This is one awesome music studio based on an iMac. I wouldn’t know how to use half of the equipment here, but it sure looks fun.

[ via Flickr ]

“iTunes could not connect to this iPhone because an unknown error occurred (0xE8000065)”

Ahhh! That’s the message I got earlier when trying to connect my iPhone to my iMac, something I haven’t seen before. I searched around a bit online and found out that this is not a Mac OS X specific problem, many people running Windows XP and Windows 7 encounter the same error. While I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what causes it, I have my own speculation: power issues.

Many of the complaints and descriptions regarding the error describe swapping around USB connections and ports to resolve the issue, and I think this helps to corroborate my suspicion with power management. With this is mind, here’s how I got the ‘unknown error’ to go away and finally connect my iMac to my iPhone again: I just let the iPhone charge more. The battery had been very low, and I have auto-sync enabled, so I imagine the iPhone just didn’t have an adequate charge to maintain a connection.

Now again, all of this is just pure speculation based on my experience and reading other peoples encounters with the same problem. So if you’re running into this “0xE8000065” error with iTunes and your iPhone (also some people report problems on their iPod Touch…) try the following to troubleshoot:

* Change the USB port the iPhone is connected to the computer with
* Let the iPhone charge sufficiently before trying to access it through iTunes
* Turn the iPhone on and off

If it’s persistant, you could even try resetting the PMU/SMC controller on the Mac.

Anyway, if you encounter this error hopefully these tips work to resolve it for you as well, let me know!

Would you prefer to use the keyboard to speed up navigation around your Mac? That’s what the Full Keyboard Access setting allows for. Using a Keyboard option, you can have the Tab Key able to switch between dialog buttons, fields, screen items, controls, and anything else in a dialog box within Mac OS X. This can greatly enhance the speed at which you use your Mac, but it’s a feature that Apple has never chosen to enable by default. Additionally, tab key navigation can be a very helpful setting for accessibility purposes, since it’s often easier to leave your hands on the keyboard than move around a mouse or trackpad.

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While everyone continues to wait for an official Hulu app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/whatever, you can beat them to the punch and get Hulu content on your iPhone now for free, using Snow Leopard!

This is a pretty crafty approach and it requires several things:
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed
* Latest version of QuickTime Player (with Screen Recording support)
* Hulu Desktop client for Mac (for easy full-screen mode)
* The audio recording utility called SoundFlower (so you can record system audio while a screencast is going on)

In case you hadn’t guessed it yet, after you’ve met the above installation requirements, you basically just set your audio output device to SoundFlower, launch the Hulu app and get your show queued up, then from within QuickTime Player you start a new screen recording and start playing the Hulu show… afterwards simply go through the saved screencast and trim out the desktop stuff you don’t want, and then save the file as iPhone format… crafty huh?

You can see the full walkthrough at SampleTheWeb: How to use Snow Leopard to Record Hulu Content on your iPhone [ screenshot borrowed from SampleTheWeb ]

Want to go to MacWorld Expo 2011 for free? Me too! The expo is from January 27th to the 29th of 2011 in San Francisco, California. You can sign up online for a free expo pass to the MacWorld exhibit until March 8th of this year, so if you think you can make it, register now!

Get your free MacWorld Expo 2011 pass here

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon.

There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens we’ll go through the most common reasons on a Mac, and of course how you can resolve the problem.

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Preview is one of my favorite Mac apps, but recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason. I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it, which is usually something that works if the Open menu doesn’t. I know the images are fine because they open fine in other Mac apps, in Windows, and even in Photoshop, suggesting Preview is just acting weird and needs a little kick in the pants to get working, and this is just the trick to do that…

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There’s no shortage of DNS Server options out there, with Google DNS, OpenDNS, your own ISP’s, and the gazillion of others available to use. The question remains though, which of these DNS servers is going to be fastest for you? And how do you know which is fastest? That’s where NameBench comes in.

NameBench is a free application that will run a set of benchmarks based on your web browsing history and tcpdump, and will report back the fastest domain name server(s) for you to use. In some cases, switching to the suggested domain name server can be a considerably speed increase, with noticeably faster page loads, making this a very worthwhile tool to try. It’ll run in Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, but of course we’re focusing on the Mac here.
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Appropriately named App Store Expense Monitor does exactly what it’s name implies, it tallies up your App Store spending on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch apps and gives you a grand total.
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If you have forgotten or lost your password in Mac OS X, you can reset a password by booting from a Mac OS X install disk.

This works with any version of Mac OS X where you have a Mac OS X Installer CD or DVD.

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The iPad sure is getting a lot of attention. If you’re pondering developing for the device, or you’re just curious in general, here are some specs on the iPad’s display:

* the 9.7″ iPad display has a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels
* the display’s pixel density is 132 pixels per inch (ppi), slightly less than the iPhone 3GS 163ppi screen.

Remember that iPhone 4 has a higher resolution that comes closer to the iPad display, this should make moving apps between the two more fluid, and more attractive.

