Ever set a desktop background picture on the Mac and have no idea where the original wallpaper image is stored in OS X? Maybe you set an image from the web and lost it, or maybe you’ve wondered where that default background image is stored so you can share it with your iOS device or another Mac? Me too, and there’s a way to quickly find the original file location of what is set as the desktop wallpaper on a Mac.

By using a defaults write debug command, you can display the full path to the currently active desktop image, directly printed on the wallpaper itself.

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Greg Joswiak is a Vice President of Marketing at Apple who focuses on promoting the iOS lineup. After working at Apple for 20 years, he has come up with four lessons that can help explain Apple’s incredible success. Shared at a recent speech in Cambridge, they are quoted below from Wall Street Journal:

Focus—”It means saying no, not saying yes. We do very few things at Apple. We are $100bn in revenue with very few products. There are only so many grade A players. If you spread yourself out over too many things, none of them will be great.”

Simplicity—”Make complex things simple. A lot of people think it means take something simple and leave it at its core essence. But it isn’t that. When you start to build something, it quickly becomes really complex. But that is when a lot of people stop. If you really know your product and the problems, then you can take something that is complex and then make it simple.”

Courage—”Courage drives a lot of decisions in business. Don’t hang on to ideas from the past even if they have been successful for you. You don’t build a product just because everyone else has one. ”

Best—”If you can’t enter the market and try and be the best in it, don’t enter it. You need that differentiation. At Apple if we can’t be the best then we are not interested in it.

Sounds like the spirit and influence of Steve Jobs to me.

Using a defaults write command, the iTunes Dock icon can be set to display a “Now Playing” song and artist pop-up that transitions in and out and music starts. It’s a nice addition, particularly if you’re playing songs from a shared network playlist and have iTunes hidden in the background.

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Stanford University is on a roll lately offering a wide variety of free online courses to anyone, either through iTunes U on topics like iOS 5 Development, or through self-contained courses conducted entirely from the web that are free to enroll in. The latter is the case here, with Stanford offering 10 new online courses that are completely free to the public. Each class is taught by a renowned Stanford professor and is focused on technology and computer science, although two concentrate on the entrepreneurial side of things as well.

All classes start January 2012, so enroll now if you want to start learning from one of the best universities in the world:

• CS 101 – Essentials of Computer Science for a zero experience audience
• Cryptography – Protecting information in computer systems
• Game Theory – Mathematical modeling of strategic interaction among rational agents
• Human-Computer Interaction – Designing technologies and interfaces that bring people joy rather than frustration
• Lean Launchpad – Turning an idea into a company
• Machine Learning – Getting computers to act without explicit direction
• Natural Language Processing – Algorithms and technology for dealing with human language data
• Probabilistic Graphical Models – Practical and theoretical methods of manipulating probability distributions
• Software as a Service – Engineering fundamentals for Agile SaaS development using Ruby on Rails
• Technology Entrepreneurship – Creating a successful startup

You won’t get college credit for completing the courses unless you’re a Stanford student, but they will provide you with a statement of accomplishment and a performance rating compared to other online students, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to learn something.

Free courses from Stanford University is a freakishly good deal, where undergrad tuition alone is about $40,000 a year!

Stanford has offered this style of online learning in the past, recently offering a free online “Intro to Databases” course conducted on the web. That class is wrapping up so if you enrolled in that one, these classes are a great opportunity to further relevant knowledge.

Our readers have some of the best setups and workstations out there. Case in point, this drool-worthy Mac setup is heavy on the Apple gear but crosses platforms for testing purposes.

From left to right there is: MacBook Pro 15″, iMac 27″ connected to a center Dell 22″ display but switches to a Dell Optiplex GX520 Windows machine, a 20″ Vuescape display connected to the white MacBook 13″, docked iPad 1, Dell Mini 1012, and a handful of peripherals including a Time Machine connected to a 1TB external drive, AirPort Extreme Base Station, Apple Remote, Apple Wireless Keyboard, and two Magic Trackpads. Plus the picture was taken with an iPhone 4S!

