What do you get when you combine two Apple fans on wedding day? A wedding picture featuring husband and wife using their MacBook Pro’s, of course.

We typically post interesting Mac setups on Saturdays, but Gabor P sent in this cute picture of he and his wife using their Macs on that special day, and we had to put it up.

For those wondering, the Macs are:

• Wife: MacBook Pro 13″ Mid 2010 , 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo , 4GB RAM , 320GB HDD
• Husband: MacBook Pro 13″ Early 2011 , 2.3GHz i5 , 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 750GB HDD

Congratulations to you both!

Apple has started to air two new iPhone 4S commercials, this time featuring actor John Malkovich speaking with Siri. The first ad, shown below, is titled “Life” and features Siri getting philosophical in response to a simple inquiry about life, replying with:

“Try and be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and then. Get some walking in. And try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

The second commercial, also embedded below, is titled “Joke” and features a more typical Siri interaction, covering weather, appointments, restaurant searches, and a bad joke about two iPhones walking into a bar.

Both commercials are roughly in the same theme as the other recent celebrity spots featuring Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel, but have otherwise veered away from Apple’s more traditional commercials.

There are tons of interesting pictures posted to Instagram all the time, but unless you’re using the iOS or Android app you can’t really see what’s going on there. That’s where Screenstagram comes in, it creates an attractive screen saver using an array of images pulled from either public photos or your personal Instagram feed.

There aren’t many options within the screen saver, but you can either specify a Instagram login and pull pictures from your own feed and who you follow, or just let it load from the “popular” public feed. For what it’s worth, Screenstagram is really at its best when you follow some interesting people who post things you actually want to see and not necessarily random photos from John Q Public.

• Download Screenstagram free from BarbarianGroup

If you’re not an Instagram fan you can also use Flickr feeds as screen savers, or go the oldschool route and build your own with a folder of pictures directly in Mac OS X.

Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.

This is really easy, all you need to do is pipe the output of any command directly to “say” like so:

uptime | say

In that example, this will speak the output of uptime using the default OS X text-to-speech voice, though you can change the voice to anything else with the -v flag:

uname -a | say -V Samantha

Taking this a step further, it is possible to export the spoken command output to an audio file. Here’s a pointless example of saving the spoken output of the openssl manual page as an m4a file:

man openssl | say -v Samantha -o "talkopenssltome.m4a"

If you want to get ridiculous, you can use one of the singing voices to, well, sing the output of a command. And who doesn’t want an audio file of of the robotic Cellos voice or the awfully perky Good News singing the output of a manual page? Put it on your iPod for the drive home.

man openssl | say -v Cellos -o "serenadingmanpages.m4a"

If you don’t like the bundled voices you can always add new voices to OS X for free through Speech preference panel.

Get creative, because the ultimate utility of this is entirely up to you.

Thanks to Greg P for pointing this out in the comments

Everyone loves a good wallpaper to beautify their desktop or homescreen. We try to post some of the nicer ones we find and to continue that tradition we’re sharing 9 more absolutely gorgeous wallpapers that have been sized for the new iPads retina display. Even if you don’t have a new iPad, the resolution of each image is a whopping 2048 by 2048 pixels which should be high enough to function as desktop backgrounds for most Mac and PC displays too.

Click the images below to open them in a new window, note the pictures hosted on InterfaceLift require manually selecting the screen resolution which will make it easy to get the perfect resolution for your display.

Read more »

Though almost everyone likes a nice photo screen saver and some of the funkier options out there, I’m also big fan of minimalist screensavers that do something simple like displaying just the time. That’s exactly what we have courtesy of Apple UI designer Robert Padbury, two beautifully simple clocks, either in 12 hour or 24 hour format, no other frills.

• Download the minimalist clock screensavers free from Dribbble
• Alternate screen saver: MinimalClock at iLoveColorz

Both are extremely lightweight and easy to install, all you need to do is download the .qtz file and drop it into System Preferences’s Screen Saver window to turn them into the active screensaver.

Because they are .qtz files, they are also very easy to edit yourself in Quartz Composer should you want to change the font and text styling, background or foreground color, rotation, or whatever else, though the default styling is very nice.

