As the tech world froths with more iPhone on Verizon rumors, an overlooked bit of information caught my eye. According to Digitimes, Apple is going to replace the glass back panel of the iPhone 4 with metal that features an integrated antenna:

As for the CDMA iPhone, Pegatron Technology is expected to start mass production in December and will supply to both US-based Verizon Wireless and China-based China Telecom. The CDMA iPhone’s back plate will be forged from metal materials and will feature an integrated antenna, according to Digitimes Research.

While the report specifically mentions the CDMA iPhone (Verizon is CDMA), it would be unusual if Apple kept other iPhone 4 models with a glass enclosure. My guess is that Apple is looking to replace the back glass for two reasons: one, it’s relatively fragile and prone to shattering with minor drops, and two a metallic back panel with integrated antenna could help to aid the antenna problems that have received so much negative press.

I really wouldn’t be surprised if Apple restyled iPhone with a metallic enclosure. From a purely design standpoint it seemed unusual that Apple went with the glass back considering their other products are enclosed in a hardy and attractive aluminum shell. Assuming they figured out a way to help the antenna issues and just make the device more durable in general, this design change is a no brainer before the iPhone comes to millions more customers through Verizon and even T-Mobile in the USA.

All iPhones have a baseband, and iPhone baseband is essentially the cellular modem firmware that is on your iPhone. Specifically, baseband includes the low level software that is running on the iPhones cellular modem hardware, the combination of which allows the iPhone to connect to a cellular network to send and receive data, phone calls, and transmissions.

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If you’ve ever needed to select and copy portions of a text document that are non-contiguous, in other words, sentences or words that are not right next to one another and do not touch, you can do so with a little-known text selection shortcut trick in Mac OS X.

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It’s no secret that I’m basically a Starcraft 2 addict, whether it’s multiplayer or singleplayer doesn’t even matter I just love playing the game. Of course it’s also fun to get a little extra help in the form of some cheat codes, so here is the complete list for SC2. These cheat codes work for either PC or Mac versions of Starcraft 2.

Starcraft 2 Cheat Codes

You activate the cheat codes within Starcraft 2 by hitting the Enter or Return key and then typing the cheat and hitting return/enter again to enable it. You will get a notification saying the cheat is active and letting you know that achievements are disabled (see note below).

• God Mode – terribleterribledamage
• Create Units at No Cost – moredotsmoredots
• 5 Billion Credits – whysoserious
• 5000 Vespene Gas – realmendrilldeep
• Unlimited Energy – jaynestown
• Upgrade Weapons, Armor, and Shields – iamironman
• Disable Ability Cooldown – hansshotfirst
• Disable Tech Requirements – sosayweall
• Disable Victory Conditions – tyushasleftthegame
• Play “Terran up the Night” Song – overengineeredcodpiece
• Cinematics Menu – eyesofsauron

Remember that cheats only work in Single Player, either in Custom Games, Tutorial, Campaign, or any other Single Player mode.

Starcraft 2 Cheats Disable Achievements

This is very important to note; if you use cheat codes in Starcraft 2 you will lose your ability to earn achievements while the cheat is activated for that game. This is the message you will see:

“CHEAT PlayerName Achievements have been disabled due to cheat usage. To enable achievements again, start a new game or load a saved game.”

You then need to either start a new game or load a previously saved game to get achievement unlocking back again.

The cinematics cheat can cause Starcraft 2 clients to randomly crash which is likely part of the wider bugs but the framerate cap listed on the Starcraft 2 bugs and fixes page seems to help.

Anytime you are connected to a local area network (LAN) you’ll be assigned an IP address for that network, and often it’s important to know what this IP address is.

There are two quick ways to get your LAN IP address in Mac OS X, one is more user friendly using the GUI, and the other is through the command line, we’ll show you how to do both.

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Alright gamers, fire up iTunes and the App Store because for a limited time the Civilization for iPhone app is free. No this isn’t the trial lite version, it’s the full Civilization Revolution, which usually sells for $6.99. The game is being given away for free courtesy of the FreeAppADay program, but there’s nothing to sign up to get the game.

You can grab the 80 MB download of Civilization Revolution from the iTunes Store or the App Store client on your iPhone but the deal is expected to expire by tomorrow.

Civilization Revolution is the iPhone version of the Sid Meier Civilization dynasty, where the objective is to build an empire, discover the in-game world, and conquer all to eventually rule the world. It’s a really fun turn-based strategy game and well worth a download even at $6.99, so being free is an absolute steal and comes highly recommended.

