If the prospect of installing Mac OS X Lion isn’t your thing, you can try running Chromium OS on the MacBook Air instead. Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google’s Chrome OS, which is an operating system based almost entirely around the Chrome browser – you boot directly into a browser, and that’s basically it.

All hardware works with the exception of Bluetooth, but all the brightness, sound, trackpad, WiFi, and it is said to install on both the MacBook Air 11″ and 13″ models, and possibly even nVidia based MacBook and MacBook Pro’s. The major caveat? You lose OS X, so don’t expect to dual boot here.

We haven’t tested this ourselves and you’ll want to be sure you backup Mac OS X before proceeding because it’ll be overwritten. If you’re brave enough to give this a try, you’ll need a compatible MacBook Air, a 2GB+ USB stick, and the Mac OS X USB Installer key that comes with the MacBook Air.

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Your Mac will automatically restart itself if it freezes, thanks to a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion and Mac OS X Lion. Tucked away in “Energy Saver”, the auto-restart ability is an option that can be disabled if for whatever reason you don’t want your Mac to basically fix itself in the event of a disaster.

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If manually deleting specific apps saved Resume states is too tedious for you, you can always choose to just disable the Resume and App Restore feature completely in Mac OS X 10.7.

• Launch System Preferences and click on the “General” icon
• At the bottom of the “Number of recent items” list, uncheck the checkbox next to “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps”

This is a sweeping change that impacts all applications and the Finder itself, meaning all apps will no longer save their previous state, including when you reboot your Mac.

Considering that Resumes is genuinely useful, plus it’s one of the snazzier new features that is heavily boasted about in OS X Lion, this should not be considered a recommended adjustment for everyone.

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In what is probably the best unintentional marketing campaign for the Incipio iPhone 4 case, an iPhone 4 has survived a fall from 13,500′ after slipping from the pocket of a skydiver.

Amazingly enough the iPhone, pictured above, survived the drop, despite landing on the roof of a building from the height of a plane. Despite suffering a broken enclosure and touchscreen, the phone continues to make and receives phone calls, and was able to be located by using the Find My iPhone feature. The aforementioned Incipio case didn’t make it out alive, but it sounds like it absorbed enough of the impact to let the phone continue to function.

This Pulitzer-quality important news event was reported by CNN.

Using the command line open tool, you can immediately launch any URL from the Terminal into the default web browser of Mac OS X. In other words, you’re launching the specified site into a GUI browser from the command line.

The syntax to open any URL into the default web browser like this is remarkably easy to use and remember:

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Update: Apple has confirmed the release date of Lion as July 20. MacBook Air ETA is yet to be determined.

Sick of 10.7 Lion and MacBook Air release date rumors yet? Us too, but as we enter into the second half of July we’re running short on time for OS X Lion to be released this month as expected. The good news is that when Apple sets a date, they almost always meet it (ignore the white iPhone 4), and the better news is AppleInsider says they have received word that Wednesday, July 20 at 8:30am ET is the magic time:

According to people with proven track records who would be in a position to know, the new product launches are set to occur later this week. Specifically, one person said the products would be released on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

A Wednesday release is slightly earlier than what WSJ’s AllThingsD reported last week, placing a “Thursday or Friday” timeline for the new hardware and software.

Refreshed MacBook Airs are said to include Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 processors, 4GB of RAM standard, a starting storage capacity of 128GB SSD, and a return of everyones favorite backlit keyboard. It remains to be seen what GPU will be bundled with the refreshed MacBook Air, but most analysts expect it to be the Intel HD 3000 chip.

The same AI report says that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was delayed slightly due to logistical issues with distribution through the Mac App Store, in addition to some unexpected problems with the Resumes feature. The GM build of Lion was released on July 1.

One of the new features in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion is the “Resume” ability for all applications to save their last state, meaning when you relaunch the app or reboot your Mac, the application will “resume” and reopen again showing all of the windows and data that was last in use. This is a great feature for some apps and situations, but there are also times where you don’t want past app states to reappear.

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The recently released iOS 4.3.4 update has been jailbroken by a new version of redsn0w. Most iOS 4.3.4 devices are supported including the iPhone 4 GSM & CDMA, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and iPad 1. For now, iPad 2 owners must stay on iOS 4.3.3 and continue to use JailbreakMe 3 as it is the only option for that hardware.

