Whether you just use OS X’s Mail.app on a Mac, or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, the Address Book in Mac OS X stores a lot of vital information that you don’t want to lose. If you’re going to be making any changes to how you sync this data, adjustments to where and how it’s stored, or just want to move it to another Mac, here’s how to back up the address book and all data inside so that you won’t lose anyones contact information, avatar icons, and any other details you have about those stored in your address book.
This will cover backing up the address book in OS X using the export feature and a manual file back up.
A new version of the redsn0w jailbreak tool has been released by the iPhone Dev Team, mostly as a feature enhancement update. Versioned as 0.9.9b1, the release includes a variety of new features, including:
Automatic device and firmware detection via DFU mode
“Pwned DFU” option to quickly enter into DFU mode without the button sequence
Various SHSH blob features pertaining to custom IPSW versions and storage on Cydia servers
Note that redsn0w 0.99b1 does not jailbreak any new iOS versions, nor does it provide an untether for existing jailbreaks that are still tethered. It will continue to jailbreak iOS 4.3.5, and for developers with access, the iOS 5 beta builds, on supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models.
Download Redsn0w 0.9.9b1
As usual, versions are available for both Mac OS X and Windows users, and include the same feature set:
Apple stock surpassed $400 a share again last Friday, bringing their market cap to $371.30 billion. That $371,300,000,000 is worth more than each of the following things:
All 32 Eurozone Banks
The Entire Economy of Singapore
All of the Illegal Drugs in the World
Total U.S. Corporate Income Tax for 2011
The GDP of Denmark
The Great Wall of China (priced at $0.52 a brick)
The Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Stephen King, and Twilight Franchises – combined, plus another $300 billion
All of the Farm Land in Iowa & South Dakota, at $4200 per acre
The Total Endowments of the USA’s 13 Richest Universities and University Systems
45 days of global oil consumption
The Cost of America’s Obesity Epidemic
Every home in Detroit and Tampa combined
The big three drug makers; Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, and Pfizer, combined
Every home in Atlanta
10 times the total paid in federal child support in the U.S. last year
The five largest ETFs (exchange-traded funds)
10 years of Silver Production
The GDP of Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon – combined
This interesting (and ongoing) list comes from a tumblr blog that is appropriately titled ThingsAppleIsWorthMoreThan, well worth a follow just for the amusement factor alone.
If you accidentally deleted a voicemail on an iPhone, you can usually retrieve these messages by looking through a somewhat unknown “Deleted Messages” list that is part of the Phone app in iOS. Though this feature is little known, it’s quite easy to use, and if you’re hoping to find old or deleted voicemails on the iPhone this is the first place you should look.
This reader submitted minimalist Mac setup comes from Danny B, it’s a MacBook Pro 17″ turned into desktop workstation thanks to the connected Apple 24″ Cinema Display, wireless keyboard, and Magic Mouse.
Thanks for sending this in Danny!
You can submit your own Mac setup to us at osxdailycom@gmail.com, we’re receiving a ton of reader submitted setups, so if you haven’t seen yours appear yet just be patient.
Google’s Chrome browser has been updated to support two native OS X Lion features; full screen support and overlay scrollbars. These features have been available in the unstable developer channels but now they’re finally released in the stable build, meaning you no longer need to use the Maximizer add-on to get full screen in Chrome, and you shouldn’t get stuck in Chromes own full-screen mode any longer.
To get the update, go the Chrome menu and pull down to “About Google Chrome” and then select “Update Now”, or if you don’t actively use Chrome you can download it from Google directly.
AirDrop is the extremely easy local peer-to-peer file transfer tool that is built into OS X 10.7 and 10.8 and beyond, it allows you to easily send and receive files wirelessly over a network just by dragging and dropping. It’s a great addition to Lion, but it’s not supported on all Macs (some 2008 model MacBook, MacBook Pros, some Mac Pro’s and Mini’s, etc), and most Hackintosh setups also can’t access it… and you can’t use it over Ethernet… until now.
You can enable AirDrop with Ethernet and enable AirDrop Wi-Fi support on technically unsupported Macs running OS X 10.7 Lion, Mountain Lion, or later by using a simple defaults write command in the Terminal. It’s a fairly easy procedure, and we’ll walk you through it.
Enable AirDrop Over Ethernet & Wi-Fi for Old Unsupported Macs
Launch Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities/
Hit Return, then on a new line in the Terminal type the following command to relaunch the Finder:
killall Finder
Exit out of Terminal if you want, and launch any Finder window to discover the AirDrop icon
You can also reboot the Mac for changes to take effect.
