Here’s a nice trick if you need to continuously observe your Macs system usage, including disk usage, CPU, and load average. The great thing about this iostat trick is that it updates constantly, allowing for realtime monitoring of system performance, which can be extremely helpful for performance testing and tracking down various processes or activities that are resource heavy.

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If you’re a writer, student, or blogger, the new MacBook Air might be your portable dream machine. For low CPU intensive tasks, the lightweight notebook boasts a battery life that is significantly better than the advertised time of 5 to 7 hours. AnandTech did some extensive reviews of the new MacBook Air and found the battery to last a staggering 7 to 11.2 hours for the 11″ MacBook Air and 13″ 2010 models respectively:

As glorified typewriters, you can’t beat the battery life offered by the MacBook Air. Light web browsing, document creation and music playback have minimal impact on the Air’s battery life. In fact, we actually beat Apple’s battery life claims in our light tests. The 11-inch Air delivers nearly 7 hours on a single charge and the 13-inch managed 11.2 hours. For a writer, you can’t do better than this.

The results were found with screen brightness at 50%, connected to WiFi, playing an MP3 in iTunes, and with no Flash player loaded while browsing the web. Here’s the chart of the new Air against other MacBook and MacBook Pro models:
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In the Halloween spirit, here’s a really creepy iPad wallpaper of a hand appearing behind foggy glass. Click on the image for a full size 1024×1024 version (hosted at imgur).

For whatever reason this picture reminds me of The Ring, ahh!

This is a comprehensive download list of all the firmware files for iPod touch 2G, iPod touch 3g, and iPod touch 4G, with IPSW from 3.1.2 to the current 4.1.0. All of these IPSW files are hosted with Apple and direct linked to their servers. If you have an iPhone, you can download iPhone firmware instead.

iPod Touch Firmware / IPSW Downloads

We are not hosting the firmware files, they are hosted with Apple. It’s best to right-click on the .ipsw link you need and save it directly to prevent your browser from trying to decompress the firmware package on its own.
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Here’s a cool MacBook mod, a user attached a black MacBook bezel on his white MacBook, creating an Oreo MacBook. I have a white MacBook and always imagined doing this and swapping in a black keyboard too after seeing the MacBook Pro come out with their black bezels and keys. Definitely a great mod and I think it’s one of the more creative Mac setups around.

I’m pretty sure this picture belongs to an OS X Daily reader, another one of our readers sent it in saying he found it following comments on an article, but I haven’t been able to track it down. If this is your MacBook and you want credit, please let us know!

Update: The Oreobook belongs to Joel Adria, you can follow the progress of creating the MacBook hybrid at his website.

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac has been rated as the best version of Office to ever come to the Mac platform. If you need the powerful office suite, there’s no better place to buy than through Amazon, thanks to their generous discounts and free shipping.

Buy Office 2011 for Mac at a Discount

There are two versions available with different license packages, all offered with free shipping at a great discount of 8% to 14% off the retail price:

Home & Student – 3 License Family Pack – 13% off at $129.99 (MSRP: $149.99)

Home & Student – Single License – 8% off at $109.99 (MSRP: $119.99)

Home and Business – Single License – 13% off at $174.99 (MSRP: $199.99)

Home and Business – 2 License Pack – 14% off at $239.99 (MSRP: $279.99)

If you’re a family or a group of friends and you need to install Office on a few Macs, the cheapest route to go is to get the 3 license pack for home and students. Considering it’s only $20 more than the single license, you might as well get the 3 license pack and find people to split it with, it’s definitely the cheapest way to get Office 2011.

Does your Mac need more memory? How can you tell? Often when a Mac needs more RAM things will start slowing down and you’ll suffer a noticeable performance hit. This can impact everything from the speed of the computer, to how long it takes to launch apps, to sluggishness when interacting with apps, and more. If you experience any of those types of issues, it could be RAM constraints, but rather than guess, let’s actually learn how to check memory usage.

Here’s a 3-step process of how I determine if a Mac user needs additional memory. Using this method you can determine if you need more memory for your Mac too, so let’s follow along.

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Everyone knows that the delete key removes letters and numbers, but it does so one character at a time. That means if you want to delete and entire word, you have to hit the “Delete” key over and over again until it’s gone, right? Wrong! There’s a super handy trick that lets you delete complete words at a time and it’s super easy to use and remember!

To delete an entire typed word at a time, simply hold down the “Option” key while using the Delete key. This will delete a complete word at once (or any other continuous string of characters that are not interrupted), so if you keep hitting Option+Delete it will continue to delete more words.
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Do you want to buy Parallels 6 for $13.99, including free shipping? This looks like a one day only deal, but what a deal it is.

