Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. Here’s how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive using the Spotlight control panel:
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If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how:
The screenshot will appear on the desktop as usual.
Another approach is to take a timed screen shot using Grab or the command line, but the “test” method is usually quicker.
You’ve probably heard the talk of AT&T throttling heavy data users, but now we can see it’s effects ourselves and it’s probably worse than you thought. AppAdviceDaily put together the video up top, skip in about a minute ahead and you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of download speeds on a throttled vs non-throttled iPhone 4S. The speed difference is gigantic, as low as 0.07mbps on the throttled account vs 1.8mbps on the normal account.
Throttling is only supposed to impact the top 5% of data consumers and unofficial tetherers on AT&T on Verizon. These users typically get a warning text message notifying they are using too much of the data they paid for:
The threshold for being throttled is alleged to vary widely, with some reports saying it’s as low as 1GB and others suggesting it’s over 4GB. Once you’re throttled, you’re basically kicked off the 3G network and stuck on the painfully sluggish 2G EDGE network.
If you’re concerned about this, check data use on AT&T and Verizon by logging into your account. For those close to their allotted data limit, it may be a good idea to disable data or at least turn off 3G until the next billing cycle.
Retrieving public URL’s from Dropbox takes several steps, but Bloodrop makes it easy. Just drag a file onto the app and it will automatically upload to Dropbox and then copy the public link to your clipboard. It’s that simple.
Before grabbing Bloodrop, you’ll want to have Growl (or the free Growl Fork) installed so you can be notified when a file is shared and the URL is ready.
Unzip Bloodrop and copy it to the Applications folder, then launch it to configure with your Dropbox ID and destination folder for shared files. Now put the Bloodrop.app into the Dock and it’s ready to accept files.
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If you want an iPhone to appear as new, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and can also be a helpful troubleshooting technique.
The reset process will remove all data on the device, you will want to backup the iPhone manually or to iCloud just in case.
Warning: This will removal all data, music, photos, everything, from the iPhone.
Resetting the iPhone on device can take a while depending on the model, the warning dialogue will give you a rough estimate but it can range from a few minutes to over an hour to restore the device completely. During this time the phone is otherwise inoperable.
At this point you’ll either want to leave the iPhone in it’s factory state for a new owner, or restore from backup.
FaceTime has long been expected to support video calls over 3G networks, but thus far it hasn’t happened without a jailbreak. Blame it on the carriers, Apple, the rain, maybe 3G is too slow, or maybe it will be a feature for upcoming 4G LTE iPad and iPhone hardware… who knows, but regardless you can use a little loophole to initiate FaceTime video chat over 3G connections without the need for jailbreaking.
Suddenly you can make video calls over 3G.
Not the best solution because it requires additional hardware, but apparently it works.
Thanks to Av for the tip
New to Mac OS X Lion are several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing you to encode and convert video and audio to other formats right on the desktop. We just covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using the media encoder, but it turns out this feature isn’t enabled by default for all Mac users running Lion. If your Mac is missing the “Encode” menu options, turning them on is easy.
Now that the OS X Lion media encoder is enabled, you can right-click on media files to convert video to audio and audio to m4a. The resulting pop-up encoder window looks like this:
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Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of Mac OS X Lion’s new media encoding abilities that are built directly into the Finder. This has been tested to work with .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4, and the resulting audio track is 256kbps m4a file:
The encoder works very fast, and you’ll end up with a .m4a audio file of the same name in the same folder as the source video. Open the file to bring it into the iTunes library for playing and syncing to an iPod or iPhone.
Speaking of iTunes, you can use the same Finder encoders in Lion to convert audio files to m4a format, which can then be added to iTunes as well.
Update: Don’t see the Encode options when you right-click media files? Here is how to enable them
An updated version of the redsn0w jailbreak utility has been made available to resolve a prominent bug with iBooks and also includes other minor bugfixes that could cause crashing. Versioned as Redsn0w 0.9.10b4, the new release continues to be an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 for the iPhone 4 & 3GS, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1, and does not provide support to any other devices.
Fixing the iBooks problem for already jailbroken devices is simple enough, all that is required is to download and run Redsn0w 0.9.10b4 over an existing iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak to apply the fix.
Alternatively, the Corona untether has also been updated which applies the same iBooks patch without the need for using redsn0w again. Corona can be downloaded on any jailbroken device for free through Cydia.
Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X Lion is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.
Here’s how to get this working yourself:
Because the screen saver is interactive, once you are playing songs you need to hit the Escape key or click the little icon in the lower right corner to exit.
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