Thinking about engraving your new iPad with some custom ASCII art? Watch out, you might end up with a few extra appendages on your ASCII drawings.

This cat:

^---^
= ' . ' =

turned into this mutant four eared cat ASCII:

^^---^^
= ' . ' =

This is obviously a mistake in the engraving process and I found it hilarious – yes I’m easily amused. The recipient of the engraving error could probably complain and have it redone properly, but it sounds like they have a good sense of humor about it and don’t mind the mistake. Here’s their quote from Flickr:

Thought I’d have something subtle and cute engraved on the back of my iPad. Instead Apple wanted me to have something more original and mutant-like.

If you didn’t know, custom engraving is free with any new iPad 2 purchase bought online through the Apple Store, it usually adds about a day onto shipping time. Current delivery times on the iPad 2 are 1-2 weeks, and they’re still nearly impossible to find in stores, so if you’re going to be waiting you might as well get an engraving too… just be careful of that ASCII art.

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Verizon iPhone 4 users can now untether their iOS 4.2.7 jailbreak thanks to a new Verizon Untether tool available on Cydia. All you need to do is install the package from Cydia on a currently tethered phone and it will become untethered, it’s very easy:

• Launch Cydia and add the following rep: http://cydia.pushfix.info
• Search for “Verizon Untether 4.2.7″ and install the package
• Reboot your iPhone

Jailbreaking the Verizon iPhone on iOS 4.2.7 is the same as jailbreaking 4.3.2 using redsn0w, just remember to download the iOS 4.2.7 IPSW for the CDMA iPhone 4 instead of iOS 4.3.2.

If you’ve stayed on the sidelines but you’re curious about all of this, check out some reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone straight from the creator of Cydia himself.

Dying to let Apple know how you feel about the iPhone? Do you have a great idea on how to make the MacBook Pro even better? Do you know of a way to improve the efficiency of a product? Stop keeping this stuff to yourself, you can give Apple feedback directly about products, and they actually encourage it!

Head on over to Apple.com Product Feedback and select the product you want to chime in on. Whether or not they’ll listen to your feature request or rant remains to be seen, but at least you got it off your chest.

Here’s me requesting the next generation MacBook Air gets a glowing keyboard and how I want a pony for Christmas:
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If you dream of Mac laptops you’ll like this one. From the looks of things, there’s a MacBook Pro 15″, MacBook Air 13″, MacBook Pro 13″, MacBook Air 11″, and a mystery Mac behind the the top two (maybe another MacBook Air 13?). All these Macs belong to Garrett Murray of ManiacalRage. If you’re wondering why there are so many Macs in the picture, it’s because he’s transitioning his household from the heavier MacBook Pro’s to ultraportable MacBook Air’s.

The Macbook Air is a great machine so I’m not surprised that people are moving from heavier models to the ultraportable lineup. I just wish the Air had a Core i5, 8GB of RAM, a black screen bezel, and a glowing keyboard, but that’s me being picky.

Apple looks to be developing a new bookmarking feature in Mac OS X Lion that allows users to select web content for reading later. The feature is called Reading List and appears to behave much like Instapaper and ReadItLater, but is currently disabled in Lion Developer Builds of Safari.

MacRumors found the following description that Apple offers for Reading List:

Reading List lets you collect webpages and links for you to read later. To add the current page to your Reading List, click Add Page. You can also Shift-click a link to quickly add it to the list. To hide and show Reading List, click the Reading List icon (eyeglasses) in the bookmarks bar.

Safari’s Reading List could simply be an extension of Safari Reader, a feature that has been in the web browser for a while. Reader strips web content from it’s origin webpage and places it in an overlaid easy to read format (it also skirts around paywalls sometimes).

There is some speculation that Reading List might sync bookmarked pages between your Mac and the iPhone or iPad for later reading, but there is currently no evidence to support this idea.

A nondescript update to Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 has been released to developers via Software Update. The description is only that it is “recommended for all users running Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2″ and likely focuses on bug fixes and feature refinements.

The update brings Lion to build 11A444d, weighs in at 1.17GB, and is the second update that has been made available to Dev Preview 2. Also available is Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 4.

Direct download links to the package update files coming soon!

