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?

If you’ve ever wished you could check up on your house while you’re away, wish no more because we have a simple solution. We are going to configure a Mac as a home security camera that will open a live video stream on demand which can be watched remotely from anywhere via an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or another Mac. If this sounds potentially complicated, it’s actually not at all, and everything is achieved through a little FaceTime hackery. Read along.

Requirements for the Mac Security Cam
Here’s what you’ll need before getting started:

• FaceTime app installed on the home Mac (comes with Lion or later, earlier Macs can get it from Mac App Store)
• A valid Apple ID to use as a FaceTime Login – you may want to create an additional unique Apple ID for this purpose
• An iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, or another Mac with FaceTime

Setting Up the Camera & Accepting Remote Video Connections

This is easier to set up than you might think. We’re going to assume you already have FaceTime on the Mac installed, if not do that first. Next you’ll want to position the Mac so that the front-facing iSight (FaceTime) camera is pointing in the direction you want to watch. With that done, here’s the most technical aspect of this set up:

1. Launch Terminal found in /Applications/Utilities/ and enter the following command to automatically accept incoming FaceTime calls:

defaults write com.apple.FaceTime AutoAcceptInvites -bool YES

2. Still in Terminal, enter the next command, changing the email address on the end with the Apple ID you wish to automatically accept a video connection from:

defaults write com.apple.FaceTime AutoAcceptInvitesFrom -array-add change@me.com

If you want to add other Apple ID’s or even a phone number to automatically accept FaceTime video calls from, feel free to do so by running the above command again with additional email addresses. Phone numbers must be prefixed with a + like so: +14085551212

Opening the Live Video Feed

Now for the fun part. Grab an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac that is setup to use FaceTime with the Apple ID you chose to autoaccept invites from, and initiate a FaceTime call with the home Mac’s Apple ID. It will automatically accept the call, giving you a live video feed of what’s going on at the location of the recipient Mac. Hang up the FaceTime call at any time to close the video feed.

As mentioned earlier, it may be best to create a unique Apple ID specifically for the recipient Mac. That Apple ID could then be added as a contact to the iOS Address Book as “Mac Home Camera” and added to favorites for quick access.

The only downside to FaceTime is the feed requires a wi-fi connection or to use Personal Hotspot to circumvent the FaceTime wi-fi limitation. You could probably use Skype to get around that limitation as well, but that’d be another article. Enjoy!

Like to learn new things, preferably from world class experts? Then you’ll like Coursera, a new organization from which several prominent universities aim to offer free high quality online courses to anyone, anywhere.

Princeton, Stanford, U Michigan, Penn, and UC Berkeley are among the schools currently participating in the program, and combined they offer a wide variety of classes on various topics. Whether you’re interested in Humanities, Social Sciences, Healthcare, Medicine, Biology, Math, Statistics, Economics, Finance, Business, Society, Networks, Information, or Computer Science, all classes are completely free and taught online.

The free Computer Science courses may be of particular interest to our readers, and those classes include: Algorithms I and Algorithms II, Automata, Compilers, Computer Architecture, Computer Science 101, Computer Vision: 3D Reconstruction to Visual Recognition, Computer Vision: Fundamentals, Cryptography, Design and Analysis of Algorithms I, Game Theory, Introduction to Logic, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Networked Life, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Securing Digital Democracy I, and Software Engineering for SaaS.

You can see the full list of free course offerings at Coursera.org

Course length varies from 4 weeks to 12 weeks. A handful of classes start this month, and many more begin in May, June, July, August, September, November, while others are still listed as To Be Announced.

Education is a great thing, and Coursera looks to have a strong future. Hopefully they come out with an iPad app similar to Khan Academy for easier self-paced learning and for those who wish to follow along more casually.

If you like the idea of learning without a gigantic university-sized price tag, iTunes is another great resource for free classes and lessons, with videos and podcasts offering free foreign language lessons, free iOS 5 development classes, general iPhone development courses, and much more.

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.

50% of households in the USA own at least one Apple product, and 10% of those without intend to buy an Apple product sometime in the next year. This finding and others were discovered by a recent CNBC poll, which revealed some other fascinating statistics on the ubiquity of Apple gear in the United States.

