If you travel around North America or have any intention on doing so in the foreseeable future, fire up iTunes and download some free Lonely Planet guides to 13 American and Canadian cities while they last. Each city guide is an individual iPhone app that will work on the iPhone or iPod touch, no cellular access is required.

Why the free giveaway? Lonely Planet says it’s in honor of the snowpocalypse that is hitting half of the continent, which has canceled hundreds of flights and left many thousands of travelers stranded at various airports and cities around the country while they wait for the snow to clear and flights to resume.

Lonely Planet makes fantastic travel aids, and these city guides are usually $5.99 each, making free a pretty great deal. If you download all 13 of them, you’ll get $78 of guides for nothing. This is a limited time offer, they are only free from now until 6pm on February 4th, so download them while you can.

All links below are direct to the iTunes App Store:
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Apple has relaxed their water damage policy for the iPod, and this probably includes the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch as well.

This is good news for users who have had experience with a device getting slightly moist from something like fog or rain, but there are certainly going to be limits to what Apple determines is acceptable liquid contact.

Specifically, the new policy states the following:
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Apple has released iOS 4.3 beta 3 to developers via the iOS Dev Center. The build number for the latest iOS beta release is 8F5166b and is available only for iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 3G and 4G.

Download iOS 4.3 Beta 3

You can download the latest beta IPSW files if you are a registered iOS developer from the IOS Dev Center.

Beta 3 is expected to include mostly bug fixes. Updates to Apple TV 2 and the iOS SDK have also been released.

The iPhone reached a 17.25% market share among smartphones by the fourth quarter of 2010, although this accounts for only 4.2% of overall cell phone market share.

Capturing 17% of the smart phone market is a pretty impressive feat, but even more so is the iPhones share of profits, which comes in at a staggering 51% despite only grabbing 22% share of overall revenues:
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Want to change what the default app is that launches when you double-click or otherwise open a file from the OS X Finder? It’s easy to do, and you can change any individual files default application by doing the following from the Mac Finder:

• Select the file (or file type) that you want to adjust
• Hit Command+i to “Get Info” on the file
• Click to expand the “Open with” section within that files info screen
• From the pull down menu, select the application you want to open this specific file with
• Close the Get Info window

This will only change the default behavior of that specific file.

Changing Default Apps for All Files of a Format

Going one step beyond a single file association, you can change the default app of all of the chosen files format by being at the same Get Info window, selecting then app, then click on the “Change All” button. This lets you assign something like Preview to always open all PNG files, for example.

Do note that if you click the “Change All” button you will change that file types association across Mac OS X, causing all instances of that file format to open in the application you chose. Even after that has been enacted however, you can still override it on a file-by-file basis by using the aforementioned Get Info trick to alter the relationship between that single file and a given application.

Apple has posted iOS 4.2.6 for download, the update is aimed specifically at CDMA iPhone 4 models which are due for a release later in the week. The early availability of the iPhone firmware is likely intended for Verizon iPhone review units that have been sent to journalists.

Download iOS 4.2.6 Firmware

iOS 4.2.6 is Build 8E200 and weighs in at 652MB:

• Download iPhone3,3_4.2.6_8E200_Restore.ipsw Now

This specific build is thus far intended exclusively for CDMA iPhone 4 models, there is no need for other users to download the IPSW file.

The latest batch of iPad 2 rumors claim that the device will have the following hardware specs:

• 1.2 GHz dual core Cortex A9 CPU
• Imagination Technologies SGX 543 dual core GPU, that is reportedly up to 300% more powerful than iPhone 4 GPU
• 512MB RAM running at 1066 Mhz
• Thinner and lighter anti-glare screen for improved readability in sunlight
• Same 1024×768 resolution as existing iPad model
• Dual lower resolution cameras borrowed from iPod touch
• Possibility of included NFC chip, which would turn iPad 2 and iPhone 5 into a digital wallet

Other than the dual core GPU, there’s not much new here. Most of these specs are in line with the past iPad 2 rumor roundup, although a 1.2GHz CPU is slightly faster than the 1GHz dual core chip that was previously speculated. The other things to notice are the improved RAM speed and the dual core GPU, both of which provide significant performance gains to app and graphics performance (maybe even providing for 1080p output?).
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To show off just how light the MacBook Air is, an Apple Store came up with this awesome window display, yes that is a MacBook Air hanging from a balloon. OK so the balloon itself isn’t the only thing holding up the MBA, it’s also held in place by some wires, but who cares? It looks awesome and gets the point across. This is easily the coolest window display the Apple Store has had yet, and some user reports say it is being adopted nationwide.

There’s a video of the floating MacBook Air below:
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Adobe Photoshop was running a bit sluggish on my Mac recently, so I set about to make the app run faster with a few tweaks. While these were done on my MacBook Pro, there’s no reason the tips wouldn’t work the same on a Windows PC running PS too.

1) Quit Other Apps
Before digging around in the Photoshop preferences, quit any other apps that you are not using. This frees up additional system resources to devote to Photoshop instead.