Long before the iPhone, there was… an Apple phone? I don’t know if this is real, if it was actually patented by Apple Inc, or if it was ever produced, but it certainly looks like someones brilliant high-tech idea from 1985. Who wouldn’t want to be talking into a flip apple phone?

For more retro Apple fun, check out the hilarious Apple Corporate video from 1984. Be sure to have your audio on for that one, because there’s even a theme song.

image via @AppleSpotlight

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines wondering why you should jailbreak your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you’re probably not alone. There’s plenty of reasons, but the video above lets us hear a few directly from Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, of Cydia fame. His main pitch is that jailbreaking gives you the freedom to do things outside of the normal scope of applications, including:

• 5 icons on your dock
• Cool animation customizations
• Quick access panels to settings
• Twitter client from a status bar
• Forward voicemail messages to other people as emails
• Custom lock screens
• Black keyboard vs white default
• iOS appearance themes

In other words, jailbreaking creates a tinkerers wonderland, allowing for thorough customization of the iOS interface and experience. If you watch the video, you’ll see a couple examples of these customizations in action, some are just pure eyecandy and others are genuinely useful enough that Apple should consider adopting them (forwarding voicemails, custom lockscreens, etc).

What app should you use to jailbreak? In the video, Saurik currently recommends using redsn0w (you can read a tutorial to jailbreak 4.3.2 with redsn0w here, it’s easy just follow the instructions).

The downsides to jailbreaking? You have to keep on top of iOS updates to make sure you don’t lose your jailbreak. Saurik recommends just waiting a few days until after an iOS update is released so that a jailbreak is available for the new version, which has been the standard jailbreaker approach for a while now. And no, jailbreaking is not illegal so there is nothing to worry about there.

For whatever reason, Saurik doesn’t mention carrier unlocking, but that’s also a common reason people jailbreak their iPhones in regions where hardware is sold locked by default. Unlocking is getting more and more challenging though, and current methods only apply to older firmware. The good news is that the GSM iPad 2 is unlocked regardless of where you buy it, and this may hint at a more liberalized approach to carrier locking in future versions of iPhone, or so we can hope.

Thanks to Parakeet for sending us the video via 9t5mac

Much like you can monitor Mac OS X filesystem usage through the command line, you can also discover what apps are currently using your internet connection.

Here are two ways to do this, the first provides easy to read output and will print names of applications and processes that are connecting to the outside world:

lsof -nPi | cut -f 1 -d " "| uniq | tail -n +2

Running this command will give you something like:

SystemUIS
Dropbox
iChatAgen
Finder
iTunes
Google
ssh

Obviously these are just the application names and there isn’t much more data here, but if you’re just trying to track down a rogue bandwidth hogging app it’s sometimes adequate.

If you want more detailed information, we can revise the above command so that we get more raw data out of lsof by removing the pipes to other command line utilities, leaving us with unrefined details directly from lsof. You’ll also notice I cut out the -n flag because I want to see the host names this time around:

lsof -Pi

This will provide much more data, including the app name, PID, protocol, IP address, hostname, and the current status of the connection. All very helpful data.

If that is information overload, try piping the command through ‘more’ so it is easier to read in chunks, or use grep to sort data for a specific app or process, like so:

$ lsof -Pi |grep iChatAgen
iChatAgen 228 David 10u IPv4 0x0bfe44ec 0t0 UDP 127.0.0.1:5191->bos-d25v-r2d2.blue.aol.com:5191
iChatAgen 228 David 13u IPv4 0x1e148b1e 0t0 TCP 192.168.1.29:50051->206.198.4.49:5190 (ESTABLISHED)

lsof is a powerful utility with a myriad of uses. I covered using lsof to track down bandwidth issues quite some time ago, but it was using just the -i flag.

You can instantly reveal the location of any item in the Finder from an Open and Save dialog box by selecting the item and then hitting Command+R. Regardless of the app, this will immediately switch to the Finder and open the containing folder of the item you selected. Try it out, this is much faster than digging around in the Finder to uncover a file.

The Open & Save dialog window has a lot more to it than meets the eye. You can show hidden items with Command+Shift+Period, go to any folder with path completion, and, one of my personal favorites, is to set the expanded Save dialog as default through a defaults write command.