How about a couple of Mac-wielding DJ’s wearing Storm Trooper helmets, presumably rocking out a crowd of fellow awesomeness to some awesome music? OK, I don’t know if this is was a halloween thing or what, but this is probably what you would see if Daft Punk were Star Wars fans and Mac users, and hey, maybe they are?

I have no idea where this picture originated, but thanks to AJ for sending it in to our group inbox. A very cool picture indeed! If you have any additional details about the image, just send us an email or post in the comments, we’d love to know where this is from or have some more details.

Until then, just enjoy the picture for it’s sheer cool factor, well, cool if you’re a geek who likes Star Wars and Macs and general geekiness…. like me anyway… Yes, this is quite lightheated compared to our usual fair, but we like to switch it up from time to time with the ‘fun’ category. So if you hate fun, well, ignore the fun category. That’s ok, no hard feelings.

Update: We have heard this is an image from a band of electronic DJ’s called LAZERDISK, taken at some show in LA, but we haven’t confirmed that yet. Sounds plausible, and we all know that many DJ’s use Macs as their primary setups.

Wondering what to do about a dead pixel or stuck pixel on an Apple device? Apple’s internal policy on dead and stuck pixels has been revealed. Titled “Acceptable numbers of pixel anomalies”, the internal document explains Apple’s policy on what they call pixel anomalies and how they handle repairs or replacements.

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Apple has now opened the doors for Mac OS X developers to submit their apps to be included in the upcoming Mac App Store. Scheduled to be released within the next three months, the Mac App Store was announced as part of the Mac OS X 10.7 feature set, but Apple quickly revealed it would also be available to existing Mac OS X 10.6 users.

Anyone can develop software for the Mac through Xcode, but if you want to distribute your software through the Mac App Store, you will need to join the Mac Developer Program from Apple. Much like the iOS Developer Program, the Mac Developer Program costs $99 per year.

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing is remaining focused, which is increasingly difficult in the digital world of mass distractions. Social media, alerts, notifications, there’s constant noise blasting our direction and ready to distract you.

Using distraction free writing software can really help eliminate the interruptions that exist elsewhere on your computer, and the open source FocusWriter fits this bill nicely for Mac users, but it’s also available for Windows and LInux too.

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If you’ve been dying to watch Flash video on your iPhone, you’ll be pleased to hear about the release of Skyfire. Skyfire is an alternate web browser for the iPhone that allows you to watch Flash videos on the device, it does so by converting the Flash to HTML5 on the fly. When the Flash video is ready to watch, you tap on the play video icon at the bottom of Skyfire to load the video as HTML5. This obviously isn’t full Flash support, but it’s about as close as the iPhone will probably get without jailbreaking the device.

Skyfire Web Browser is intended for the iPhone and iPod touch, but also works on the iPad. It costs $2.99 and you can get Skyfire Web Browser from the iTunes Store.

The description on the App Store says that the $2.99 download is a ‘Special Early Adopter Price’ which would suggest it’s bound to cost more in the future. I have yet to try the app myself but it’s getting good reviews on the App Store, as well as from the New York Times and Engadget.

Update: Skyfire was temporarily removed from the App Store by the developer, they released the following statement explaining why:

Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections.

The user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.

Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store. We are working really hard to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as we can support it.

We are very grateful for the demand. Within 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Wow!

Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned.

Thanks, Robert.

It sounds like the app will be available again once they figure out their bandwidth situation.

You may know that iPhone users can opt to turn off Caller Id on their iPhone to always make blocked calls from that number and phone, this means when your calls will show up as “blocked” to the recipients phone all the time. But you may not want to block every call all the time, and instead you might just want to temporarily block an iPhone call that you’re making.

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Apple is now allowing customers who purchased an AppleCare Protection Plan to transfer the warranty to a new device without having to cancel the current plan or buy a new one, according to a report from BGR. This information comes from a leaked internal document in the form of a screenshot (shown above), which specifies the change in policy.

The transfer applies to purchases made within 30 days, specifically:

The product originally covered by the agreement must have been purchased within the past 30 days, and the new product must be of the kind that can be covered by that agreement.

For example, if you just bought an iPhone 3GS with an AppleCare Protection Plan and upgraded to an iPhone 4 within the month, you can transfer your plan to the new hardware. It looks like the transfer option expands to all AppleCare Protection Plans, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Displays, and one can assume the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro. Although the leaked snapshot does not specifically show all of the Apple hardware, it refers to “all other APP agreements.” This report and screenshot appeared on BGR, who says the move will simplify the buying process for customers. If you were wondering, the AppleCare Protection Plan has always been transferable to new hardware owners.

AppleCare Protection Plans are highly recommended and serve as an extended warranty, you can save up to 26% off of AppleCare Protection Plans by buying from Amazon.com.

The iTunes Visualizer is a neat feature of iTunes that’s been around forever, more recent incarnations of the app have brought a more attractive visualizer which is a bit more fun to play around with. In fact, there’s some hidden commands that you can access while in iTunes Visualizer that modify the appearance of what’s displayed on screen.

