AirDrop is the extremely easy local peer-to-peer file transfer tool that is built into Mac OS X 10.7, it allows you to easily send and receive files wirelessly over a network just by dragging and dropping. It’s a great addition to Lion, but it’s not supported on all Macs (some 2008 model MacBook, MacBook Pros, some Mac Pro’s and Mini’s, etc), and most Hackintosh setups also can’t access it… and you can’t use it over Ethernet… until now.

You can enable AirDrop with Ethernet and enable AirDrop support on unsupported Macs running OS X 10.7+ by using the following defaults write command in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1

Paste that in and hit enter. You’ll need to then kill the Finder with ‘killall Finder’ or reboot the Mac for changes to take effect.

What’s really interesting is that this enables AirDrop over both Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet connections, which basically means any machine running Lion can use it whether or not it has a wireless card. As long as it’s connected to the same network you will be able to see the Mac in the AirDrop list of another Mac running 10.7.

If you ever want to disable this for some reason, you can just use:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 0

This tip comes from a user submission to MacWorld, and attached is a note that you may need to use this command on all Macs that intend to interact with the unsupported Mac, although that doesn’t seem to be the case on all machines.

Don’t forget that you can also change the AirDrop sound effect too.

Just in time for some weekend fun, you can download the wildly popular physics-puzzle-shooter game Portal for free from Steam until September 20.

Download Portal from Steam by going here and clicking the big green “Install Game” button

Portal runs in both Mac OS X and Windows, and once it’s in your Steam account you can download it on other machines if you want.

Here’s the interesting part: the game is offered as a free download until September 20, 2011 as part of the “Learning with Portals” program, where some schools are using the popular video game to help teach physics and critical thinking skills. How cool is that? This blurb from their website explains further:

Today, innovative educators are finding ways to incorporate Portal™ and Portal 2 into their classrooms—helping teach physics and critical-thinking skills. It’s eye-opening to see how video games can be used in amazing and unexpected ways to help educate our next generation.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching science, technology, engineering, and math is capturing the students’ imaginations long enough for them to see all of the possibilities that lie ahead.

Using interactive tools like the Portal series to draw them in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun which gets us one step closer to our goal—engaged, thoughtful kids!

If you’re skeptical, Valve put together a video which shows exactly how it’s being used by one 7th grade classroom:

Pretty cool huh?

Check it out yourself, the system requirements are relatively basic and it should run on most recent Macs:

• OS X version Leopard 10.5.8, Snow Leopard 10.6.3, or higher
• 1GB RAM or more
• NVIDIA GeForce 8 or higher, ATI X1600 or higher, or Intel HD 3000 or higher
• Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection

While we’re on the topic of free gaming, if you’re looking for a multiplayer experience, don’t forget that Team Fortress 2 is also a free download from Steam too.

If you want to quickly style your folders or Launchpad with Emoji, you can access the Special Characters panel directly from the Finder in Mac OS X Lion:

• Click on the Finder or the Mac OS X desktop
• Pull down the “Edit” menu and select “Special Characters”

Here’s the weird part, and this could be a bug or maybe it’s intentional, but if you right-click on an item from the Special Characters panel and chose “Copy Character Info”, instead of getting just the icon into your clipboard you’ll get the full unicode and more, like this:

“🎃JACK-O-LANTERN Unicode: U+1F383 (U+D83C U+DF83), UTF-8: F0 9F 8E 83″

You can either just delete all the text after the Emoji character since it appears at the front of the string, or you can just get the icon by doing either of these:

• Drag and drop an icon from the Special Characters panel onto the desktop to create a .textclipping containing the special character or icon
• Drag and drop the character directly into a folder or file name

Even with it’s quirks, this is quicker than using TextEdit or another app to access the Emoji icons.

Thanks to ram who left this tip in our comments!

We already covered how to install Windows 8 in VMWare, and now we’re going to show you how to get Windows 8 running inside of VirtualBox. If you’re wondering why, well, VirtualBox is advantageous for several reasons, the two main being that it’s free and it’s available for all major platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Download these first:

• Windows 8 Developer Preview – download this free from Microsoft Dev Center
• VirtualBox – download this free from Oracle

Put the Win8 ISO somewhere you can find it easily, and install VirtualBox before proceeding. You’ll notice the setup is a bit more complicated than using VMWare, but we’ll walk you through everything so just be patient and you’ll be up and running in no time.

