If you don’t want your MacBook Pro to wake from sleep when you open the lid of the machine, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the following command:

sudo pmset lidwake 0

Changes take effect immediately, and you can verify this is working by using the -g profiles flag below, or just by closing the lid to force the MacBook to go to sleep. Now when you open the lid, the Mac will not wake from sleep. This will work on the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.

You can set this back to default behavior (ie: waking from sleep when the lid is opened) with the following command:

sudo pmset lidwake 1

Again, changes take affect immediately.

If you want to check your pmset settings, use the following command:

pmset -g profiles

You’ll see something like this, grouped by Battery and AC power sources:

womp 0
sms 1
hibernatefile /var/vm/sleepimage
ttyskeepawake 1
acwake 0
sleep 0
autorestart 0
halfdim 1
hibernatemode 3
disksleep 10
displaysleep 15
lidwake 0


Anything with a 1 next to it indicates that feature is enabled, a 0 is disabled. The ‘hibernatefile’ or sleepimage is where the contents of your Mac are kept when you sleep the machine, this serves as a cache file and can grow quite large depending on your RAM. If you want to learn more about the rest of the pmset functions, use ‘man pmset’ at the command line.

pmset is a powerful utility that offers a lot of customization for Mac OS X power management. Using pmset, you can temporarily prevent a Mac from sleeping, schedule Mac boot and sleep/wake times, disable the sudden motion sensor, and much more.

If you want to create a new partition in Mac OS X, you won’t need to use anything fancy other than the built-in Disk Utility. Be sure to have a full backup of your hard drive before adjusting the partition table just in case something goes wrong. If you have an adequate backup, proceed:

Add a new hard drive partition in Mac OS X

• Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities/
• Select the hard disk you want to partition from the left side of the app
• Click on the “Partition” tab
• Click on the + button to add a new partition
• Specify a name for the new partition, select a filesystem type (Mac OS Extended Journaled is default), and choose a size either by manually entering a capacity or by dragging the slider bar in the partition map
• Click on “Apply” to create the new partition

You can make partitions any size as long as you have the available disk space to accommodate it, and creating the partition shouldn’t affect your existing filesystem either as long as there is free space. Nonetheless, there is always a chance something could go wrong, which is why I recommended you backup your drive first.

After you have clicked ‘Apply’ to create the new partition, it will be immediately accessible in the Finder to use how you want. A new partition will behave like a new hard drive, and it will appear on your Desktop as a new drive which can be ejected, mounted, formatted, just like a hard disk.

I partitioned my drive before installing Mac OS X Lion so that I could maintain my stable Mac OS X 10.6 system software while still exploring the Lion 10.7 Developer Preview. Another common use is to partition large external hard drives for a specific Time Machine backup partition. Time Machine will backup a drive until the available space is taken, so if you set it to backup to a partition, it will only take up that space and leave the other partition alone, allowing the drive to serve multiple uses.

Deleting a partition
Removing partitions is just as easy as creating one. All you need to do is follow the steps above to get to the partition table, select the partition you want to delete, and then click the “-” button rather than the plus icon. Remember, if you delete a partition, you will lose data that exists on it.

Apparently the Royal Wedding is a big deal, with an expected viewing audience of up to 2.4 billion people (yes, billion) watching the ceremony. If you’re one of these 2.4 billion people, you’ll be happy to find out you can watch the whole thing live directly from your iPhone or iPad thanks to YouTube streaming and a nice little iOS mod.

Click this link on your iPhone or iPad to watch the livestream

If you don’t open the link in Safari it won’t work. When we got this tip a few days ago I ignored it thinking it was too niche to mention, but after hearing some friends and family rant about the wedding and how they wouldn’t be able to watch it for various reasons, I figured hey, someone might find this useful. If that’s you, great, if it’s not, that’s great too.

Thanks to Robert for the submission!

If you’re in IT, or just fixing Grandmas Mac, it’s not too uncommon to get a machine where you don’t have the admin users password. If you find yourself in this situation, you can easily change the Admin password, or any other users, simply by booting into Mac OS X‘s command line Single User Mode. I consider this to be essential knowledge for troubleshooting Macs.

Change an Admin Password in Mac OS X Single User Mode

This is a multistep process but it’s easy to follow:

• First you need to enter Single User Mode. Reboot the Mac and hold down Command+S at boot to enter into the command line.
• You’ll see a note where Mac OS X tells you that you need to run two commands in order to make filesystem changes, this is necessary so let’s handle that first
• The first command checks the Mac OS X filesystem for errors and fixes them, it can take a few minutes to run:

fsck -fy

• The next command mounts the root Mac OS X drive as writable, allowing you to make changes to the filesystem:

mount -uw /

• After the filesystem is mounted, you can reset any users password using the following command:

passwd username

• You’ll need to enter the new password twice to reset and confirm the changes

Don’t know the admin username? No problem
If you’re fixing someones machine and you don’t know the username to reset, just look in /Users with:

ls /Users/

Here you’ll see at least three items, .localized, Shared, and a username. The username is what you’ll want to change with the passwd command.

After the password is reset and confirmed, you can exit out of Single User Mode by typing exit or reboot. The Mac will now boot as usual and you’ll have access to the machine with the new password.

This is an easier and faster method than the approach taken for resetting lost passwords or using the Mac OS X boot DVD, because it’s changing an existing root users password rather than creating a new admin user account. Both work fine though, so you can use whatever method you’d like.

You can use the same approach to navigate around a sleep/wake lock screen, although you’ll obviously have to reboot the Mac meaning you will miss whatever is currently on the users desktop.

