You can now run Siri directly on the iPad 2, thanks to the recent A5 jailbreak and a few third party tools. While Siri works as expected and will answer your questions and inquiries, getting this all put together isn’t exactly for the impatient and it’s a somewhat lengthy procedure with a fair amount of … Read More

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

If you use a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel in Mac OS X and you need to scroll horizontally, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel. This shifts the normal scrolling motion to go side-to-side rather than the default up-and-down motion, allowing you to … Read More

Macs have always had the classic boot chime that announces the system has begun startup or has rebooted, but if you’re in a quiet place you don’t always want that sound to play. You may know that you can temporarily mute the Mac by holding down the Mute key during boot or reboot, but if … Read More

The default behavior for most command line tools is to show sizes in bytes, for tiny text files that is fine but when you start working with larger items this becomes difficult to read and interpret. The solutions is fairly simple, pass a “human readable” flag with the command, which will convert bytes to a … Read More

Apple fans have another book to add to their reading lists, this time focusing on the business side of things. Titled Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, the reader gets an in depth look at Apple’s unique culture and internal processes, ranging from it’s legendary secrecy to how … Read More

We recently showed you how to password protect files and folders using encrypted Disk Images in Mac OS X, but if you have an external drive you can go a step further. By using encrypted disk partitions, any drive, be it a USB key, flash drive, hard disk, or whatever else, can be set to … Read More

Developer build Mac OS X 10.7.3 11D50 has been released to registered Mac developers, this is the sixth dev build of the next update to Mac OS X, and arrives nearly a week after the last 10.7.3 build showed up. With no known issues, the emphasis is still on iCloud, Address Book, iCal, Mail, Spotlight … Read More

Apple has reported an absolute blowout first quarter for fiscal 2012, far exceeding any analysts expectations across the entire product lineup. Record iPhone sales, huge iPad and iPod sales, big Mac sales, giant revenues and profits, Apple is on fire. Take a look at some of these numbers: Q1 2012 Financials: $46.33 billion in revenue … Read More

Mac OS X Lion introduced automatic file locking for any file that hasn’t been edited recently. You’ll have noticed this when you try and open an older file and make changes to it, a dialog box asks to duplicate the file or to manually unlock it. This is fine for files that you don’t want … Read More

The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly … Read More

Do you want to view the recent picture(s) you just took with your iPhone camera? Rather than closing out of the Camera app and then launching into the Photos app and then Camera Roll, you can go another route directly from the Camera app!

The A5 jailbreak tool Greenpois0n Absinthe has been updated to version 0.3, the third release is relatively minor but includes a few bug fixes and adds support for Linux. As before and as the name implies, the app focuses on jailbreaking A5 based hardware only, meaning the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, both of which … Read More

Can’t remember what folder you stuffed that iOS app into? If you have a ton of apps on your iPhone or iPad, try rearranging them all by their actions (or by verbs), rather than by the apps category. Although you’ll have to do this manually by moving apps around and renaming or creating folders yourself, … Read More

The powerful Vim text editor is a longstanding favorite amongst developers and sysadmins, and now it has been ported over to the iPad and iPhone. The version for iOS is full featured, including automatic indentation, visual mode, language-aware syntax highlighting, integrated scripting capabilities, macro recording and playback, place markers, multiple clipboards, and much more. Download … Read More

Another option when enabling zoom in OS X Lion and other newer Mac OS X versions is to use a smaller floating zoom window, rather than zooming into the entire screen. This allows you to zoom into screen elements using a small zoom window that hovers over screen elements, kind of like a virtual magnifying … Read More

As recently as 2002, most of Apple’s products were manufactured in the USA. What happened? Why is nearly everything, from Macs to iPhones, made in China now? The New York Times provides an in depth report on Apple’s move overseas, and it’s not as simple as you might think. It isn’t just that workers are … Read More

Modern versions of Mac OS X include a great tool called tmutil that lets you interact with with Time Machine from the command line. It’s a powerful utility that has a ton of options, and we’ve used it before to disable local snapshots, but for the purposes here we are going to use tmutil to … Read More