Rather than watching system activity in Activity Monitor, have you ever wished you had physical analog meters on your desk that showed you what was going on with your computer? You know, maybe having a gauge that showed you what your CPU cores were doing, another to show network activity, and another for RAM usage. If that sounds like a loose pipedream it’s not at all, and this awesome Mac Pro setup proves it. Sounds awesom? We agree, here’s the full hardware shown in this setup, and read on to learn how to configure such a desk yourself:

• Dual Dell 2408 24″ Displays for a total of workspace resolution of 3840×2400
• Mac Pro 1,1 Quad-Core Xeon with 7GB of RAM, Radeon 5770 GPU, 128GB SSD for the OS, dual 2TB HDD’s for data
• Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Trackpad
• Analog dials measuring the Mac Pro’s CPU load, network activity, and RAM usage, all via an Arduino connected via USB
• Hidden in the ventilated(!) cabinets are: Drobo with 4 1TB drives for Time Machine backups, Wii, PS3, printer, UPS, iPad and iPhone chargers, routers, adapters, switches, etc

If you were wondering how this awesome desk setup was put together, including all the necessary Ikea parts for the desk, don’t miss Matthew’s blog where he lays out the entire project and provides the source code for the meter reading.

Check out some more pictures to really appreciate this workstation:

We get a lot of submissions to our weekly Mac setups but this one is one of the more creative desks we’ve seen in a while. If you have a sweet Mac setup, send a good picture with some hardware details and what you use it for to osxdailycom@gmail.com.

Thanks for sending this in Matthew!

Duplicate contact entries occur with some regularity, whether it’s because a contact has changed an email address, phone number, name, or just because you accidentally entered someone twice into your iOS contacts list.

If you have a Mac, the Contacts / Address Book app makes it very easy to merge these duplicate contacts and then automatically remove the duplicate entries, clearing out a messy contacts list.

Read more »

Chrome’s “Most Visited” thumbnails capture snapshots of the websites you most frequently access.

These thumbnails can very convenient but they can also be embarrassing, thankfully they are fairly easy to clear out:

How to Remove Thumbnails from Chrome Most Visited List on Mac

1. Quit Chrome
2. From the Mac Finder, hit Command+Shift+G and enter the following path: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/
3. Look for and delete “Top Sites” and “Top Sites-Journal”
4. Relaunch Chrome

You’ll find the thumbnails have been refreshed with none of the previous sites being shown, instead replaced by a series of grey boxes waiting to be populated.

To disable the feature completely you’ll have to lock those two files through Get Info, a task not quite as simple as disabling the same feature in Safari.

Trashing the Chrome Most Visited Thumbnails in Windows

For a Windows PC the same Chrome thumbnails can be deleted from the following location:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

Delete the Chrome data and then relaunch Chrome for change to take effect.

How many times have you typed something to discover the last two characters are in the wrong order?

You know, when “the” turns into “teh” and “something into “somethign”, a fairly common general mistype.

Well the Mac has a solution to this, with a great little keystroke that swaps the last two characters.

Read more »

Mission Control is a powerful window and app manager built directly into Mac OS X, it combines elements of Virtual Desktops (Spaces), an application switcher, and a window manager, into one easy to use centralized location.

If you aren’t using this excellent Mac feature on a regular basis then you should reconsider, learn a few new tricks, and give it another try, so with that in mind here are nine tips to help master Mission Control.
Read more »

Just about every iOS app wants to send notifications and alerts to your iPhone or iPad. Twitter, Skype, Game Center, Instagram, all these are great services that have one thing in common: their notification sounds can be annoying, and arrive in huge bursts.

Instead of muting an iPhone or iPad constantly, you can selectively silence notifications on a per-app basis within iOS Settings. Though not all Apple default apps give the option, but most third party apps do, and here’s how to silence them:
Read more »

If you’re wondering who made the SSD (flash storage) drive on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro it’s fairly easy to determine:

1. Pull down the  Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”, then click on “More Info”
2. Click “System Report”
3. Look under “Hardware” for the “Serial-ATA” entry and select it
4. Expand the chipset and look for “APPLE SSD SM128” or similar, the final block of characters show the manufacturer, model, and size. With an SSD on MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, they are as follows:
• TS = Toshiba
• SM = Samsung
• Other = likely 3rd party upgrade

If you guessed the 128, 256, 512, etc on the end was the storage capacity of the flash drive, you were right.