Are these pictures of the next-gen iPhone 5? Images have surfaced on Chinese website MIC Gadget that show what appears to be a white iPhone with a larger screen. The side-by-side image above shows a traditional iPhone 4 display on the left, and on the right is a mystery iPhone display piece with a larger screen area, which could be iPhone 5 (or a fake, of course).

MICGadget says the following about the images, but doesn’t specify where they came from:

Man, we don’t know if this is real, but at least we can see that it has a larger display and edge-to-edge glass. Maybe it’s a mockup, but we are sure that it’s not an iPhone 4.

The similarities with iPhone 4 are obvious, which corresponds with recent rumors that iPhone 5 will share the design of iPhone 4 and feature mostly internal hardware upgrades.

Another image shows the device apparently turned on:
Read more »

The DVD may not be dead yet after all. It looks like Mac OS X 10.7 Lion may be offered on traditional DVD installation disks in addition to the more modern and fancy App Store download distribution and USB installer keys.

The possible leak comes from a German Amazon page for the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion, where mediatype is clearly specified as DVD-ROM (screenshot below):

It’s entirely possible that this placeholder is inaccurate or even a mistake, but Amazon does have a history of accidentally leaking release dates and software upgrades on their various worldwide online stores.

I should also point out that the idea of a USB key installation method is speculation based on the new MacBook Air Mac OS X install drive, and the distribution from the App Store is also speculated based upon the digital delivery of the Mac OS X Lion Developer Previews through the Mac App Store. It’s entirely possible that neither of these installation methods will appear and that we will only see a DVD installer, but with the MacBook Air and Mac Mini Server’s lacking DVD drives, those devices must be served with some form of installation method for Lion.

We’re almost certain to find out what exact installation methods we’ll get for Lion at WWDC 2011, which is just a few months away.

Are you stuck with a Windows PC at work? Maybe you just prefer the look of Mac OS X to Windows? If you’re bored of the Mac OS X 10.6 theme for Windows, spice things up with an all new Mac OS X 10.7 Lion theme for Windows 7! The theme pack is pretty detailed and it brings the illusion of having Mac OS X Lion running on a Windows PC, complete with the new Lion wallpapers and all.

You can grab the skin and theme pack from DeviantArt

Look for the download link on the right side of the DA page. Obviously you’ll need Windows 7 to use this, but you’ll also have to download a couple programs for Windows that allow you to further customize your desktop. These include Reshacker, Universal Theme Patcher, Moveex, JPGtoBMP, leftsider, RocketDock, UberIcon, VirtuaWin, and YzShadow. Don’t worry, there’s links to download all of these on the themes DeviantArt page.

If this theme pack doesn’t satisfy you, just get a Mac. You know you want one anyway.

You can quickly retrieve any Macs serial number via the command line by using the following command string:

system_profiler |grep "r (system)"

The command results will look something like this:

$ system_profiler |grep "r (system)"
Serial Number (system): C24E1322XXXX

If you just grep for “Serial Number” you’ll be presented with serial numbers to other hardware included in the Mac, which is why the “r (system)” qualifier is included.

Once you have a serial number, you can do things like check AppleCare warranty status and repair history.

Wondering how fast the iPad 2 is compared to an iPad in real world tests? This video of side-by-side speed tests shows typical iPad usage, things like booting, launching various apps, and shutting down. You’ll see the iPad 2 excels in most areas but lags, oddly, in shutting down. If you don’t want to watch the video, here are the raw numbers and the tests:

iPad 2 vs iPad Real World Speed Tests

• Booting: 25.3 vs 28.6
• Launching Infinity Blade: 10.6 vs 26
• Launching Google Earth: 17 vs 20.3
• Launch Garage Band: 3 vs 6
• Launching Angry Birds: 8 vs 10.5
• Shutting Down: 26 vs 12

Obviously this test is nonscientific and there’s nothing too groundbreaking here, but it’s interesting to watch anyway. Sure there are improvements in general speed and functionality, but I think we have yet to really see apps that really take advantage of the improved iPad 2 hardware specs.

Thanks for sending this in Davis!

Several applications in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion include unusually high resolution icons, providing another hint that Apple may be laying the groundwork to support retina displays on the Mac platform. The icons measure in at 1024×1024, which are double the current maximum Mac OS X icon resolution of 512×512.

The doubling of pixels and resolutions is significant, as doubling existing resolutions was how Apple handled bringing retina displays to the iPhone 4, and as we saw in some of the possible resolutions for retina Macs, it’s what makes most sense for developers and designers to accommodate.

The high res icons were noticed by Brazil’s MacMagazine (via MacRumors), and apply at least to the App Store, AirDrop, and LaunchPad icons under the Lion Developer Preview.

This discovery is after one of our readers noted that Lion’s large 3200×2000 resolution wallpaper may suggest a retina Mac future. If huge icons and default background images weren’t enough, MacRumors pointed out several months ago that so-called “HiDPI display modes” are making an appearance in Lion:

Taking cues from iOS, Apple has reportedly built in support for what it calls “HiDPI display modes”. These HiDPI modes allow developers to supply 2x-enlarged images to support double-high resolution displays. Like the iPhone 4′s Retina Display, this means that user interface elements will remain the same size, but everything will be twice the resolution and therefore twice as detailed.

While evidence continues to suggest that Apple is planning for a higher resolution future across their hardware lineup, costs to produce ultra-high resolution displays are likely still prohibitive. In other words, don’t expect displays with these resolutions anytime soon, if ever.