2) Raise the Memory Usage
More memory the better! This gave me a large speed increase:

• From Photoshop Preferences, click on “Performance”
• Adjust the slider upward to use more RAM, the more you can spare the merrier

A quick note regarding RAM: Computers love RAM, and so does Photoshop. If you’re a frequent Photoshop user or you do anything else that involves significant memory consumption, adding more memory to your computer is a good idea. You can read my review of upgrading a MacBook Pro to 8GB RAM if you haven’t already, or find out if you need a RAM upgrade.
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We’ve talked about the iPhone Configuration Utility before, the enterprise iPhone management and setup tool, but there’s another nice feature in the app; the Console. This console allows you to see what activity is going on with iOS on an iPhone, Ipad, or iPod touch, just like the Console with system logs does on Mac OS X.

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DFU stands for Device Firmware Update, and Apple TV 2 has DFU mode like the iPhone does. This allows you to tweak and install firmware and is necessary for some of the hacks available to the device.

How to enter DFU mode on the Apple TV 2

Getting into DFU mode on the ATV2 is slightly different than other iOS hardware and requires the ATV2 remote control and a connection to your computer.

• Launch iTunes
• Connect the Apple TV 2 to your computer
• Using the Apple TV aluminum remote, hold down both the Menu and Down buttons for about 6 seconds until the device reboots
• After reboot, release both of the buttons, and then immediately press and hold the Menu and Play button together
• Continue holding until you see a message in iTunes saying an Apple TV in recovery mode has been detected

You will now be in DFU mode, where you can restore and update firmware.

Want some more Apple TV2 fun? Learn how to jailbreak and install XBMC on the Apple TV 2. If you just want to jailbreak without XBMC, check out Seas0nPass, it is very user friendly and one of the easiest jailbreak tools out there.

If you use Twitter to keep an eye on things or to livestream news and events, this feature in the Twitter for Mac desktop app is a must use. It allows the Twitter app to automatically update and scroll to the most recent tweets, giving you a live and constantly updated feed of what’s going on from who you follow on Twitter. This applies to your main feed as well as search streams and other feeds, so this trick makes for an excellent way to watch the social world of twitter, serving whatever purpose it is that you use the app for (and we all seem to use it differently).

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iPhone backups contain a huge amount of personal data, from various account and service logins, contact list and phone logs, personal notes, emails, health data, messages, fully readable SMS conversations, just about anything that is used or stored on the device gets placed in the backup file. That’s excellent for backup restoration purposes, but technically anyone with access to the computer can easily dig around in the backups locally if they wanted to. For this reason, it can be a good idea keep these locally stored iPhone backup files encrypted, which then require a password to access and restore from, and it also makes the backups safe from prying eyes.

Enabling backup encryption for iPhone (and iPad and iPod touch for that matter) is a simple procedure that must only be enabled once. After encryption has been toggled on, all backups will be placed through encryption, and all future backups that are made will be encrypted, making them unreadable and unusable without having the accompanying password that was set. This allows for a very secure layer of privacy and security for stored iOS data on any computer.

This tutorial will show you how to enable encrypted backups in iTunes for Mac or Windows.

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This is starting to look like flashback week, first with the flickering retro Terminal app Cathode and now this absolutely ridiculous iPhone case that is made to resemble the giant block cellphones from the 80’s.

Is this thing hilarious or what? It’s not just photoshop either, here it is next to an Android:
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How about a bit of everything with an Apple logo? Here’s a full range of portable Macs and iProducts; an iPhone, iPad, MacBook 13″ (maybe Pro?), and a MacBook Pro 15″.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this setup is that you can sync the bluetooth keyboard and mouse to any of the devices.

This pictures is from Flickr, and if you browse through the users photostream you’ll see a *gasp* Google Nexus One phone too!

Todolicious is a nice and simple to-do list manager for Mac OS X. I generally just use Stickies for to-do lists on my Mac, but Todolicious has a couple features that are handy that Stickies doesn’t.

One is obvious, you can check items off and they disappear from the task list. The other you have to set in the apps preferences, but it causes the Todolicious Dock icon to show a red badge with the number of items remaining in your to-do list, shown below:

More and more apps are starting to do this (kind of like the Twitter for Mac notifications tip from earlier) and it’s surprisingly useful.

Usually it costs $4.99, but today only (January 28) the developer is letting anyone download it for free via the Mac App Store. So if you need a to do list app for your Mac, grab this one from the Mac App Store while it’s free.

I wouldn’t recommend this, but someone was crazy enough to apply a Zagg shield to their MacBook Air, and then use it as a cutting board to chop some peppers and a tomato with a large knife. I guess this is supposed to demonstrate how effective the Zagg shields are at protecting the MacBook Air, which it does, but it also just looks slightly crazy.

Video of this below, it should start at 5 minutes 10 seconds in, if not skip ahead to see the cutting board action:
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You can get desktop Growl notifications in Twitter for Mac, here’s how:

• From Twitter for Mac, go to the Twitter menu and open Preferences
• Click on the Notifications tab
• From the drop down menu, select ‘Growl notification’ for either Tweets, Mentions, or Messages
• Close out Preferences and changes are immediate

Now just a word of warning, if you follow a ton of people, having Growl notifications for Tweets can be a firehose of desktop notifications atop Mac OS X. I just enabled the feature for Mentions and Messages, and if you have a large and active follow list this might be the best choice.

Notice that you can also set notifications to appear on the Dock icon. In the screenshot below you can see the little red star badge appear on the Twitter icon, alerting you to a mention or message.

Twitter for Mac is a great twitter client with a lot of cool features. I wasn’t originally sold on the app, but after using it and discovering the cool features like sending a tweet from anywhere in Mac OS X, I’m now a regular user.

Thanks for sending in the tip Adem!