warning: Try these methods at your own risk! We are not responsible for you damaging your iPhone in any way, and if you are not confident in your ability to do it right, you should probably avoid the techniques altogether!
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I find myself never using the MacBook Pro’s optical drive, the only time I have used it was to boot Mac OS from a DVD to reformat and reinstall Mac OS X. Now that it’s so easy to install Mac OS using an external drive though, is having a DVD drive really a good usage of limited hardware real estate on your MacBook/Pro?

If you’re like me, you might consider repurposing the optical drive slot to accommodate another hard drive, like a really fast SSD drive. You can do this using a great product from MCE called the OptiBay, and any internal 2.5″ drive (not just SSD’s). LifeHacker just wrote up a complete walkthrough on the hardware installation process, and it’s really motivated me to do this install myself.

What you’ll need to install a hard drive or SSD into the Optical Bay of a MacBook / MacBook Pro:

* MCE OptiBay for your MacBook Pro (starts around $99)
* A superfast SSD drive, like the Intel X25 SSD, disk space and prices vary from $115 to $430
* Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups
* Patience, and comfort with disassembling computer hardware

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You can adjust Gmail Notifier’s mail checking frequency interval by accessing an advanced preference in the application. In this example we will change the email check interval to 3 minutes.

* Click the Gmail Notifier menubar icon
* Hold down Command+Option keys and click on “Preferences” in the drop down menu
* Enter the following information exactly in the Key and Value boxes:

Key: AutocheckInterval
Value: 3

* Note that AutocheckInterval is case-sensitive, the second number value is the minutes between checking.
* Click the “Set” button
* Quit and re-open Gmail Notifier

By default Gmail Notifier does not have a value set for AutocheckInterval, which can lead to extended lengths of time between email checking (hours if you’re away from your computer, and regularly 30+ minutes while at your Mac). You can also just manually adjust this setting by adding the value in a Plist editor.

If you’re like me, you store a lot of information on your iPhone that you want to keep private. You might be interested to know that by default the backups from iTunes are not encrypted and can be dug through rather freely, furthermore restoring the device and seeing all your data is just a matter of clicking the restore button.

If you’d like more security with your iPhone/iPod/iPad backups, be sure to enable the encryption feature in iTunes.

* Connect your iPhone/iPad to your computer and select the device in iTunes
* Click on the ‘Summary’ tab
* Scroll down to “Options” and click on “Encrypt iPhone backup” – it will say iPad or iPod if that is your device.
* Select a password at the prompt – don’t forget this password or you won’t be able to access your backups!
* Click “Set Password”

Now all of your backup data that is stored locally will be encrypted, which is indicated by a padlock icon. From this point forward, if you are restoring your iPhone or iPad you will be required to enter a password, and the data is no longer freely accessible by anyone with access to your machine.

I would highly recommend enabling this feature if you have sensitive data on your iPhone/iPad, or you sync your device to a computer that is not under your own control: like a work or school machine.

If you’re a writer, developer, designer, musician, anyone that needs to have complete concentration to create freely, this app just might be your saving grace. Freedom forces you to pull away from the ubiquitous distractions of the online world by disabling your Mac’s network interface for a set amount of time, up to 8 hours. When the time is up, Freedom automatically reenables your Mac’s networking capabilities and you’ll be back online again as usual. How’s that for serious concentration?

You’d be amazed to find out how easy it is to concentrate on something when you can’t really do much else. As a student I used to unplug my computers ethernet cable when I had to really focus on a project, which is proof of concept really.

Freedom is a great app and is now an essential part of my Mac productivity arsenal, highly recommended.

Freedom developer home
Download Freedom now

Freedom is free to download and is donationware. If you use it often, consider sending the developer a donation.

Growl is a desktop notification system that allows applications to publish updates and items to floating windows on your desktop. This allows you to see things like updates, information, and status changes to whatever application is publishing the Growl notification.

The advantage to Growl is that regardless of what application has the focus, you’ll see the published status update. This is also the disadvantage, there are many times when you are using an application and you simply don’t care to see updates from another application printing to your desktop. I find Growl updates to be of a particular nuisance when you are using a Mac with a smaller screen resolution, when display real estate is valuable any additional clutter can really get in the way.

With all this in mind, here are a few ways to disable Growl notifications, both on an application specific basis, and on a system wide basis by disabling Growl completely.

Disable Growl Notifications for specific applications

You can specify applications to disable Growl notifications for by using the Growl control panel, here’s how:
* Open System Preferenecs
* Click on the “Growl” icon
* Click on the Applications tab
* Select each application you want to disable Growl support for by unchecking the checkbox next to the application name.

In this screenshot example, Cyberduck, TextWrangler, and Transmit have had Growl support disabled but Facebook Notifier for Mac is still allowed to publish Growl notifications to the desktop.

* Once you have unchecked the ‘Enabled’ checkboxes next to the application names, close the Growl system prefs and your changes will take effect immediately for those applications.

Disable Growl Notifications completely

OK so you’ve determined that there is no app worthy of dumping status updates all over your desktop, I can relate. Here is how to completely disable Growl notifications from appearing on your Mac:
* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the Growl icon
* Under the ‘General’ tab, click on the ‘Stop Growl’ button
* Disable the ‘Start Growl at login’ item
* Close System Preferences, changes take effect immediately.

Now it doesn’t matter what application has Growl support, the notifications won’t popup on your desktop. If for whatever reason you want to leave Growl running but you don’t want to see any notifications, you can hide all the Growl notifications by going to the same menu as above, and instead of stopping Growl, just click the checkbox next to ‘Hide all notifications’. This leaves Growl running but you won’t see any of the status updates.

You can watch many AVI movies without any additional software on a Mac just by playing them in the included QuickTime Player (located in the Applications folder). Just double click the file and it should work.

But what if it doesn’t? There are situations when AVI movies won’t play at all, and you might get an error message like the following:

“The document “movie.avi” could not be opened. The movie is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.” Followed with some fine print “You may need to install additional software to open this type of file.”

There are also times when just the audio of an AVI doesn’t work and sometimes just the video won’t work, in these cases it’s likely because you need to get a particular codec on your Mac to watch the AVI file.

In any of these cases the best solution is to get the AVI to play on your Mac is to just download a free plugin for QuickTime Player called Perian. Perian covers many codecs and will almost certainly allow your AVI file to play in the Mac QuickTime Player.

* Quit out of QuickTime Player if it’s open
* Download and install Perian (it’s free)
* Launch the original AVI movie back into QuickTime Player

The video should now play trouble free within QuickTime Player. You could always convert the AVI to MOV as well but you’d still need to download Perian for that.

If you’re looking to play DIVX on a Mac, I would highly recommend using Perian as well, it’s really the best solution.