What an awesome setup, thanks for sending this to us Bryn!

You can send in your own to setup shots to osxdailycom@gmail.com – we get a load of entries but we’ll try to post them all eventually

Using iOS folders and some bookmarks, anyone can mimic the quick iOS Settings access of the popular jailbreak tweak SBSettings – minus the jailbreak. It’s simple and you don’t have to install anything but a few shortcuts:

• Launch Safari on iOS
• Go here and scroll until you see a list of settings names and click on them to create icon shortcuts to the settings you want quick access to
• Drag the shortcuts into each other to create a folder to then add more

Some of the most useful shortcuts to add are: Network, Brightness, Software Update, Bluetooth, WiFi, HotSpot, etc. Going to the bottom of the page will show the ‘old’ method of creating bookmarks through Safari rather than using profiles, you can go with whatever method you’re comfortable with. Most of the choices should behave on all iOS 5 hardware, but some are going to be limited to iPhone or 3G equipped iPads.

This is a great alternative for anyone wary of jailbreaking, or if you just don’t like the current tethered solutions. Found via MacStories

With iCloud and the “Find My iPhone” feature, you can send messages to your remote Apple gear. These come through in the form of a pop-up window in Mac OS X and a notification in iOS 5, and while there’s a variety of uses for this, it’s also a fun way to send a quick message to someone using your hardware, be it a loved one or a thief. You can also choose to play a pinging sound with the notification, it will repeatedly play at full volume until someone acknowledges the notification, guaranteeing that it can’t be ignored.

You’ll need iCloud enabled and have iOS 5+ on the iPad or iPhone, and OS X 10.7.2+ on the Mac, and all hardware must be sharing the same iCloud ID.

Send a Message to Your Apple Hardware from iCloud

We’re going to send a message to a MacBook Air for the purpose of this walkthrough, but it’s identical on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch too:

• Go to iCloud.com and login
• Click on the “Find My iPhone” button – it will say iPhone even if you want to send a message to a Mac, iPad, or iPod



• A list of compatible devices will load in the left menu titled “My Devices” and the location of the device will appear on a map
• Click on the blue “i” button to bring up a the “Find My Mac” (or iPhone/iPad) control panel for that machine, select the “Play Sound or Send Message” button



• Type your message and click on “Send” , keep the ON switch for “Play Sound” if you want the loud pinging sound to repeat until the notification is acknowledged

Messages are delivered practically instantaneous. From the users end they look like the pop-up at the top of the screen, and the sender will get a confirmation in the email that is attached to their iCloud account:

Bonus points if you send a nice message to a significant other or loved one, or if you gently nudge your iPad hogging roommate who is addicted to Temple Run.

After you’ve made the transition to iCloud from MobileMe, the option to remove the old and now obsolete MobileMe menu bar icon disappears. It’s easy to get rid of though, as Tony R shows us in this tip he sent in:

• Hold down the Command key and click and hold on the old MobileMe icon, then just drag it out of the menubar

The little icon will disappear into a puff of smoke. You can use the same command key trick to rearrange menubar items and remove other ones as well.

If you haven’t done so yet don’t forget to get iCloud configured, the basic account is free and it’ll sync data between your Macs and iOS hardware easily.

Thanks for sending this in Tony R!

What do you think the profile of an average iPad owner would be like? Would you guess that the most likely individual to buy an iPad was a male who owns pets and plays video games, who might be a business traveling doctor or scientist that takes vitamins and prefers organic food?

Yup, all those things are more likely to be true of iPad owners, and they also tend to be married college graduates who live in apartments. All of this is according to a market research firm that AllThingsD tapped to make the infographic embedded below.