Apple uses multiple hardware manufacturers to be able to meet demand. There is some evidence to suggest the drives manufactured by Samsung are faster than the Toshiba drives, but due to the ultrafast nature of all SSD storage the difference is practically irrelevant. This is especially true with the 2012 model year MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models, whose SSD benchmarks show incredibly impressive results regardless of who created the drive.

A more complex method using the command line can be used to determine the manufacturer of the Macs LCD display panel.

The optional Path bar shows the complete filesystem path to the current working directory in any Finder window of Mac OS X. This optional window-dressing item has more use beyond that though, because not only does it show you the present directory, it’s also interactive. In short, that means you can double-click the individual folders to jump directly to them, and you can even drag and drop files and folders to them, making it extremely easy to copy or move files to the parent folders or elsewhere within a complicated directory structure.

Read more »

If you’ve been interested in learning how to develop apps for the iPhone and iPad, this may be the best chance yet. Based on Stanford’s Fall 2011 iOS development course, the new offering from Stanford gets social and lets you work on assignments with the rest of the enrolled class. No more getting stuck or confused by a concept presented in the lectures or videos, this time around the collaborative forum built around Piazza let’s students ask and answer questions quickly in a central location, which should improve the learning experience considerably.

Enrolling in the course is free, classes start on June 25 and goes through August 16.

You can find out more and register for the collaborative course at Piazza

If you’d prefer the self-paced solitary approach, Stanford University has provided a ton of free classes on iTunes U covering development and other topics. Thanks to MacRumors for the find.

Satellite Eyes is a neat free app that automatically adjusts your desktops background wallpaper to satellite images of your current location. Commute to work and you’ll see a new background than what you do at home, fly across the country or world and it’ll change with you.

For a simple app there are a fair amount of customization options to change how the wallpapers look. There are four different map styles, which include the generally attractive Bing Aerial satellite imagery, Terrain map which looks like a general map, Toner which looks pretty dreadful, and Watercolor which is exactly what it sounds like. Additionally, there are four different zoom levels, including Street Level, Neighborhood, City, and Region. The City and Region options can look either really great or really awful depending on how good the satellite images are for the area and how much terraforming human lifeforms have conducted in your region of planet Earth. If your setup includes multiple monitors you’ll find Satellite Eyes is smart enough to extend the imagery over each display.

• Get Satellite Eyes free from the developer

If you don’t want Satellite Eyes to automatically adjust the wallpaper as you change locations, you can open the app once at a select destination and then quit, the background picture stays intact. The app uses Location Services in Mac OS X in order to function, meaning you’ll need to have them enabled for the satellite image to be accurate.

The Preference panel is accessible through the menubar and includes a fair amount of customizations. This is showing regional view.

Seeing Neighborhood view painted in watercolor is abstract and attractive.

Not a fan of pictures of the planet from satellites? That’s ok, we have ten gazillion more wallpapers in our archives.

Heads up to @Daryl and Isiah for the tip

Anytime you use iCloud or iTunes to back up an iPhone or iOS device, the Contacts will be backed up automatically assuming the default settings are preserved. If you want to store an additional backup outside of iTunes and iCloud however, by far the easiest way to do that is with Address Book.

This will create a portable vCard file that contains all contact information, this can be stored anywhere as a manual backup and it can also be sent to other devices and imported to other phones, operating systems, email clients, and much more.

1. Launch Address Book from the Applications folder
2. Pull down the “File” menu and go to “Export” and then to “Export vCard”



3. Set the save destination and name the .vcf file something like “Contacts-Backup”

The file you just exported is the contacts list backup. The vCard format is widely accepted and can be imported into just about anything else while preserving all names, emails, phone numbers, and whatever other data you had entered.