I’m always looking for good mobile games and Civilization Revolution fits the bill well when I’m (temporarily) pulled away from my current addiction of Starcraft 2.

The Apple Cinema Displays aren’t cheap but they certainly are gorgeous. Here one sits beautifully alongside a 15″ MacBook Pro, and a iPhone. Only thing he needs is a stand for the MacBook Pro.

[ SimpleDesks via Flickr ]

While new iPhone and iPads have the Emoji keyboard built in to iOS and ready to be enabled, older devices may not. But if your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch does not have the Emoji keyboard available because it’s running an older version of iOS (like iOS 5 or older), you can still use Emojicons by downloading an app that offers the same Emoji keyboard.

Yes, older iPhones need to download an app to get emoji, but this app works for older models that do not support that native emoticon character set.

Old-model iPhone and ipad owners, do not worry, you can still use the popular emoji icons on older iPhone models without a jailbreak thanks to a free app available at the app store. We’ll show you what to do, it’s easy.

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This is impressive: 70% of new college students are bringing Macs with them to school, according to a Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. The figure comes in relation to his downgrading of Microsofts stock, which caused shares of the software giant to fall 2%. Here are the details:

70 percent of college freshman are entering school with Macs, up about 10 percent to 15 percent from a year ago.

“Our research is indicating that Microsoft is unable to connect with the new generation of users,” Chowdhry wrote, adding that this could cause problems down the road when these students enter the work force and once again pick Macs over Windows.

I hope the raw statistics and research data is released so we can get the precise details, but speaking from experience I can definitely say that Macs and Apple hardware are overwhelming college campuses. Sure you’ll see other computers and electronics around too but a clear majority of people are using at least one of Apple’s signature products, whether it’s a Mac, iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

So Apple is pretty much taking over, dominating college campuses, the USA, and reaching to the highest levels of power with President Obama and the White House staff all using Macs and iPads. Amazing.

All iPhone devices have a unique hardware identifier known as a MAC address, or as iOS refers to it, a Wi-Fi Address. Sometimes you need to know what the iPhone MAC address is so that you can connect an iOS device to a specific router, provide it to a systems or network administrator, using Wake On LAN, or for many other purposes.

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If your Mac is suddenly running sluggish and you launched Activity Monitor, you may notice a process named ‘mds’ cranking away at 30% and even up to 90% CPU utilization. If you see this, don’t worry, it’s not abnormal behavior and your Mac isn’t crashing, it’s just indexing it’s built in search engine.

What is MDS in Mac OS?

mds stands for “metadata server” and the mds process is part of Spotlight, the amazingly powerful and very useful search feature built directly into the foundation of Mac OS X. You access Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar.

An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

You can then click on the Spotlight icon and you’ll see your main hard drive being indexed, with a progress bar and estimated time until completion:

Is the mds process related to mdworker?

Yes. Usually you will see the mds process in conjunction with mdworker, which is another part of Spotlight and it’s indexing engine.

How long does mds & Spotlight take to finish indexing?

How long it takes to update the Spotlight index depends on a few variables, but mostly the size of your hard drive, the amount of data being indexed, major changes to the filesystem, and the time since last indexing. Just let the indexing complete, it generally takes between 15 and 45 minutes to complete.

If Spotlight isn’t working, you can check out these Spotlight troubleshooting tips which will get you situated again. If you don’t ever use the search feature or just don’t like it, you can also disable Spotlight and all of its indexing.

I came across an excellent alternative to the command line ‘ping’ and ‘traceroute’ tools recently. It’s a utility called mtr, which combines the statistics and prints their functionality into a single network diagnostic tool, reporting details on the network connection between your host machine and whatever the destination host is, determining the address of each network hop (like traceroute), and sending ICMP ECHO requests along the way (like ping) to determine the response quality of each network link.

To install and use mtr you will either need DarwinPorts or to be a familiar with the command line and compiling from source on your Mac, both of which requires the installation of Xcode.

You can download the source of MTR at the developers home or the more user friendly installation through DarwinPorts.

I found mtr while reading old posts on OneThingWell, and the screenshot is borrowed from them as well.

12 years of Steve Jobs… always wearing the quintessential black long sleeved shirt, jeans, and some sneakers.

I love how laid back this guy is, can you think of any other CEO of a comparably popular company dressing so casually? He’s definitely got a distinct wardrobe, even when he visits Apple Store openings.