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Thanks to the inclusion of Emoji in OS X Lion, you can now customize the appearance of Finder items by inserting Emoji characters into file and folder names. This offers yet another way to customize the appearance of a Mac OS X 10.7 desktop:

• Launch TextEdit and hit Command+Option+T to access the Emoji characters selector
• Double-click on an Emoji icon you want to use to insert it into a blank text document
• Highlight and copy the inserted Emoji icon with Command+C
• Back in the Mac OS X Finder, click and hover to rename a file or folder, and use Command+V to paste the Emoji icon into the name
• Repeat for other Emoji icons and files or folders

You may want to adjust the text size of file or folder names too so that the emoji is more visible. In the screenshot the font size is set to 16 which provides more detail. You can do this by:

• Go to the “View” menu and choose “Show View Options”
• About halfway down the panel look for “Text Size” and set it to accordingly

The text labels are also positioned to the right, which is done directly below text size.

In a similar customization, you can also use Emoji in Launchpad folder names.

Wondering how to find the routers IP address that your Mac is connected to? It’s pretty simple:

• Launch “System Preferences” and click on “Network”
• Click on the “Advanced” button in the lower right corner
• Click on the TCP/IP tab and find the router IP next to “Router:” in the format of x.x.x.x

In the example screenshot above, the routers address is 192.168.1.1

To clarify here, the routers IP and your own IP address are different things. Being the start of a network, the access point typically holds the very first IP address on the network, ending in .1 or .100, and then individual IP’s are counted from there. If you know the format of the networks assigned IP’s you can often just guess this, because if your machines IP is 192.168.1.5 it’s a very good chance the routers is 192.168.1.1, and so on.

So why would you need this info? For one, if you’re setting manual TCP/IP settings, but it can also be crucial for troubleshooting network issues. I had to walk someone through this over the phone this morning when troubleshooting a relatively common Wi-Fi connectivity problem in Lion, which for OS X 10.7 at least, the simplest solution is often to use a keepalive script or to ping the router to maintain constant data transfer between the Mac and elsewhere.

There’s no doubting that the tech world is abuzz about Windows 8, Microsofts upcoming iOS and Mac OS X competitor. If your curiosity is peaked by all the talk, you can easily install Windows 8 and have it running on top of Mac OS X thanks to virtualization. The best part about this particular solution? It’s all free, so read on.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download Windows 8 Developer Preview – free download (64-bit version recommended)
• Download VMWare Fusion 4 – free 30 day trial or $49 to buy

Note: Don’t want to use VMWare? Here’s how to install Windows 8 in VirtualBox, which will run in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

The Windows 8 iso is about 4GB GB but transfer very quickly from Microsofts servers, and getting the VMWare Fusion trial is just a matter of confirming your email address.

Assuming you have now downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO file and then installed VMWare 4, you’ll probably want to quit most of your other apps so that you can free up as much RAM and CPU as possible.

How to Install Windows 8 in VMWare

This has been confirmed to work in both Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

• Move the Windows 8 ISO file to your Mac OS X desktop
• Launch VMWare and click on “New”
• Drag and drop the Windows 8 ISO into the “New Virtual Machine Assistant”
• Ensure that “Use operating system installation disc or image:” is selected and the Win8DP ISO is chosen, then click “Continue”

• Select “Windows 7″ as the Operating System and give the Windows 8 VM at least 2GB of RAM for best performance (64 bit version)
• Boot the VM by pressing the giant play button (>)
• Proceed to install Windows 8 Developer Preview by following the few onscreen instructions

Installation is surprisingly quick, you’ll be up and running in about 20 minutes from start to finish. When installation is complete, you’ll be greeted by a brief customization and setup screen and then quickly launched into Metro. You’ll also have access to the ugly Ribbon Windows Explorer UI:

From my brief usage, it seems like Windows 8 would be best with a touchscreen, and I wasn’t too thrilled with using a mouse in the Metro interface, but nonetheless it’s worth checking out yourself if you’re curious about this stuff or just like keeping on top of the latest tech trends. Enjoy!

