This is just a quick security tip based on some recent news, a couple Japanese computer scientists have figured out a way to crack WPA TKIP encryption in under a minute. This news came out a few weeks ago but after updating my wireless routers firmware I realized I hadn’t made the encryption type change yet myself, so I imagine many other people haven’t as well.

WPA is still more secure than WEP, but now that TKIP has been hacked, it’s best to change your Wireless Router’s encryption method to AES to continue to be secure.

Making the change is quick and easy, just login to your router’s administrative panel and you should find an option to switch the encryption from TKIP to AES.

Obviously this isn’t strictly Mac news, but since it’s a security issue that effects everyone equally, it’s worth posting here. You can learn more from the linked article.

The key takeaway is this: make sure you use the strongest wi-fi security protocol that your wireless router supports, and WEP is not secure. Use WPA2 or WPA anytime it is available, and with a strong password.

Yahoo News: New Attack Cracks Common WiFi Encryption in a Minute

Here’s something you don’t see everyday, Safari in an epic freakout and taxing 7,909.9% CPU usage. WTF?

Disabling Spotlight in Snow Leopard is pretty easy, launch the Terminal and type the following command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute.

Re-enabling Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is just as easy, just reverse the command to:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now Spotlight indexing will be back on and work as usual.

MouseOver popups, self-starting blasting audio, auto-refreshing webpages, random sound effects, obnoxious flash ads, resizing of your browser window… oh the web is filled with all sorts of things that are sure to annoy web browsers a world over. Lifehacker came up witha great list of fixes that you can implement in Firefox to reduce the most obnoxious encounters on the web (some work in Safari too). If your pop-up blocker isn’t doing enough for you, try these tricks out too:

Lifehacker: Use FireFox to Fix the Webs Biggest Annoyances

First a quick note, we absolutely adore Apple and all it’s software and hardware offerings, but… Hackintosh machines offer an impressive alternative to the official Apple hardware that we all know and love, and in some cases even fill a niche where Apple has yet to dabble (eg: Netbooks). If you’re in the market for a new Mac and you don’t mind sacrificing Apple hardware’s good looks, and you either want to save some serious cash or just want to geek around a bit, building a Hackintosh is a great solution. The Hackintosh movement is growing strong and steady, so grab a Netbook or build a Desktop PC, follow these hackintosh guides, and join us!

Hackintosh Netbook

Here’s a whole slew of guides for creating a Hackintosh Netbook, and some other very helpful links. I’d personally recommend the Dell Mini 10v for ease of use and functionality, but my own hackintosh is actually an Acer Aspire One (which works great with 10.5.6 but wasn’t easy to get there, required a wifi card upgrade, etc).

Hackintosh Mini 10v – this is our guide on how to get a Hackintosh Dell Mini 10v that runs Mac OS X for just over $200. In my opinion, the Dell Mini 10v is the best option for a really awesome Hackintosh Netbook, it’s got good looks, a 10″ screen, and you can get one extraordinarily cheap by following these steps. Only downside is the RAM upgrade hassle.

Dell Mini 9 / Vostro 90 – if you can get over the awful keyboard on the Dell Mini 9/Vostro 90, it makes a great little hackintosh netbook

MyDellMini Forums – Snow Leopard – the most helpful forum group for the Hackintosh Netbook community is catered to Dell Mini owners, check out the Snow Leopard guides and if you have any questions or problems the MyDellMini forums should be your first line of defense

Asus EEE 1000h – a Hackintosh walkthrough for the Asus EEE PC 1000h

HP Mini 1000 – guide for hackintoshing the HP Mini 1000, just about everything works

Lenovo S10 – onboard ethernet does not work but otherwise following this guide you’ll get a fully functional Hackintosh S10

BoingBoing Netbook Compatibility Chart – a pretty solid chart to see which Netbooks can be turned into a Hackintosh and what works and what doesn’t, last updated in July 2009

Virtually Scale Window Size – very helpful hint for Hackintosh Netbook users with limited screen resolutions and real estate to virtually scale down window sizes

Desktop Hackintosh

Here’s the best information I know of for building a desktop Hackintosh machine, it’s all based around the infamous Lifehacker guide that shows you how to build a really sweet desktop Hackintosh PC for around $900. The process has gotten even easier thanks to a PKG from Stella and it requires no hacking, just a simple pkg install.