How to score Parallels 6 for $14 $17.99

Update: Parallels 5 for Mac on Amazon is now $17.99 after rebate. This is still a great deal because it is still eligible for the free upgrade to Parallels 6 which is a huge discount!
Here’s the deal, Parallels 5 is offered on the Amazon Daily Deals site today at a reduced price of $33.99, and it includes a mail-in rebate of $20, bringing the price to $13.99. But guess what? Parallels offers a free upgrade guarantee on version 5 purchased until November 30, 2010, meaning you get a free upgrade to Parallels 6.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Find and buy Parallels 5 for Mac on Amazon for $33.99
• Fill out the $20 rebate form with the developer (the rebate code comes with Parallels 5)
• Save your Amazon receipt, then register and activate Parallels at https://www.parallels.com/account/ within 30 days of purchase
• Now go to http://www.parallels.com/keyfor6/request/ to fill out the free upgrade to Parallels 6 request. You will need the version 5 activation key and a digital copy of your Amazon invoice (taking a screenshot or digital picture of the Amazon receipt should work)

You must fill out the form by November 30, 2010 to get the free upgrade to Parallels 6. Parallels says that claims can take up to 6 to 8 days for processing, but user reports from the prior deal we posted indicate they process claims much faster than that.

Oh and if you’re wondering whether Parallels 6 is worth it, I’d say indeed it is, particularly if you’re a gamer. The gaming performance of Parallels 6 within Mac OS X is pretty amazing, here’s what ArsTechnica had to say about it:

The graphics can be jacked all the way up, and there’s no laggy latency—that’s pretty incredible

You can check out running Windows games in Parallels 6 for more. Apparently just running Windows on top of Mac OS X is pretty speedy with it too.

If you miss out on this deal, you can still use the rebate, Amazon discount, and upgrade guarantee to get Parallels 6 for cheap, but the price seems to fluctuate a bit. The rebate and upgrade guarantee are valid until November 30, 2010.

Select your iPhone, as long as it’s not white. Has the White iPhone 4 been discontinued? The device is now missing from the Apple Store’s iPhone purchase page, which has led to speculation that the white model has been discontinued entirely.

The prevailing theory is that Spring of 2011 is close to what is typically the launch date of a new iPhone, thus Apple won’t produce a white model of the current iPhone 4. If this holds true, the white model may appear as an iPhone 5, or whatever the naming convention goes with, iPhone 4G is perhaps just as likely.

Earlier this week, the White iPhone 4 release date was pushed back to Spring of 2011, which included an apology from Apple.

If you accidentally sent a file to the Trash can on a Mac, you can undo that file or multiple files movement into the Trash with one of two easy tricks to essentially undo that file action.

You can use either method below to accomplish this, with the “Undo” command working if the trash action was the most recent, otherwise you’d want to rely on the “Put Back” method to restore a files location and undo the Trash move.

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Apparently Apple ran the gamut of the entire animal kingdom while deciding on a creature to brand their new operating system with. After taking a look at some of the options, they finally settled on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

OK not really, if you’ve followed Apple whatsoever you’ll know they’ve had a cat theme for a while now, but this is a rather funny picture from the Apple joke site Scoopertino.

You can change the placement of icons on your iPhone or iPod touch much faster by moving them around directly within iTunes.

• Plug your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad into your Mac or PC
• Launch iTunes
• Select your iPhone
• Click on the ‘Apps’ tab within iTunes
• Drag icons around the visible homescreen

As long as you have “Sync Apps” enabled, your new iPhone home screen and icon placement will be saved. I find this much easier than trying to rearrange lots of icons on the small touch based screen.

This even works with jailbroken devices, although the Cydia icon was stubbornly quirky after the limera1n download and kept snapping back to it’s original placement on an iPhone 3G.

Note: You can reset an iPhone passcode but you will lose data on the iPhone. This works on all iPhone and iOS versions, whereas the tip below describes a vulnerability in iOS 4.1 only.

There’s a significant security hole that effects iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users running iOS 4.1. The hole allows a user to bypass the iPhone passcode completely and get around the lock screen, accessing user data. It’s a simple process and hardly a hack:

• Hit “Emergency Call”
• Dial ### and press the call button (any non-emergency number technically works)
• Immediately press the lock button on the top of the iPhone
• You’re now in the users address book.

From this you can make phone calls, browse around the address book, have access to the camera, email, mms, and photo library, including the ability to email or send MMS pictures from the photo library. The trick does not work on the iPhone 3G.

Apple has reportedly acknowledged the problem with a patch in the upcoming iOS 4.2 update, which is due for release in November for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

A trojan horse has been discovered that affects Mac OS X users, dubbed “trojan.osx.boonana.a” or ‘Koobface.’ An infected machine will hijack users social network accounts and attempt to spread the trojan further by sending out spam messages from your username.

Thus far the trojan has been spread through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and eMail. Here is the method of operation:
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It looks like Civilization 5 for Mac OS X will be released on November 22, this is in line with the official release date scheduled loosely in “Fall 2010” that was announced previously by Aspyr.

Update: you can now pre-order Civilization V for Mac from Amazon which includes free shipping.

The precise release date comes from Amazon UK (screenshot above in case it goes down). Amazon has spilled the beans on other software and hardware releases in the past (iLife 11, Office 2011 for Mac, etc), so this should be considered somewhat reliable information.

Currently the USA Amazon Store reveals a generic placeholder for Civilization V for Mac, which doesn’t have any release information, box shots, or artwork, only the “Currently unavailable” message.

Thanks to Andrew who discovered this!

If your computer doubles as your stereo, you’re not alone. Anytime I just have iTunes playing music, I like to put iTunes into fullscreen mode.

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How about a custom floating iPad stand that sits in front of your face while you’re lounging around in a lazyboy? Hmm, as if the iPad needed any help in being couch potato friendly, this comes along. I’m sort of speechless. More goofy pictures: Read more »