In fact, if you attach the resulting .vcf file to an email and send it to another iOS device, Windows phone, or Android, you can actually transfer all the contacts to a new phone without using iTunes at all too. This is handy if you want to setup a new phone with only the contacts intact, are sharing contacts with a partner, or you are temporarily using another device and don’t want to manually sync it with a bunch of other stuff.

You can also easily send single contacts directly from iOS if you wish to back up a unique contact or just share it with someone else.

The MacBook Air 2012 is a screamer, and though the CPU-based benchmarks show about a 15-20% improvement over the MacBook Air 2011 models, by far the biggest performance boost comes from the new flash memory (SSD) that Apple is using for storage on the 2012 models. In our tests, the disk used in the newest MacBook Air models is up to 217% faster than the previous model years drives.

MacBook Air 2012 SSD: writes at 364MB/sec, reads at 461MB/sec

MacBook Air 2011 SSD: writes at 152MB/sec, reads at 145MB/sec

MacBook Air 2010 SSD: writes at 157MB/sec, reads at 188MB/sec

It is difficult to convey just how fast the newest MacBook Air is, but it’s safe to say the performance is extremely impressive and I haven’t ever used a laptop that feels faster. You can attribute that to the ultraquick flash storage.

Interestingly, the SSD tested within the MBA 2012 is the TS128E model, a Toshiba drive. The SSD tested with the MBA 2011 and 2010 models are Samsung. You may recall that Apple also ships faster Samsung drives in some MacBook Airs, that appears to still be going on with the 2012 updates which suggests the tested Toshiba flash drive is probably slightly slower than a Samsung model, though the performance difference between the two drives is likely to be completely negligible at this point.

All read and write speeds were benchmarked with DiskSpeedTest, a free disk testing app available from the Mac App Store.

Apple has begun to air a new iPad commercial, focusing on a variety of tasks being accomplished through various apps on the 3rd generation iPad. The narration says:

“Send a note. Stay informed. Catch a show. Make your point. Make a memory. Make a… masterpiece. Read something. Watch something. And learn something. Do it all more beautifully, with the retina display, on iPad.”

This is the second recent TV advertisement released by Apple that focuses on the retina display technology, with last week Apple starting to air a new MacBook Pro with Retina display commercial as well.

An update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4 has been released to developers, barely a week after the last version was released at WWDC. The update comes as build 12A248 and is recommended for all devs running DP4 and can be downloaded through the Mac App Store.

The largely unspecified release presumably includes bug fixes and updates to various elements of the next version of Mac OS X as the consumer release nears next month.

OS X Mountain Lion will be available to everyone in July from the Mac App Store for $19.99.

Microsoft released Surface today, their direct competitor to the iPad and Android tablets. As you’d expect, the device is a touchscreen tablet but differs from the iPad in that it comes in two distinct versions; a traditional tablet model based on ARM architecture and runs only Windows RT – that’s Metro for those who don’t follow MS closely – and the other is a pro model based on Intel Ivy Bridge chips that runs full-fledged Windows 8 desktop.

Other than providing a look at Apple’s competition, perhaps most interesting to iPad users is the cover that ships with the tablet. Upon first appearance it looks like a Smart Cover knock-off, but it actually one-ups Apple’s offering by including a completely functional multitouch keyboard built directly into the cover itself. It certainly looks fascinating, and assuming it works well you can bet third party cover manufactures will be cranking out similar cases for the iPad soon.

Onto the Surface specs:

Surface – Standard model

• Windows RT (Metro-only interface)
• ARM CPU
• 32GB and 64GB available
• 1.5lbs
• 9.3mm thick enclosure made out of magnesium, with built-in stand
• 10.6″ ClearType HD Display (retina-ish?), 16×9 aspect ratio
• MicroSD card slot, USB 2.0, MicroHD video, 2×2 MIMO antennae (?)
• Bundled with Office Home & Student 2013 RT
• Multitouch cover with built-in keyboard

Surface – Pro model

• Windows 8 Pro (standard Windows desktop & Metro)
• Intel Ivy Bridge CPU
• 64GB and 128GB storage
• 2lbs
• 13.5mm
• 10.6″ ClearType Full HD Display (not sure how this differs from other model)
• MicroSDXC, USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort, 2×2 MIMO
• Bundled with Touch Cover, Type Cover, and magnet stylus pen

Noticeably missing from either spec sheet provided by Microsoft is any word on battery life, device pricing, or availability of the Surface.