Lifehacker: How to build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard from Start to Finish – a breakdown of all the hardware and procedures required to build a smoking desktop hackintosh machine, use their newer guide for installing Snow Leopard though

Lifehacker: Install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC with no hacking required – after reading the “how to build” guide from Lifehacker, read this for a much easier method of installing Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh

InsanelyMac Discussion on the Lifehacker Guide – a helpful forum with other Hackintosh users that have followed the Lifehacker guide, and any issues they’ve encountered along the way

Stellarola: Snow Leopard Hardware Compatibility List – repeated below for convenience, Stella is the genius behind the Lifehacker “no hacking” guide

Snow Leopard Hackintosh Compatible Hardware List for a Desktop

Webcams:
* Dynex DX-WEB1C 1.3MP (Fixed Focus Cam and mic built-in)
* Xbox 360 Live Camera (Manually adjustable Cam only)
* Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro for Mac (Autofocus cam and mic built-in)
* HP KQ246AA (Autofocus cam and mic built-in)

Wired Ethernet Cards
* Netgear GA-311 (PCI)
* Trendnet Gigabit TEG-PCITXR (PCI)
* Rosewill RC-400 (PCI)
* Encore ENLGA-1320 (PCI)
* SMC9452TX-1 (PCI)
* Sonnet Presto Gigabit GE1000-E (PCI-e)

Wireless “Airport” Cards
* Asus WL-138G V2 (PCI)
* Dynex DX-BGDTC (PCI)
* Dell Wireless 1505 (PCI-e)

USB Audio
* SYBA SD-CM-UAUD
* SYBA SD-CM-UAUD71
* M-Audio Jamlab
* Griffin iMic

(above desktop hardware compatibility list courtesy of Stellarola):

Got anymore Hackintosh information or links? Share them with us!

Looking for a free iPhone Twitter app that is awesome? Allow me to rave for a moment about Echofon (previously Twitterfon), it’s without a doubt the best free iPhone Twitter app I have found and it has become an integral part of my day. I know there are various paid solutions out there which are pretty cool too, but since Twitter is free, I’m looking for a free solution for the iPhone, and Echofon does exactly the job I need it to do and quite well. You can easily tweet out, follow your friends, and track @messages going back and forth, and so much more. If there is a better free iPhone Twitter app out there, I want to know about it!

Download now [iTunes link]
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I apologize to everyone that has seen this, but if you haven’t it’s pretty funny. It’s the entire Apple 9-9-09 keynote address condensed into just under two minutes of superlative adjectives. It’s incredible, awesome, easy, better and better, wonderful, remarkable, easy, amazing, awesome, amazing, amazing, easy, great, great, easy, great, amazing, awesome. It’s awesome. Check it out.

[ via TechCrunch ]

Though the Mac is fairly error free and tends to run much more stable than some of the competitors out there, many of us will find a bug or two in day to day usage anyway.

Sometimes the bugs are minor, sometimes they’re fairly major and can dramatically impact how Mac OS X or iOS works or behaves.

Bugs are just a reality of software development, but that doesn’t mean we as end users can’t do or say anything about it.

Read more »

An interesting opinion piece on kottke.org can be summarized as: the iPhone is taking over the world. Arguing that between the iPhone’s built-in functionality and the myriad of apps developed for it, the iPhone is going to win the fight for consumers limited pocket and purse space, and many devices (and thus, companies) are doomed as a result. The readers digest version for those of you who don’t want to read the entire article says the following devices are either now or going to be in direct competition with Apple:

* Mobile phones (duh)
* PDA’s
* iPod (duh)
* Power and shoot cameras
* Personal computer
* Nintendo DS
* PSP
* GPS (duh)
* Flip video camera
* Compass (disagree based on personal experience)
* Watch (yup)
* Portable DVD Player
* Kindle
* Pedometer
* Tape recorder
* Heart monitor
* Calculator
* Remote control
* USB key
* etc

Read more here: Kottke: Your Company? There’s an App for that

The iPhone Dev Team sure works quickly, and they have just released Jailbreak for iPhone 3.1 / iPod Touch firmware 3.1.

If jailbreaking your iPhone with 3.1 software appeals to you, then Pwnage Tool is what you’ll be looking for.

Before you attempt to jailbreak your 3.1 iPhone be sure to read the full post on the iPhone Dev Team blog so you can see potential pitfalls.

And as always, back up your iPhone or iPod touch before you do this.

Note that this version of the Pwnage tool does NOT work for the iPhone 3GS running 3.1, that’s apparently still under development.