These are amusing to look at in the same vein of the profile of Android vs iPhone users and Mac vs PC users, just don’t take any of the comparisons or assumptions too seriously…
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If you didn’t already buy an unlocked iPhone 4S from Apple or take advantage of Sprint and Verizons 90 day unlock request, you can apparently unlock the 4S’s GSM SIM card slot yourself by taking advantage of a strange bug in iOS 5 and how the iPhone 4S handles the Edge network.

Here’s what you’ll need to attempt this:

• GSM activated iPhone 4S (AT&T model on contract, for example)
• AT&T SIM card
• T-Mobile Micro SIM

If you have all of that, completing the unlock is a matter of tripping up iOS 5 by performing a virtual song and dance routine, how someone figured this is out is fairly impressive on its own:

How to Unlock the iPhone 4S

Do this at your own risk:

• Insert original carrier AT&T SIM card
• Dial 611 for AT&T customer service hotline and drop the call
• Turn on Airplane Mode
• Take out AT&T SIM card
• Insert T-Mobile SIM card
• Make sure WiFi is off ( also tap on ‘Forget this Network” to make sure it doesn’t connect automatically later)
• Switch off Airplane Mode and iPhone will search for network. This is followed by the Apple splash screen appearing.
• Activation Required will be displayed on the screen
• EDGE network will activate automatically – notice the ‘E’ on the top left corner of the screen
• Wait for about 20-30 seconds and turn off the phone
• Turn on iPhone and the same Activation Required screen will be displayed
• When you see one signal bar, tap on Use Cellular Connection
• Eject SIM card
• Activation Required screen will be displayed the second time
• Insert SIM card
• Unlocked!

Multiple users are reporting success with this method, although some had to repeat it many times to get it to finally work.

Apparently this trick has been around for a few weeks now, although it hasn’t been widely publicized for some reason or another. Here’s a YouTube video of someone completing the procedure as described above:
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The Kindle Fire is the hottest Android tablet out there, and while it’s no iPad 2, it’s a hot little item either as a Christmas gift or just a cheap tablet for slothing about the house. For $199 it’s hard to beat, but today only you can save $10 through a special promotion between Amazon and MasterCard bringing the price to just $189. The only catch is that you need a MasterCard credit or debit card (tip: you can create a MasterCard instantly with PayPal):

• Go to Amazon.com and click the upper right banner that says “Save $10”
• Copy the coupon savings code “8C65VF3Y” as shown on the next screen
• Add the Kindle Fire to your shopping cart and go to check out, being sure to pay with a MasterCard and using the coupon code you just got

Congrats you just got a Kindle Fire for $189! Shipping for the Kindle Fire is currently about 2-3 days, and the Kindle Touch is about 3-5 days. By taking advantage of this deal you get another bonus $10 off coupon to use on a later order too.

Technically the $10 off coupon is valid for any electronics or toys order over $100, so you could use it on the Kindle Touch or some other gadget Christmas gift too. The big thing to remember here is that it’s time sensitive and for today only.

We showed you how to run OS X Lion in a virtual machine on top of Snow Leopard, but it seems everyone wanted to know the opposite of that: how to run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in a VM on top of Mac OS X Lion. Follow our instructions and you’ll be up and running in no time.

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For those of us in the northern hemisphere, ski and snowboard season is upon us, and while it seems like everyone on the mountain has an iPod or iPhone, the guys at Signal Snowboards took the Apple love a step further with the iShred. Yup, the the iShred, it’s a snowboard built to honor Steve Jobs, and it includes a built-in iPad 2 near the nose of the board, and it even has a fancy Apple-esque glowing logo on the bottom of the aluminum base.

They put together a video showing the board being made from scratch, and then a pro rider taking it out for a spin. It looks cool but the alu doesn’t handle too great:

“First run was awesome, the things like a missile. It doesn’t like to turn, but it’s pretty fast and heavy.”