If you want something similar but with the date as well as the time, a screen saver called Today offers that, though it’s not as lightweight as this one.

Update: The original Minimalist Clock was pulled from Dribble for some reason, but you can find similar screen savers like Today, Fliqlo flip clock, and MinimalClock. We will update this post if the original screen saver returns.

For those of us who will probably never work at Apple, this little inspirational new-hire note gives some insight into the company culture and philosophy. Apparently this greets all new employees upon their first day with the company, it reads:

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

 Welcome to Apple.

The message is clearly inspiring while also demonstrating the demanding nature of work at Apple, which helps to explain why their products are so refined and ultimately enjoyable for all of us to use.

This was found on HackerNews, which has a mostly negative response to the note. What do you think, good or bad?

The next time you’re in desperate need to crack open a beer bottle, reach for your iPad power adapter. Say what? Well, apparently it can double as a bottle opener, not that we’d recommend that. This may be the ultimate Apple-geek party trick and I’m sure college students the world over are rejoicing in their dorms right now at this exciting new discovery, but that doesn’t mean anyone endorses this practice or that we’d recommend you trying.

Using an iPad power brick as a bottle opener is almost certainly not covered by your AppleCare warranty so don’t cry to Apple or anyone else if you break something in the process. We certainly aren’t going to try it ourselves, though this should also work with the MacBook Pro & Air MagSafe charger too. But you’re entirely on your own here, so party on.

Heads up to @EvaZebra for discovering the revolution on Twitter, you should follow us there too.

Have a fraying iPhone or iPod USB sync cable? Welcome to the frayed cable club. Now, you have a few choices if you’re floating the boat of cable frays: try to get Apple to replace it for free at about a 40% success rate, shell out $29.99 for an official cable, jury rig a hideous repair by slapping on some electrical or duct tape, or roll the dice with $1 and get a brand new knock-off replacement.

Obviously the best approach is to get a replacement from Apple, but they typically only replace these cables if they fray within the first year of a devices ownership. You may have better success at the Genius Bar, but for me going to the Apple Store isn’t convenient anyway, and something about paying $29.99 for a couple wires wrapped in rubber rubs me the wrong way. Initially I just globbed some electrical tape on the portion of the fraying cable, but within a few days it attracted more cat hair than a velvet suit at a vet clinic and about a week later I think it developed a pulse and started trying to communicate with me, plus lets face it, it looks like crap.

Enter the great $1 Amazon cable gamble! For the whopping price of a buck with free shipping included, you can order a cheapo knock-off cable from Amazon, and about 85% of the time the cable is great and works perfectly. The other 15% of the time the cable may not work that well or it looks so janky you’ll be embarrassed to be seen with it in public. Nonetheless, those odds are better than Vegas, so if you’re up for some adventure, shell out a dollar and cross your fingers to get a knock-off cord replacement at a fraction of the price of the official iOS device syncing cable.

• $1 iPhone Compatible USB Sync and Charging Cable – Amazon.com

We’re throwing this out there because these cheap replacement cords have worked for ourselves and friends on multiple occasions, but we’ve also got a dud before. Accept that little caveat beforehand, because your $1 may or may not be well spent, it ultimately depends on where the cable ships from. Buying from iKingshop, VVT, or Importer520 all have very favorable ratings, but as you can see from some of the other Amazon ratings there are a few sellers that ship you rubbish for a dollar. Good luck!

Are you a gamer? Toss your plans out the window for the next few days because Diablo 3 is free to play all weekend long. Dubbed an “open beta”, the free weekend is intended to help Blizzard load test the Diablo III game servers before the official public release on May 15. You’ll be able to play the game from today (April 20) at noon until Monday, April 23 at 10AM PST, with complete access to all five character classes up to level 13.

Playing Diablo 3 Open Beta is completely free for both Mac OS X and Windows users, here’s what you need to get started:

• Battle.net account (free to sign up)
• Create a BattleTag
• Download the game client and install it before April 23 (free)
• Hardware that meets the Diablo III system requirements for Mac or PC

Whether you’re a fan of the Diablo series or just Blizzard games in general, this is a great chance to get an early look at the game. Likewise, it’s also a good opportunity to see if you like Diablo 3 before shelling out for the full paid version when it comes out next month.