Check out the jailbreak info here: iPhone-Dev.org: 3 o fun

The iPhone and iPad are amazingly stable, but every once in a while you may run into an app that misbehaves itself and seems to become stuck in some infinite loop of iPhone-frozen madness. Thankfully, if you find yourself in that situation you can force quit a frozen application on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.

The secret to force quitting on an app in iOS is by holding down the Home button for 10 seconds from the shut down screen. We’ll detail the steps below for completing this procedure.

Read more »

For anyone looking to have a great desktop Mac without paying a small fortune, creating a Hackintosh is becoming an ever-popular solution, and building a Hackintosh just got even easier. Assuming you have the supported hardware, this awesome tool from LifeHacker makes creating a Hackintosh Mac even easier by eliminating some of the more complex technical hacks in favor of running a simple installer! I absolutely adore Apple and their products, but I’m a big fan of the Hackintosh movement, in part because it’s fun and also because it’s a more affordable way to run the best operating system in the world.

If you’re in the market for a new desktop Mac, don’t ignore the Hackintosh option, especially with how easy this is getting to do… Check out the full article on Lifehacker.

LifeHacker: Install Snow Leopard on your Hackintosh PC – No hacking required

[Above image borrowed from Lifehacker]

The next super secret Mac OS X alpha is in the works! In an obvious jab at the feline obsession with Mac OS X build names, a satirical image of a 10.7 build installer has appeared on Flickr, titled…. Mac OS X 10.7 Ceiling Cat! I’ve never really understood Apple’s cat naming system, if anyone does please explain it to me, but Ceiling Cat does make you wonder what cat name we’ll see in the upcoming versions of Mac OS X.

Via Flickr

We know that Snow Leopard added some features to Mac OS X, but what about the things that Snow Leopard took away? Waffle has an updated list of things known to be removed from Snow Leopard, and there’s some interesting stuff on there. Here’s what I found to be most interesting (and surprising) that was removed in Snow Leopard:

* AppleTalk Printing
* Project templates in XCode
* Preinstalled developer examples
* Preinstalled API documentation
* ZFS Support

Now obviously some of these things were removed to save disk space, but I’m actually really surprised by the XCode and developer examples/templates being removed. Many beginning developers lean heavily on examples and now it looks like you have to fish around on Apple’s Developer Connection website to find this information.

Other noteworthy things missing include PowerPC support (this was expected) and the QuickTime Pro for $29, but check out the full list here:

Waffle Wootest: Things Removed in Snow Leopard

Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable the service temporarily.

Generally speaking you should leave Bonjour enabled since it’s functionality is ubiquitously used throughout Mac OS X, but if you DO want to disable mDNSResponder, here’s how to do it:

Read more »

Ever wondered what the ‘mdworker’ process was on a Mac? mdworker is short for ‘metadata server worker’ and if you’re still confused don’t feel bad. mdworker is basically the core technology behind Mac OS X’s awesome search engine Spotlight, it spiders meta data from your Mac and its files and creates a readable index so that you can find things practically instantaneously via Spotlight (command-spacebar).

We’ll cover some common questions and answers regarding mdworker on Mac, inspired by my recent switcher friend who arrived at the Mac OS platform from the other side, who tweeted me asking why mdworker is taking up so much CPU.

Read more »

Squid is a web caching proxy that is wildly useful for those of us on slower internet connections or anyone that has reduced bandwidth availability, it reduces bandwidth by caching and reusing frequently accessed web pages and works with http and https. Squid has been particularly useful to me on business visits to places where broadband is a distant concept rather than the norm, it really makes the web usable in challengingly slow internet environments. Squid Manager is a nifty manager to use the Squid web caching proxy on your Mac, so if you’re in the market to use Squid on your Mac, be sure to check out Squid Manager.

Download Squid Manager now
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Every once in a while you stumble upon a Mac utility, app, or feature that you immediately fall in love with and wonder how you ever live without… well today and for me, that is iStat Menu.

iStats Menu has been around a while, but apparently I’ve neglected it to my own detriment because this thing is awesome.

Installing is a breeze and it becomes a System Preference pane, where you can adjust settings to monitor everything from the temperatures in your Mac, to CPU activity, disk space, bandwidth usage, and oh so much more.

If you ask me, this is an absolute must download for Mac geeks, so check it out!

iStats is highly configurable, so if monitoring system resources appeals to you then check it out.

Update: iStats was free for a while and a trial can still be downloaded for free, along with a full featured paid version. However, you can still download the free version of iStats Menu and get those features on older versions of Mac OS X.