Watch the video below or just check out a couple screenshots:

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Shopping for kids holiday gifts is notoriously difficult, the last thing you want to do is buy them something they don’t want, or worse yet, something that isn’t “cool”. Thankfully kids are getting easier to shop for (for us geeks anyway), because what do they want? Gadgets, and lots of them. Dominating the top of the most desired electronic gifts are three Apple products: the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Here’s the full list as polled from Neilsen:

Most Desired Electronics Among Kids for Holidays 2011

For kids aged 6 through 12:

• iPad – 44% want one
• iPod touch – 30% want one
• iPhone – 27% want one
• Computer – 25% want one
• Tablet computer (non-iPad) – 25% want one – Kindle Fire is $199
• Nintendo 3DS – 25% want one
• Kinect for Xbox 360
• Nintendo DS / DSi /DS Lite
• TV Set
• Smartphone (non-iPhone)
• Sony PlayStation 3
• Blu-Ray Player – (note the Playstation 3 is also a blu-ray player)
• E-Readers
• Microsoft Xbox 360
• Other mobile phone
• Nintendo Wii
• PlayStation Move
• PlayStation Portable (PSP)

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You can quickly search the iTunes Store and iOS App Store from anywhere within iTunes, all you have to do is hold down the Option key while hitting Return in the standard search box.

That’s really all there is to it, with Option+Return you search all purchasable content through the online stores whether its an iPhone app, movie, song, artist, anything, rather than the iTunes local media library.

The highly anticipated official version of Minecraft for iPhone and iPad has been released to the iOS App Store. For those who don’t know, Minecraft is a virtual sandbox building game with a focus on creating your own worlds and structures that are subject to in-game physics. Thanks to basic electrical circuits and logic gates, some extremely elaborate creations can be built in your own virtual world, it’s kind of like virtual Legos on crack, and is known to be very addictive.

• Get Minecraft – Pocket Edition for iPhone and iPad (App Store link)

Here’s the official description from the App Store:

Imagine it, build it. Create worlds on the go with Minecraft – Pocket Edition

Minecraft – Pocket Edition allows you to build on the go. Use blocks to create masterpieces as you travel, hangout with friends, sit at the park, the possibilities are endless. Move beyond the limits of your computer and play Minecraft everywhere you go.

* Randomized worlds
* Build anything you can imagine
* Build with 36 different kinds of blocks
* Invite and play with friends to your world (local wireless network)
* Save multi-player worlds on your own phone

There are a ton of nonsensical knock-off titles trying to capitalize on the Minecraft name on the App Store, so be sure you either click directly through a verified link or search for “Minecraft – Pocket Edition” , making sure it’s by Mojang.

For the truly dedicated, you can now run Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim directly in Mac OS X thanks to the Porting Team’s unofficial Mac port of the freakishly popular game. The game is played either through a Cider wrapper or Wineskin, the latter being easier but the former apparently having better performance, but in both cases you’ll need to own a Windows copy of the game to get it working (frankly the game is going to run a lot better natively in Windows through Boot Camp anyway), leaving this in the realm of determined die-hards.

Neither the Cider or Wineskin methods are the easiest thing in the world to get working, and if you have no experience with this sort of thing you should probably just buy the game for Xbox 360, PS3, or stay with booting into Windows on your Mac. Nonetheless, if you’re committed, here’s what you’ll need:
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If you don’t want to deal with dual booting between Lion and Snow Leopard, another option is to run Mac OS X Lion in a virtual machine atop an older 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. This is not supposed to work with 10.6 without a quirky configuration, but it does, and it’s easy to do.

For the record, this also works in OS X Lion if you want to run a VM of Lion atop Lion for testing purposes or whatever, that is also perfectly acceptable in the EULA.

Requirements:

• VMWare (free 30 day trial)
• Mac OS X Lion installer app (re-download it from the Mac App Store)

VirtualBox and Parallels may work also if you’re installing Lion on top of an existing OS X Lion base, but it doesn’t seem to work with Lion on 10.6.

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