The new Apple TV has just shipped and is barely available in anyones hands, but the devices firmware has already been exploited using the SHAtter jailbreak, according to the iPhone Dev Team’s blog:

It’s looking like SHAtter is going to be the gift that keeps on giving. Even though the new AppleTV isn’t yet in people’s homes, the firmware is available on Apple’s normal public distribution servers and SHAtter has been used to decrypt its keys!

This is exciting news for the mod and jailbreak community, as the Apple TV will undoubtedly be a hackers hit. The device is largely thought to be a reconfigured iPod Touch, but until a full tear-down is completed nobody knows the machines innards for sure.

The new Apple TV runs iOS 4.1, although it is a modified version of the operating system minus the Springboard application. Springboard is the classic iPhone touch-based user interface that has become synonymous with iOS, and in it’s place is something called LowTide, which is practically identical to the FrontRow application running within Mac OS X.

Thoughts on an Apple TV Jailbreak

So here’s my prediction: Apple TV jailbreak will be released soon, the Springboard application will be run (despite the lack of touch), and you’ll be able to use all your favorite apps on the jailbroken Apple TV in the near future, perhaps using another touch-based iOS device as the controller.

I also think that Apple is going to pay close attention to how the mod community handles the Apple TV, and may even implement changes based on their findings. Other than the obvious game of cat-and-mouse that involves closing the various jailbreak exploits, I think Apple learns from the jailbreak community and uses the best of their ideas in future products. I have a hunch that Apple TV will follow this example. Much like Installer.app and Cydia are thought to have gave rise to the official App Store, it’s quite possible that the best functionality of the jailbroken Apple TV will make an official appearance down the road.

In the meantime, this will all be done unofficially through the jailbreak/hacker community, so don’t expect any love from Apple (although jailbreaking is legal, it is said to void your Apple warranty).

You know those Motorola Droid commercials where a robotic voice says “Droid”, or more accurately Drooooid? Oddly enough, your Mac may have been the originator of this sound, and without any additional software you have the ability to play and save the sound yourself right in OS X.

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Are you tired of the scribbly marker looking font in the Notes app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch? Want to have a different font in Notes app for iOS? No problem, you can select a variety of font options to be the default on the Notes app.

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Want to run Windows-only PC games on your Mac? How about doing this without Boot Camp? With Parallels 6, you can actually play Windows PC-only games with good performance directly in Mac OS X, making Parallels Desktop 6 an essential upgrade for avid Mac gamers or anyone looking to play Windows games on the Mac.

Don’t believe it? All I can say is, prepare to be impressed. I was skeptical too, but here’s a pretty incredible video from ArsTechnica of Left 4 Dead running with maximum settings at 1920×1200 in Parallels 6 at 86fps!

Check out some of the other amazing videos, here’s the popular Mass Effect 2 running in Mac OS X under Parallels at 1920×1200:
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If you’re tired of looking over a man (manual) page within the Terminal, you can use a nifty command sequence to launch any specified man page into the Preview app of Mac OS X. This is done by piping the standard man output into the open command and Preview.

Launching the man Page into Preview

The exact syntax to use for this purpose is as follows:

man -t [COMMAND GOES HERE] | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

For example, this is using the trick to open the manual page for ‘ipconfig’ into Preview:

man -t ipconfig | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

You can do this with any page, just replace ‘ipconfig’ with any other command or known man page you’d like to read within Preview and it’ll work the same.

And yes, this is opening the manual page in Preview.app, the image editing and viewer app bundled with every version of Mac OS X… that may sound confusing and a bit weird to send a command line man document into an image editing app, but this is where things get particularly cool… you can export it as a PDF!

Essentially what you’re doing here is converting the manual page from a terminal text file into a PDF document.

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You can install and run Android OS on the iPhone, thanks to a tool called iPhoDroid. I’m not sure why you’d want to do this, but it’s fun to know that you can.

Grab the iPhoDroid download on the developers site or Google Code, the tool runs on both Windows and Mac OS X and is about a 50mb download.