What’s really interesting is that this enables AirDrop over both Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet connections, which basically means any machine running Lion or later can use it whether or not it has a wireless card. As long as it’s connected to the same network you will be able to see the Mac in the AirDrop list of another Mac running 10.7, 10.8, or 10.9. This trick also works to enable AirDrop on many Hackintosh Macs for those who built their own…
Keep in mind that you will need at least one other Mac in the same region in order to use AirDrop. If you’re totally new to the feature, check out our quick guide that covers how to quickly and easily share files with the AirDrop protocol, it’s really one of the fastest ways to share files between Macs and is well worth using.
If you ever want to disable this for some reason, you can just use the following defaults command instead:
Same as before, you will need to relaunch Finder for the changes to take effect and have AirDrop disabled again.
With how easy this is to enable, it makes you wonder why it was left off of some older Mac models to begin with, and why it’s not enabled for Ethernet connections either.
This tip comes from a user submission to MacWorld, and attached is a note that you may need to use this command on all Macs that intend to interact with the unsupported Mac, although that doesn’t seem to be the case on all machines.
Portal runs in both Mac OS X and Windows, and once it’s in your Steam account you can download it on other machines if you want.
Here’s the interesting part: the game is offered as a free download until September 20, 2011 as part of the “Learning with Portals” program, where some schools are using the popular video game to help teach physics and critical thinking skills. How cool is that? This blurb from their website explains further:
Today, innovative educators are finding ways to incorporate Portal™ and Portal 2 into their classrooms—helping teach physics and critical-thinking skills. It’s eye-opening to see how video games can be used in amazing and unexpected ways to help educate our next generation.
One of the biggest challenges in teaching science, technology, engineering, and math is capturing the students’ imaginations long enough for them to see all of the possibilities that lie ahead.
Using interactive tools like the Portal series to draw them in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun which gets us one step closer to our goal—engaged, thoughtful kids!
If you’re skeptical, Valve put together a video which shows exactly how it’s being used by one 7th grade classroom:
Pretty cool huh?
Check it out yourself, the system requirements are relatively basic and it should run on most recent Macs:
OS X version Leopard 10.5.8, Snow Leopard 10.6.3, or higher
1GB RAM or more
NVIDIA GeForce 8 or higher, ATI X1600 or higher, or Intel HD 3000 or higher
If you want to quickly style your folders or Launchpad with Emoji, you can access the Special Characters panel directly from the Finder in Mac OS X and then drag or enter those special characters or emojis into the folder or file names.
We already covered how to install Windows 8 in VMWare, and now we’re going to show you how to get Windows 8 running inside of VirtualBox. If you’re wondering why, well, VirtualBox is advantageous for several reasons, the two main being that it’s free and it’s available for all major platforms including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Put the Win8 ISO somewhere you can find it easily, and install VirtualBox before proceeding. You’ll notice the setup is a bit more complicated than using VMWare, but we’ll walk you through everything so just be patient and you’ll be up and running in no time.
Wondering how iOS 5 on an iPad 2 goes head to head with a Windows 8 Tablet? This video is a thorough look at the two touch interfaces side-by-side. You can see some of the better Windows 8 features and you can also get excited for iOS 5… but remember that Windows 8 won’t be out until next summer, while iOS 5 will be released very soon…
I wonder where iOS and the iPad will be by the time Windows 8 is released? Don’t forget you can always check out Windows 8 for free yourself too if you’re bit by the curiosity bug.
Thanks to the inclusion of Emoji in Mac OS X, you can now customize the appearance of Finder items by inserting Emoji characters into file and folder names. This offers yet another way to customize the appearance of a Mac OS desktop, and it can provide an easy visual identifier for file and folder names too.
Adding emoji into your folder (or file) names on the Mac is really quite simple, and it provides a fun way to improve the appearance of otherwise boring looking folders.
This article details how to spruce up and stylize a Finder item, whether a file or folder, on the Mac by adding some Emoji into the name:
Apple charges $200 to upgrade a MacBook Pro’s RAM to 8GB, and $300 to upgrade a Mac Mini’s to 8GB, but you can do it yourself for just $34. RAM has been getting cheap for a while, but $33.99 for 8GB of name brand memory has to be some kind of record low. The super low price includes free shipping from Amazon, just don’t forget to send in the $10 rebate form.
The 8GB comes as 2 x 4GB DDR3 SODIMM’s at 1333MHz. This RAM works in the 2011 MacBook Pro and 2011 Mac Mini series with Core i5 and Core i7 CPU’s, but the easiest way to double-check compatibility is to go to “About this Mac” and look next to ‘Memory’ for a MHz speed, you are looking for 1333MHz.