This is a somewhat typical Redsn0w jailbreak, with the main limitation being it is tethered only. Be sure you understand completely what a tethered jailbreak means and it’s limitations, but in short, anytime you reboot your iOS device it will have to be connected to a computer and booted with the assistance of the Redsn0w application.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.8b3

As usual, Mac and Windows versions are available:

• Download now (Mac)
• Download now (Windows)

The iPhone Dev Team suggests most users stay on iOS 4.3.3 so that they can continue with an untethered jailbreak. Remember, the only change in iOS 4.3.4 was the fix for the PDF hole that was utilized by jailbreakme 3, but that hole can be patched independently through Cydia or by upgrading iOS itself.

Other than the tether, the process of using this version of redsn0w remains the same as the prior version. If you need assistance, you can follow a walkthrough for 4.3.3.

Want to upgrade the memory on your new 2011 MacBook Pro for a great price? Amazon is offering an 8GB upgrade (2 X 4GB) DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit (1333MHz Unbuffered CL 9 SODIMM) for just $50 after a $10 mail-in rebate from Corsair. The kit installs on the most recent Core i5 and Core i7 series of MacBook Pros from 2011.

Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit with free shipping on Amazon

The deal is still a very cheap $59.99 without the rebate, but why not save an extra $10 and mail it in? Here’s the rebate form (PDF).

The RAM comes with a lifetime warranty from Corsair, but after you install the upgrade don’t forget to run a RAM test to check for any problems or defects.

Using curl we can retrieve the HTML & CSS source code of any specified URL and even the http header info, but some sites serve completely different content or HTML to different OS and browser versions, this is done by detecting their user agent. Because of this, we can spoof the user agent of another browser version and operating system, and this allows web developers to quickly get access to those alternate variations of a sites source code. For the purposes here, we’ll achieve this from the command line by using curl.
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What an awesome Mac setup this is… connected to those three 30″ vertically oriented displays is a Mac Pro under that desk. I’m going to assume this is an iOS developer considering there are code editors open on screen, not to mention the six iPhones under all the displays.

If you’re wondering, rotating a Macs screen orientation is just a matter of holding down Command+Option when you open the Displays panel in System Preferences, but if your monitors don’t have a way to stand sideways that won’t do you much good (you can do this with the MacBook Pro & Air lineup too and just rest it on it’s side if you really want to).

This comes via Flickr, but I’m pretty sure I originally saw it on Twitter somewhere…

Thunderbolt MacBook Pro hardware will support dual external displays daisy-chained by compatible Thunderbolt hardware, according to an image that popped up on Apple’s website. This suggests the possibility that upcoming MacBook Air refresh may support the same feature.

This image comes from a recent post on MacRumors, where they noted that Apple accidentally leaked a new Thunderbolt LED display by posting images to Apple.com prior to an official launch. That is obviously a blunder on Apple’s part, but I found the daisy-chaining of Thunderbolt displays much more interesting than the fact that a new Cinema Display is coming out soon. MacRumors also points out that with current MBP models, only the 15″ and 17″ would support this ability, but hopefully refreshed MacBook Air’s will too.

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You may know by now that OS X Lion drops Rosetta support, that means old PowerPC apps will no longer run in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

List What Installed Apps Are Incompatible with OS X 10.7 Lion

For incompatible applications, all you are looking for is the “PowerPC” designation, here’s the easiest way to get a list of these installed on your Mac:

• Launch System Profiler (from Spotlight or hold down Option > Apple menu > System Profiler)
• Look for the “Software” menu on the left side Contents list
• Click on “Applications”
• Click on “Kind” to sort your installed applications by architecture type, scroll through the list until you see “PowerPC”

Anything listed as “PowerPC” will not run in 10.7 Lion. Intel and Universal apps will run just fine.

If you are completely dependent on one of these PPC apps, you may want to try a dual boot OS X 10.6 and 10.7 configuration, or just skip upgrading to Lion until a Lion-compatible version of that app is made available.

If you look in System Profiler and none of your apps are listed as PowerPC, you should have no compatibility issues. You can view the broader Mac OS X Lion system requirements if you haven’t done so already, but aside from requiring a 64-bit processor they are fairly lenient.

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iOS 4.3.4 update has been released by Apple, the update is aimed at patching the PDF vulnerability in iOS 4.3.3 that allowed JailbreakMe 3 to work from a web browser. Because of this, if you used a jailbreak like JailbreakMe 3, do not upgrade to iOS 4.3.4 or you will lose your jailbreak. Users who are not dependent on jailbreaking should upgrade to iOS 4.3.4 because it patches security holes.