BTW, VMWare Fusion 4 costs $49, but if you have no interest in buying it the 30 day trial works just fine to check out and play with Windows 8 to see what the hype is all about.

Some MacBook Pro or Air users may want to disable their internal screen when the laptop is connected to an external display, this is generally achieved in two ways but since Mac OS X 10.7 the internal screen is more persistent and wants to stay on.

To disable the internal screen for OS X Lion based laptops, launch the Terminal and enter the following command:

sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0"

You’ll need to reboot for changes to take effect, and the internal display will then be completely disabled regardless of whether the Mac is open or closed.

To undo this, you can go back to the Terminal and enter:

sudo nvram -d boot-args

Then reboot again, or you can just zap PRAM by holding down Command+Option+P+R during reboot, which clears out the boot-args as well. If you were to disconnect the MacBook Pro from an external video source, zapping the PRAM would be how you’d want to reenable the internal display.

This is the opposite of “clamshell mode” – where the Mac laptop is closed and the screen is still turned on. Clamshell can look nice, but without adequate air flow the Mac may overheat, thus running the computer with the display open is recommended. If you’re going to do this, be sure to set the primary display so that the menubar, Dock, and alert windows go to the proper screen.

Thanks to Marcus for the tip via a thread on Apple Discussions

If you’ve been using the iTunes betas and want to downgrade back to a stable iTunes build, or you just want to remove iTunes for another reason, here are two ways to delete the app under Mac OS X 10.7: the easy way using the GUI, and a quick way for advanced users using the command line.

Remove iTunes Using the Finder

• Quit iTunes
• Navigate to /Applications and locate iTunes app
• Select iTunes and hit Command+i to “Get Info” on the application
• Click on the Arrow next to “Sharing & Permissions” to reveal the access panel
• Click on the lock icon and authenticate with your administrator password
• Under “Privilege” set both instances of “everyone” to “Read & Write”
• Close out the Get Info window and drag iTunes to the Trash, and then empty the trash

Remember that without another version of iTunes available for Mac OS X to use, you will likely encounter errors in various places, plus it will make it impossible to sync and backup iOS hardware like an iPhone or iPad. Basically, if you don’t have a good reason to be removing iTunes, such as to downgrade or ditch the colorized version, than you should keep it around.

Delete iTunes via the Terminal

This is a quicker method for users who are comfortable with the command line:

• Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/
• Type the following commands to kill iTunes:

killall iTunes

• Now kill the Helper process:

killall "iTunes Helper"

• Now to delete the actual application, use this command:

sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app/

• Authenticate the sudo command, note there is no warning for the actual deletion of the app

As usual, be careful with the rm command because if you mistype the file path, you will delete other things without warning. This is why we recommend the command line for more advanced users only.

Note: this does not delete your apps, backups, books, media, or the iTunes library, which is located at ~/Music/iTunes/ (unless you moved it elsewhere)

We’ve shown you how to make Mac OS X look like iOS, but what about going the other way? If using a jailbreak doesn’t freak you out, this winterboard theme makes an iPhone look and behave freakishly similar to Mac OS X Lion and includes a variety of features that are borrowed from OS X 10.7, including:

• OS X Lion style login screen
• Mac OS X style Dock
• Usable Finder menu bars
• Draggable Finder windows that contain your apps and data
• LaunchPad shows all your apps
• Stacks for quick app launching from the Dock
• Mission Control gives quick access to social apps and Dashboard widgets
• Safari is reskinned to look like OS X

Called “OS X Lion Ultimatum”, it may be one of the most advanced iOS themes that’s available out there. It’s currently in beta but will cost $3.50 and require Dreamboard and a jailbreak.

Update: Here’s how to install OS X Ultimatum on the iPhone:

Open Cydia

Tap Manage Sources

Tap Edit, then Add, then add source fnetdesigns.com/cydia/repo

Go to the Changes section and install Theme Outlet

Close Cydia, go to your home screen, and open Theme Outlet

Browse for OS X Ultimatum and download it from there

Open up Dreamboard, browse for the OS X Lion Ultimatum theme, and install it.

You can follow development over at MyMyi Forums but it should be released soon.

Screenshots don’t do it as much justice, be sure to watch the two videos embedded below to get a full grasp on how convincing the theme is.

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