• 55 million homes have at least one iPad, iPhone, iPod, or Mac in the house
• Apple buyers tend to be male, college educated, and younger
• 57% of homes on the West have Apple products, with an average of 2 per household
• 47% to 51% of homes in the remainder of the country have Apple products
• 61% of households with children own Apple products
• 48% of childless homes have Apple products
• 28% of households making $30,000 a year own at least one Apple device
• 77% of households earning over $75,000 a year own at least one Apple product, and average three devices per home

Owning Apple gear is also a nonpartisan affair, with 56% of both Republican and Democrat party members owning a device.

Some of these figures are unsurprising given the tremendous sales volume of Apple gear over recent years, though it’s still an impressive feat for a company that was nearly bankrupt in 1996.

If you want to experiment with Linux without dual booting and potentially impacting your main operating system, the best way to do so is with virtualization. Virtualization allows you to run Linux directly atop your primary OS, whether it’s Mac OS X or Windows, in a separate virtual machine, with practically no potential for error. It’s completely free and fairly easy to set up, we’ll walk you through the entire process.

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Want to run Windows 7 right on an iPad? OnLive Desktop does exactly that, letting you access a cloud-based Windows 7 PC directly from iOS. Complete with the full Microsoft Office 2010 suite, you can use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with full touch controls, and believe it or not it’s actually really fast and fluid.

Amazingly, this is free for the first 2GB of virtual storage space on the cloud PC, though additional storage and paid plans are available. The paid plans start at $4.99 and include up to 50GB of storage, provide access to more Windows applications, add DropBox support, and also bring full Internet Explorer access with Flash (useful for web developers who don’t want to run IE in virtual machines).

Using OnLive Desktop is easy, here’s all you need to do:

• Download the free OnLive app from the App Store (iPad only)
• Sign up for a free OnLive account

The account signup process requires an email but is otherwise quick and painless. Enter that ID into the app, and you’ll immediately find yourself on the desktop of a Windows 7 machine, right on the iPad.

Try this service out and get it while you can, because there is some question as to how long OnLive Desktop will be around. Microsoft is actively complaining that the service violates their Windows 7 licensing agreements, though OnLive is adamant that it’s supported and is willing to fight for it. Hopefully the two can come to an agreement and keep the OnLive service alive, because frankly it’s a cool technical feat and also has some very useful applications for the real world. Better yet, Microsoft should just buy them and offer the service directly with Windows 8 Metro, which is optimized for touch and may well be a significant competitor to iOS down the road… who knows. Anyway, check it out, even if you don’t like Windows it’s impressive to try out the free service.

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Want a free instant macro lens for your iPhone camera? Carefully apply a tiny drop of water to the lens, flip the iPhone over, and voila, you can suddenly take extreme close ups of just about anything. I know that sounds a little weird, but it works, and the results are fairly impressive.

The drop of water has to be tiny and fit pretty much perfectly on the camera lens, aim for a droplet between 1/4 and 1/2 a centimeter wide, just enough to fit on the lens but not go over its border. You’ll want the droplet to be as circular as possible too, otherwise you’ll end up with strange edge effects. I managed with a finger tip but it’s generally easiest to use the end of a pen or pencil to apply such a tiny water drop.

Here are a few sample images of extreme closeups of a $10 bill and another iPhone screen, taken with a good old iPhone 4 and a water droplet on the lens:
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If you want to play around with Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) but don’t have an Android phone or tablet, you can download the official Android SDK, or better yet, grab a preconfigured virtual machine that will run ICS in VirtualBox. Other than providing an interesting look at the primary competitor to iOS, virtual machines are useful for compatibility testing, and developers and designers should find some value in adding an Android VM alongside their Windows & Internet Explorer VM’s, giving this some practical use beyond the novelty factor.

Here’s how to run Android 4 ICS in VirtualBox:
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If you found the recent New York Times pieces on the making of Apple products to be interesting and “Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory” to be enlightening, you’ll probably enjoy this ABC Nightline report on Foxconn.

ABC’s Nightline was given exclusive access to a Foxconn factory in China that assembles Apple products, providing a fascinating look at how Apple gear is made. You’ll see iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pro’s being put together manually by workers as there’s virtually no robots or automation, nearly all of the devices are assembled by hand. This means it takes a while to produce each Apple product, and a single iPad takes nearly a week to complete.

It’s not exactly a groundbreaking documentary, but if you are an Apple fan and user of Apple products, it’s worth watching. The show is about 15 minutes long and has been embedded below or you can watch it on ABCNews.com.