The update has been pushed out for all iOS 4.3 compatible hardware, in addition to a special version of iOS 4.2.9 for iPhone 4 CDMA users. You can download the update directly from iTunes, or you can use the direct download links below to obtain IPSW files per device.

iOS 4.3.4 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links for IPSW from Apple’s servers:

• iPhone 4 (GSM)
• iPhone 4 (CDMA) (iOS 4.2.9)
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2 (WiFi)
• iPad 2 (GSM)
• iPad 2 (CDMA)
• iPad 1 (WiFi)
• iPod touch 3rd Gen
• iPod touch 4th Gen

If you have any trouble downloading the firmware, right-click and ‘Save as’ and be sure the file downloads as a .ipsw and not .zip. After you have the proper file, hold Option (Mac) or Shift (Mac OS X) and click on the restore button within iTunes. You can read more about using IPSW files here if you are unsure.

Have you ever wondered specifically what processor was being used on a Mac, including processor type and CPU speed? It’s actually quite easy to retrieve CPU information from the command line in Mac OS X, though the commands to use to get the processor information may be unfamiliar to many.

We’ll show two ways to grab a Macs CPU details from the command line of MacOS and Mac OS X. These tricks work on virtually all Mac OS versions and CPU architecture types.

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We’ve all been waiting for it, we’re seeing the Lion apps pop-up on the App Store, and Lion has been said to launch alongside new MacBook Airs, so they must be due out any minute now right? Close, AllThingsD says their sources have confirmed the new MacBook Air’s are arriving “late next week” and to “look for an announcement Thursday or Friday“.

Admittedly, AllThingsD’s article seemed a little vague, but before you jump to conclusions that they are randomly guessing, their executive editor Kara Swisher chimed in to directly address any skepticism in their articles comments:

“We never guess. You’ll see.” is about as strong of a statement as one could make to address the doubters. To put some further bite into that language, All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are known to have tipsters inside Apple, and have both even interviewed Steve Jobs directly on numerous occasions:
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Remember that classic Sesame Street song “Everyone Makes Mistakes”? Your sister and your brother and your dad and mother too? Well even Apple does too, at least in regards to their website stock photos.

In an amusing picture featured on the Apple Store’s Parallels Desktop 6 page, the Parallels USB installer stick is jammed into, well, the Ethernet port, which is several ports away from the proper USB location on a unibody MacBook Pro 15″ model. Oops.

This is almost as funny as the four-eared cat engraved on the iPad. I’m sure the image will get fixed quickly, and to be fair, this could be a generic product shot provided by Parallels or a third party, so it may not be Apple’s mistake at all.

Thanks for sending this in Scott

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One of the most highly desired features of iOS by anyone who shares an iPad is the ability to have multiple user accounts. This would allow parents to share iPads with their kids, friends to share with friends, and me to share the iPad with my girlfriend, and everyone could have their own custom springboard, app settings, wallpapers, and settings without interfering with others.

Multi-user accounts won’t be appearing officially in iOS anytime soon – as far as anyone knows – but if you jailbreak your iPad you can get an app from Cydia that does allow you to access and switch between multiple user accounts on the iPad right now.

Side note: if you’re new to jailbreaking but want to try this out, the absolute easiest jailbreak method for iPad and iPad 2 is by using JailbreakMe 3 with iOS 4.3.3, it’s entirely web-based at jailbreakme.com and as simple as it gets, just be sure to backup your iPad before starting.

The app is called iUsers and here’s how to download and use it:

• Launch Cydia and add “cydia.iblogeek.com” as a repository
• Search for iUsers

After you’ve downloaded iUsers, you add and switch user accounts with:

• Tap on Settings > Extensions > iUsers
• Tap “Add User” and enter a name, passcode, and choose to give them full admin access or not
• To switch user accounts, go to your iPad lock screen and tap on the Accounts button in the corner to bring up the user selector, shown in the screenshot up top

I came across this app on MacStories and they caution that iUsers might not work well with backups because it reboots Springboard to activate, but if you’re cool with that risk then this is a nice add-on. I have to say that of all the new features that iOS 5 introduces that eliminate the need for a jailbreak, this is one that Apple really should include in future iOS versions, it’s just too useful not to.

A demonstration video of iUsers is embedded below:

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