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.

Purple Galaxy

Grass Blades

Dark wood

Rain Drops

Antelope Canyon

Scottish Highlands

Walpa Gorge

Millau Viaduct

Alamut Mountains

Some of these were found by @RetinaiPadWalls on Twitter, a great resource to follow for wallpaper needs. Follow @OSXDaily too for the latest updates and some other tidbits that don’t make it to the web.

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.

The Apple ][ is celebrating it's 35th birthday. Originally demoed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at a computer fair on April 16 and 17, 1977, the Apple II was the machine that put Apple on the map and then went on to catapult the personal computer revolution. What better way to celebrate one of the original PC's monumental birthdays than to use an Apple II simulator in Mac OS X?

Bundled within the XScreenSaver for Mac collection, the standalone Apple2 application is actually a completely usable VT100 Terminal emulator in the lovably awful Apple ][ style, complete with screen noise, random color flickers, a permanent caps lock, and other peculiarities unique to technologies of a bygone era. Whether you have distant memories of the ][ or never even used one, the simulator is a fun look at what computers behaved like 35 years ago.

• Download the XScreenSaver pack DMG, mount the disk image, and launch Apple2.app

Optionally, you can install the Apple2.saver screen saver as well. Not the most useful thing in the world, but it sure is fun.

Tired of all the OS X default screen savers? Breathe a ton of new retro life into your screen saver collection with the XScreenSaver pack for Mac. The free bundle includes over 200 old school screen saver classics, including an Apple II emulator, Flying Toasters, The Matrix, Blue Screen of Death, Missile Command, Phosphor BBS emulator, Rubiks cube, bouncing cow, and tons of other once-upon-a-time-was-fancy and hilarious screen savers from computing days of yesteryear.

• Download XScreenSavers from JWZ (free)

Individual screen savers can be manually installed by double clicking the .saver file, or you can install the entire pack of 201 by doing the following:

• Hit Command+Shift+G, enter “~/Library/Screen Savers/” as the path and hit return
• Copy all of the .saver files into that directory
• Open System Preferences and click on “Desktop & Screen Saver” to find them under the “Other” category

Being a retro Apple geek, my personal favorite is the Apple II simulator, which does a great job of emulating a terribly noisy TV screen and even lets you specify a terminal command to display continuously as the screensaver. Here is Apple II showing the output of “top” in it’s wonderfully distorted glory:

If you come from a unix background, many in the XScreenSaver collection will be familiar to you. The first version adorned X11 in 1992 and has been gradually adding more screen savers to the collection ever since.

Apple was busy dreaming about the future 29 years ago, long before the days of the iPhone, touch screens, cell phones, and even cordless phones. As this Apple product concept from 1983 shows, the company envisioned an Apple phone complete with a Mac-like OS, touch screen, touch keyboard, and even a stylus to navigate the onscreen elements. Of course this particular phone never went anywhere, but it does show Apple’s tradition of dreaming big and being years ahead of their rivals in imagination alone.

These particular concepts were created by one of Apple’s famous first industrial designers, Hartmut Esslinger of frogdesign. You can see more old Apple product concept pictures at fudder.de alongside a fascinating article about Apple’s early design, though it’s in German so the English translation is a bit rough.

Conceptually this one looks much more useful than the silly looking literal Apple phone from 1985, which was shaped like an actual Apple logo.

Spilling coffee on something is generally considered a bad thing, but not if you have a brown leather iPad Smart Cover. TwoLivesLeft accidentally got some coffee on their iPad case, and then had the hilarious epiphany “I had a wonderful, horrible idea: I’d stain the cover with coffee“. The result? A surprisingly attractive appearance that looks like beautifully refined leather, akin to something dug out of an old dusty library.

You can see how to make your very own coffee stained Smart Cover at TwoLivesLeft, it involves painting the smart cover with coffee and then rubbing crushed beans all over it.

Speaking from my own experience of spilling coffee on porous things, the Smart Cover will undoubtedly smell like liquid crack for a very long time. Whether that’s a bad thing is your call, but I won’t be trying this myself. if you’re brave enough to give it a go we’d love to hear about it.

Fascinating discovery by CultOfMac, best of luck to anyone who tries this.

The iPad is a great device to read on, and if your digital library is feeling a little bare then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve found some of the best places to get free ebooks, ready to be downloaded and opened with iBooks on your shiny new iPad (or iPhone, iPod, Kindle, Nook, or Android, for that matter).

• Project Gutenberg Top 100 – Full of classics, if you’re only going to visit one source for free ebooks, Gutenberg should be it. They have over 38,000 free ebooks available, and their top 100 list is basically a mirror of the Western Canon of literature. Grab titles from the popular lists, and then search category or by your favorite author to load up on a nearly infinite amount of reading. Audiobooks are offered in some cases too.
• Gutenberg Bookshelf by Category – Looking for books on a specific topic? This is the place to go. Sorted by alphabetical category.
• Gutenberg Harvard Classics – A 51 volume anthology of world literature classics, this collection was created in 1909 to provide the core elements of a liberal arts education by reading just 15 minutes a day. Free is slightly cheaper than a Harvard education.

Gutenberg is probably the best source online, but other sites offer free ebooks too:

• ManyBooks – Plenty of classics and a wide variety of formats
• FreeKindleBooks – All in .mobi format, intended for Kindle
• ePUbBooks – Free .epub ebooks, plenty of classics though most are also on Gutenberg
• FeedBooks – Free books from the public domain, varying quality
• SneeKidsBooks – A handful of childrens picture books like the Three Bears and Little Bo-peep

If you download the books onto a Mac or PC, emailing them to an iPad or iPhone is generally the easiest way to transfer them over quickly without syncing. From there they can be directly imported into iBooks or the Kindle app.

Know any other quality sources for free ebooks? Chime in the comments.