By the way, for those wondering, the famous Steve Jobs turtleneck is apparently from Japanese designer Issey Miyake. So if you want to outfit yourself and your own wardrobe in a similar fashion, now you know where to start. Or just get a black turtleneck, it may not be as fancy but it could still do the trick.

Thanks to Chris for sending this in!

Oh and if you’re a fan of the turtleneck and of Steve Jobs, perhaps you’ll enjoy this incredibly goofy corny joke.

You can now use a carrier unlock on iPhone 4, thanks to the latest ultrasn0w release from iPhone Dev Team. Installing the carrier unlock is easy, but you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone before it works. Here are the requirements and steps to unlock the iPhone 4:

How to unlock iPhone 4

Unlocking the iPhone 4 from a carrier is pretty easy:

• Jailbreak the iPhone (I recommend the easy iPhone jailbreak for iOS 3.1.2, or download Pwnage Tool 4.1 for iOS 4.1)
• Run Cydia and tap on “Manage”
• Navigate to “Edit” and tap on “Add” and enter the following URL repository: “repo666.ultrasn0w.com”
• Now search Cydia for “ultrasn0w 1.0-1” and install the package
• Once the ultrasn0w package is installed, restart iPhone 4 to complete the carrier unlock

Your iPhone 4 is now unlocked and untied to any specific carrier, the device will work on any GSM carrier around the world with the proper sim card.

Remember that the iPhone 4 uses micro sim format, you can manually trim down existing sim cards to fit into the iPhone 4’s micro sim bay but it’s a delicate process and will certainly require a fair amount of patience as well as an exacto knife or razor blade.

What baseband does the iPhone 4 unlock work with?

The ultrasn0w unlock works with iPhone 4 baseband 01.59 and also on iPhone 3G/3GS basebands 04.26.08, 05.11.07, 05.12.01 and 05.13.04.

What is iPhone baseband?

In case you are curious, iPhone baseband is basically the 3G cellular modem firmware. Hacking the baseband is what allows the unlocked iPhone to actually use the cellular portion of the phone to make and receive calls and data.

If you need to, you can download iPhone firmware IPSW files of nearly all versions released from 3.0.0 and up.

Is unlocking the iPhone illegal?

Using a carrier unlock and jailbreaking iPhone is not illegal thanks to a recent ruling by US officials, however using either hack will likely void your warranty with Apple. If you have a jailbroke and unlocked device, it’s best to unjailbreak it before you take it into Apple for any kind of warranty service or care.

The Mac firewall has long been based on IPFW, a robust and strong software firewall that comes form the unix world. But managing IPFW usually requires digging around in the command line, so as I was recently looking around for a Mac OS X GUI to IPFW, I came across WaterRoof.

If you’re looking for a nice powerful GUI frontend for Mac OS X’s built in firewall IPFW, look no further, WaterRoof is free and simple to use. Using WaterRoof you an easily add, build, and modify ipfw rules quickly and easily with OS X. The GUI is quite nice and easy to parse.

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Starcraft 2 has been out for about a week now and since launch date my life has basically revolved around the game (I’m a nerd, I know). The game is an absolute blast and you should buy it if you like real time strategy games. Now all that said, it’s not without problems. Despite a lengthy beta testing period, there are still some pretty annoying bugs and crashes in SC2, particularly for Mac users who have NVidia hardware.

Here is the known problem list for the Starcraft 2 Mac client, and more importantly some potential fixes for the problems:
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So you’ve decided that you want to reverse the jailbreak on your iPhone, no big deal. All jailbreaks are reversible, but what most users don’t know is that you can easily unjailbreak an iPhone by using the Restore functionality within iTunes, and then you can restore your apps, contacts, and iPhone customization to the device as well. This process is the same to undo a jailbreak on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or even an Apple TV. We’re covering the iPhone here as an example, but it’s the same for all devices and all iOS versions.

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If you’re troubleshooting a Mac machine with some particularly odd issues that routine measures don’t seem to be resolving, it can be helpful to list what kernel extensions are activated, particularly third party kexts loaded in OS X.

Determining what kernel extensions are loaded and running in Mac OS X is rather easy, and using grep you can then easily list all third party kexts. You can also use the same command to list native kernel extensions as well. To accomplish this, you’ll use the kextstat command and pipe the output to grep, using the command line. This works the same in all versions of Mac OS X.

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