Here is Microsofts …unusual… promo video for Surface, it is more similar to the Motorola DROID commercials than any Apple advertisement:

What do you think, does the Surface look interesting to you? If you’ve played around with Windows 8 on your Mac, does it seem like the type of OS you’d want to run full time on a tablet? Anyone going to jump from the iPad to the Surface? I’m fascinated by the announcement and I think it looks like an interesting product, I look forward to trying one out.

If you went ahead and installed iOS 6 beta and determined the buggy nature of the first developer release isn’t for you, it’s time to downgrade. Most developers should know how to do this already, but if not this process is easy and you’ll be back to running iOS 5.1.1 in no time at all.

Downgrading is identical on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

1. Turn the device off, connect it to the computer via USB, and launch iTunes
2. Place the iOS device into DFU mode: with the device off, hold down the Power and Home buttons together for 10 seconds then release the power button, continue holding Home button until iTunes notifies you of a device in recovery mode being detected. The devices screen should stay black as if turned off.
3. Restore within iTunes through either method a or b:
• a: Restore from the iOS 5.1.1 backup you made prior to installing iOS 6 beta
• b: Restore to iOS 5.1.1 IPSW by Option-Clicking the “Restore” button, and then restore from iCloud backup when finished
4. Let iTunes restore back to iOS 5.1.1, the device will reboot when finished

Typically you can’t downgrade iOS versions so easily, but because Apple is still signing iOS 5.1.1 this allows downgrading to commence with minimal effort.

Troubleshooting the Downgrade:
If you get any strange errors (3194, 1013, etc) when trying to restore, you probably have Apple’s servers blocked in your hosts file. This is relatively common for people who jailbroke a device at some point in their iOS usage. Remove any blocks to Apple’s servers from /etc/hosts and try again.

TotalTerminal is an excellent tweak for those of us who frequently use the command line, it provides instant access to the Terminal from anywhere in Mac OS X with just a keyboard shortcut. Modeled after the classic Quake console, an official Terminal.app prompt drops down from the top of the screen where you can quickly enter a command or two and then hide it to get back to work within the OS X GUI.

• Get TotalTerminal free from BinaryAge

Installing TotalTerminal is much easier these days than it’s early incarnation as Visor, and once installed the default hotkey for summoning the drop-down terminal is Control+~ (that’s Control tilde, the squigly line next to the 1 key). An accompanying menubar item allows you to access the command line as well, and of course you can customize the keyboard shortcut yourself. TotalTerminal gives you a lot of other options for customization, letting you change the positioning on screen of where the terminal appears, if it shows up on all Spaces, the delay for showing and hiding, whether or not it should animate itself, and a handy unix-friendly copy/paste setting.

It’s important to note that TotalTerminal will uninstall SIMBL due to conflicts between the two system-level tweaks. If you’re using SIMBL for colorizing Finder icons or some other system mods you may not want to use TotalTerminal at all. If you want to just try it out however, uninstalling TotalTerminal is as easy as installing it, by a simple choice of “uninstall” through the apps drop down menu.

Fully compatible with virtually every version of Mac OS X including Snow Leopard, Lion, and even OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, TotalTerminal is a worthy addition to Mac powerusers toolkits.

The Retina MacBook Pro 15″ screen resolution is 2880×1800, but because of how a retina display works the effective resolution is 1440×900 and the onscreen elements are just running in HIDPI mode. Apple provides an option to run at 1920×1200 through System Preferences, but as of now there is no built-in approach to running the retina display at the screens true 1×1 native resolution of 2880×1800. Instead, you must activate the 2880×1800 option through a variety of third party approaches, the result of which is a gigantic amount of screen real estate, albeit with tiny onscreen elements. If that sounds good to you, here are three four different ways to enable the true 1-to-1 native res:
Read more »