If you find yourself needing to know what the default gateway address is for a Mac, you can uncover this information in a few ways from OS X. For those who aren’t familiar, the gateway address is the IP of whatever modem, router, or switch the computer is using the access the internet, hence, it’s the gateway to the outside world.
We’ll cover two ways to display gateway address information on Mac OS X. Read more »
There’s no doubting that the tech world is abuzz about Windows 8, Microsofts upcoming iOS and Mac OS X competitor. If your curiosity is peaked by all the talk, you can easily install Windows 8 and have it running on top of Mac OS X thanks to virtualization. The best part about this particular solution? It’s all free, so read on.
The Windows 8 iso is about 4GB GB but transfer very quickly from Microsofts servers, and getting the VMWare Fusion trial is just a matter of confirming your email address.
Assuming you have now downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview ISO file and then installed VMWare 4, you’ll probably want to quit most of your other apps so that you can free up as much RAM and CPU as possible.
How to Install Windows 8 in VMWare
This has been confirmed to work in both Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Move the Windows 8 ISO file to your Mac OS X desktop
Launch VMWare and click on “New”
Drag and drop the Windows 8 ISO into the “New Virtual Machine Assistant”
Ensure that “Use operating system installation disc or image:” is selected and the Win8DP ISO is chosen, then click “Continue”
Select “Windows 7” as the Operating System and give the Windows 8 VM at least 2GB of RAM for best performance (64 bit version)
Boot the VM by pressing the giant play button (>)
Proceed to install Windows 8 Developer Preview by following the few onscreen instructions
Installation is surprisingly quick, you’ll be up and running in about 20 minutes from start to finish. When installation is complete, you’ll be greeted by a brief customization and setup screen and then quickly launched into Metro. You’ll also have access to the ugly Ribbon Windows Explorer UI:
From my brief usage, it seems like Windows 8 would be best with a touchscreen, and I wasn’t too thrilled with using a mouse in the Metro interface, but nonetheless it’s worth checking out yourself if you’re curious about this stuff or just like keeping on top of the latest tech trends. Enjoy!
BTW, VMWare Fusion 4 costs $49, but if you have no interest in buying it the 30 day trial works just fine to check out and play with Windows 8 to see what the hype is all about.
Apple and Starbucks have expanded their “Pick of the Week” program to offer free iBooks, the redemption codes for which will appear on cards just like the free app and free song offerings that currently exist in Starbucks stores.
The first iBook offered through the program is “The Night Circus“, a popular novel about a magical circus that otherwise retails for $12.99 on the iBook store or $15 on Amazons Kindle.
Technically this was announced yesterday by Starbucks, but I’ve visited different Starbucks stores yesterday and today and didn’t see the book cards offered yet, so the current availability seems to vary by location. The picture of the card on the right shows what you’re looking for, via MacRumors, and they should be sitting near the register and the place where you put sugar in your drinks.
Renowned jailbreaker i0n1c, aka Stefan Esser, has put together a rather extensive presentation titled “iOS Kernel Exploitation” that explains exactly how jailbreaks work, ranging from how the exploits are found, how new code is injected into the iOS devices, how untethers work, and so much more. It was presented live at last months Black Hat security conference, but now the slides are freely available on the web for all to see.
The 97 slide presentation includes the following main topics and dives into very specific details:
Introduction
Kernel Debugging
Kernel Exploitation
Stack Buffer Overflows
Heap Buffer Overflows
Kernel patches from Jailbreaks
This is a fairly technical read with plenty of code samples, making it an extremely interesting look into the world of jailbreaking and iOS security. It’s pretty much a must read for anyone interested in security, development, iOS, Mac OS X, or just jailbreaking in general.
Some MacBook Pro or Air users may want to disable their internal screen when the laptop is connected to an external display, this is generally achieved in two ways but ever since Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, and OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the internal screen is more persistent and wants to stay on.
Whether you just use OS X’s Mail.app on a Mac, or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, the Address Book in Mac OS X stores a lot of vital information that you don’t want to lose. If you’re going to be making any changes to how you sync this data, adjustments to where and how it’s stored, or just want to move it to another Mac, here’s how to back up the address book and all data inside so that you won’t lose anyones contact information, avatar icons, and any other details you have about those stored in your address book. 
has to be some kind of record low. The super low price includes free shipping from Amazon, just don’t forget to send in the $10 rebate form.
Apple and Starbucks have expanded their “Pick of the Week” program to offer free iBooks, the 
“, a popular novel about a magical circus that otherwise retails for $12.99 on the iBook store or $15 on Amazons Kindle. 