These work on both Mac and Windows versions of iTunes, so play some music and explore the effects.

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There’s a new iPad commercial out again, and Apple showers the device in superlatives: iPad is cinematic, elementary, academic, full-size, presenting, bought, sold, fantasy, electric.

The latest TV advertisement features the same finger snapping Chilly Gonzales piano song from iPad commercials airing earlier in the year, except at the end there’s an electric guitar playing the same chords.

The latest iPad commercial joins the MacBook Air, iPhone, iPod touch, and iPod nano commercials that are also seen on the airwaves with some regularity.

Previously, Apple used the same song for a similar themed commercial for iPad 1, as part of an ongoing television advertising campaign for the tablet.

Mac users generally don’t have to worry much about viruses, but with the popularity of Macs growing the likelihood of viruses appearing increases. Just recently a new trojan called Boonana Koobface appeared that affects Mac users. If you’re concerned with getting a virus on your Mac, why not download a free anti-virus app for Mac OS X?
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The transparent computer screen effect is always cool, and this stack of 5 transparent laptops is no exception. There’s an iBook (this is pre-iBookstore), a couple PC’s, and even an old school PowerBook in there.

OK so they’re not actually transparent, they’re just carefully shot digital pictures that are opened on each individual laptop to give a see-through effect. This picture was sent to us via Flickr, and doesn’t serve much purpose other than looking cool.

If you need to download iPad firmware and IPSW files, here are the links to do so. These are the original unmodified IPSW files, for versions 3.2 and up for iPad. You can also download iPhone firmware or iPod touch firmware if you need to.

iPad Firmware & IPSW Downloads

These .ipsw files are hosted on Apple’s servers, it’s best to right-click the file you need and “Save As” to prevent some web browsers from trying to extract the file as an archive.
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The GM release of iOS 4.2 is now available to download through Apple’s Developer Program. GM stands for Golden Master, which generally means the software release is ready to ship. The iOS 4.2 update is hotly anticipated for iPad owners in particular, since it will bring multitasking abilities to the device. The update also installs on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, and the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd generation iPod touches. Installing the iOS 4.2 update requires iTunes 10.1 as well.

If you’re an iOS developer, head on over to Apple’s iOS Developer Center to grab the iOS 4.2 GM build 8C134.

For those who aren’t developers, the wait to download and install iOS 4.2 is not going to be long. It’s expected that the newest version of iOS will be released to the public within a week or two, which would match the November release date that Apple scheduled earlier in the year.

Note: Any download links made available in the comments have not been verified and are not condoned by OSXDaily.com. Use at your own risk.

If you need to open and expand rar files in Mac OS X, you can unrar files with two free utilities available for the Mac. Not only will either of these apps quickly open and decompress .rar files, but it also has the ability to restore corrupted and missing archives using par files. Archive restoration using par2 is often essential when working with torrent and newsgroup downloads.

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The iPhone Dev Team has released RedSn0w 0.9.6 in it’s second beta form for both Windows and Mac platforms. There are two main reasons you’d want to use redsn0w. The first is for Windows users, since redsn0w allows you to use custom IPSW files. The second reason is that redsn0w allows you to use custom boot logos on iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPod touch 2G, assuming you have qualifying bootrom, this is obviously just a cosmetic feature.

Update 11/23/2010: redsn0w 0.9.6b4 download has been released.

The Dev Team notes that you should not use redsn0w if you have used the ultrasn0w unlock in the past, since you may lose the carrier unlock if you were to upgrade to iOS 4.1.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.6b2

These are direct download links for Windows and Mac OS X:
0.9.6b2 for Mac OS X
0.9.6b2 for Windows

Remember that if you need to build a custom IPSW file for redsn0w to use, you’ll have to do so with Pwnage Tool. Otherwise, if you need to access original IPSW files, you can download iPhone firmware & IPSW or iPod touch firmware from two large lists.

The redsn0w 0.9.6b2 jailbreak uses the same exploit as limera1n as opposed to the older DFU mode exploit. If you just want to jailbreak your phone and you’re not concerned with unlocks, I would recommend going with greenpois0n or limera1n, they are a bit easier.

You can have your iPhone display the character count of text messages by enabling an option within the settings, here’s how to do this in iOS:

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Zombie Snow White on a MacBook? Yikes, this is rather horrifying but very fitting for Halloween.

Everyone has probably seen the Snow White decal stuck on the back of a MacBook by now, if you’re a Disney & Apple fan it’s an appropriate tribute to both, and, well, this is a very creepy twist on that. Would I put it on my MacBook? No, I don’t think I would, but then again my personal favorite decal is The Giving Tree, which is a whole lot friendlier. To each there own.

Happy Mac Halloween everyone! And thanks to CJ for sending this picture in.

Oh, and remember it’s not too late to grab a pumpkin and carve an Apple logo pumpkin or to get a creepy iPad wallpaper.

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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