[ via Apple.com ]

Talk about screen real estate, wow. This MacBook Pro is setup to use dual 24″ Apple Cinema Displays. Awesome.

[ via TnPham ]

Here’s another sweet dual monitor setup with a MacBook Pro, this time with 22″ displays (and lacking the super cool city view in the background of the previous one).

[ via Flickr ]

The bouncing Dock icons are a nice GUI feature that let you know an app is launching on the Mac, but for some people those little bouncing icons are just really annoying. Additionally, Dock icons will bounce to notify you that an alert is active in the app, or the app needs your attention.

If you’re not a fan of the bouncing dock icons on a Mac, you can disable all Dock bouncing activity, including on app launch and the Dock icon bounce notifications in Mac OS X by using the command line.

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Mac OS X simplified the font smoothing settings (anti-aliasing) for Mac OS and all apps running within it, but for some the change is unwelcome. If you feel like your screen looks different, or that fonts look a little unusual and text looks different too, it probably does, and the change can be very profound on certain LCD displays.

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Want to find out how to see all startup and login app launches and scripts on a Mac? This article will walk through that process. Gone are the days of Mac OS System 9 where all startup items were sitting nicely in a system folder labeled ‘Startup’, now with the Unix undercore of Mac OS X things are a bit more complicated, with some startup and login scripts and apps launching beyond the easily accessible ‘Login Items’ preference pane.

We’ll review where these startup, login, and auto-launch agents, plists, daemons, and applications may reside in Mac OS X. This can be helpful for troubleshooting, privacy, and security reasons.

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TTYtter is a rather fun command line based Twitter client. Written in Perl, it’s got all the essential ingredients needed for basic Twitter needs without ever leaving a Terminal window.

Running TTYtter is easy enough, it just needs your login information and off it goes. You can either run it through perl with:
perl /path/to/ttytter.pl -user=username:password

or make the script executable:
chmod +x ttytter.pl
and run as usual:
./ttytter -user:username

Note: if you don’t want to specify a password at the command prompt (security reasons, personal preference, against your marital vows, whatever) just leave it out and specify a username, the TTYtter client will ask for your password once executed.

Typing anything and hitting return will tweet that immediately, those who follow the OS X Daily Twitter stream probably saw my nonsense tweets last night as I played with the script. The actual command structure will be familiar to IRC users, commands are executed with / then the command, /help brings up help and commands, /quit exits the program, /refresh displays all new tweets, /replies shows replies to your tweets, etc.

TTYtter developer home
Download TTYtter now

[ AssimovT @ Google Buzz via Buzzzy ]

If you’re anything like me you’re curious about the beautiful background picture featured on the iPad displays in all the press photos of the original iPad, so I dug around a bit and got some answers about this now widely distributed amazing photograph that was shown as the wallpaper on the first iPad.

The now famous image is titled “Pyramid Lake (at Night)” and is a 2004 photo by photographer Richard Misrach, taken at Pyramid Lake in Nevada.

The Story Behind the Original iPad Default Wallpaper

ArtInfo.com has a pretty good story on the nice picture and Apple’s decision to use it, apparently at the last minute without the artist even knowing himself:

“I was in bed watching Inglorious Bastards when I got a call from Jeffrey FraenkeL, my dealer in San Francisco, and he said, ‘Do you know what’s going on live here?'”
…”The funny thing is that I don’t even have a contract with them yet, so they must have decided on it at the eleventh hour,” Misrach says. “I’m sure they’ll send me one quickly now. But I’m very happy, I’m sure it’s fine, and the terms are good.”

That sounds like Apple’s legendary secrecy at it’s finest, even down to it’s licensing of images. I’m sure Richard Misrach is going to have many more fans and licensing deals in the near future, as Apple has catapulted his work onto the world stage.

According to the photographer, this is the first time he has licensed an image for commercial use in his 40-year career–a deal he agreed to because he’s a fan of the company. ‘What’s funny is that for years I actually used the photo as my own screensaver,” Misrach says. “So I guess they know what they’re doing.”

Apple certainly does have an eye for pleasing imagery, but I haven’t been able to dig up a high resolution image of the picture to use as a desktop. I’m sure in time one will appear with at least the resolution of the iPad at 1024×768.

And apparently we aren’t the only people curious about this stunning image, NPR also wanted to know the story behind it too!

Oh, and if you’re looking for another amazing iPad background picture of a starry sky, look no further than our wallpaper posts.

Update: OS X Daily reader Deadmilkman posted this picture in the comments, it comes pretty close to being a high res version of the iPad background picture. If you look carefully it’s actually the smaller picture just repeated, reflected against each other, and smoothed together with Photoshop, but it looks pretty nice nonetheless.

[ via ArtInfo.com ]

Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X, and it can be desired for a variety of situations to store a home folder elsewhere on a Mac, or even on another drive. This is valid and works the same in all versions of OS X.

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