Personally I like iOS so I’m not about to run Android on my iPhone, but if you feel like giving this a go, then have at it and report back the results. If running it on your phone is too big a jump, you can always run Android in a virtual machine that’s preconfigured too.

You already know that you can take screenshots from the command line on Mac OS X, and now using a simple tool called webkit2png you can quickly take a screenshot of any webpage from the command line too.

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Feeling nostalgic for a horrible crash-prone user experience and ugly GUI? How about putting the Windows 95 boot screen as your iPad background? It won’t make your iPad run Windows 95 (thankfully), but it sure looks dreadful enough.

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You can disable the new iTunes Ping sidebar from appearing in iTunes 10.0.1 by using the following command within the Terminal:

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iTunes 10.0.1 is a minor update that replaced the iTunes store arrows with a Ping pull-down menu button instead. I think it clutters the iTunes interface a bit so here’s how to remove this feature.

Launch the Terminal and type or paste the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE

Then quit and relaunch iTunes for the changes to take effect, as seen in the screenshot:

You can get the Ping pull-down menu buttons back by typing:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool FALSE
And then relaunching iTunes again.

You can also disable the iTunes Ping sidebar if you want to further clean up the iTunes interface.

Disable iTunes Ping buttons in Windows

By request, here’s how to disable the Ping button in Windows. First, quit iTunes, then:

• From the Start menu go to the ‘Run’ command
• Enter the following in exactly:

"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt hide-ping-dropdown 1

• iTunes will now execute running that command and the Ping button will be turned off

Want to buy Starcraft 2 for cheaper than retail? Thanks to Amazon, you can pickup SC2 for $49.99, which is a 17% discount from the $59.99 retail price offered by Blizzard. Not a bad deal for a sweet game with tons of replay value, and as far as I know this is the cheapest deal to get Starcraft 2 yet.

Starcraft 2 comes on a multi-platform compatible DVD so you can install it on a Mac or Windows PC. So what are you waiting for?

Head over to Amazon and grab Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty for cheaper than retail, plus it includes free shipping.

Branching out a bit from the Mac Setups, here is a great iPad setup!

The iPad rests comfortably in a dock and is connected wirelessly to a bluetooth keyboard, surrounded by a glass of red wine and an iPhone.
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Want to mount an iPad in your car? You can install an iPad onto your dashboard for easy access, this is a great idea that will surely improve the time you spend in traffic. I’ll cover two solutions here, one is a car mount kit that is probably the best solution on the do-it-yourself market, and the other is a cheap no-frills hack that gets the job done on a tight budget.
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Apple now allows iPhone ringtone creation apps to be sold on the App Store, in a somewhat strange turn around from their previous policy. The reason I say this is strange is because you can make ringtones with iTunes 10 for free without any additional software, and you can also buy ringtones on iTunes for $0.69, so allowing ringtone apps is sure to cut into their own business of selling them.

The ringtone maker app market has already proven to be popular, with several of the apps now climbing the ranks of the App Store top paid apps, as AppleInsider notes. I suppose the convenience of being able to create a ringtone directly on the iPhone is nice, but I think I’ll stick to making them free within iTunes (Garageband works too).

This right here is a tiny horse, alongside a customer, in an Apple Store. Yes, I did a double-take too.

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An underused feature of Mac OS X is the ability to use any Finder window as an application launcher. This is actually a feature of the Toolbar, which is usually thought to just hold things like the back and forward buttons, list and icon views, etc. But in fact, that same toolbar can launch apps too, and they can be whatever apps you want.

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Office 2011 for Mac is scheduled to be released at the end of October according to Microsoft, but ZDNet claims that the official release date will be October 26.

This expected ship date date came from Amazon sales page for Office 2011, but now the date is no longer shown. which is now confirmed as October 26.

Microsoft has publicly announced the ‘end of October’ release for Office 2011, which is expected to come in a few flavors at different price points.

We just got a rather amusing email along the lines of: “Hey I tried to share a story on Facebook but your site is broken!” but with more swear words and other nonsense thrown in there for good measure.

Facebook is down, it’s not us. Blame them.

But this is a good reason to discuss what to do when a site goes down, and even ways to view websites when they’re down.

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