Apple news blog

MSI today took the wraps from its first North American portables to use Intel’s Centrino 2 platform. Both the 15.4-inch GX620 and 17-inch GX720 both pick up a new Intel chipset that includes faster Core 2 Duo processors and the …

ASUS’ Eee PC 701SD will not only upgrade the internal specs of the 7-inch notebook but improve on the mini notebook design itself, say a new set of photos and leaked details. The entry-level Eee PC notebook will now resemble a …

Integer overflows and buffer overflows in graphics API and fonts API. Applications: MacOS X 10.4 (04.08.2008)

Apple.pro has posted new photos (via Engadget) of what are claimed to be the new MacBook casings. Apple.pro was the Chinese blog that previously posted photographs of prototype MacBook Pro casings that were later believed to be real. <br /…

Computerworld reports on comments made by Psystar’s attorneys who suggest that anti-trust issues may arise in their defense of the Mac-clone company. Apple sued Psystar in July after Psystar had begun selling a Mac-compatible computer almost two mon…

TechCrunch claims that Apple has ramped up iPhone 3G production to a massive 800,000 units per week. They cite a source “with direct knowledge of the numbers”.

If true, this would bring Apple’s iPhone 3G production and sales well abo…

This hint explains one way create a bookmark in your Dock that will bring up the All Bookmarks page in Safari. In Safari, entering the URL bookmarks:// does the same thing as pressing the Bookmarks button in the Bookmarks Bar, or selecting Bookmarks » Show All Bookmarks. Confused yet? Good! The only trouble is that LaunchServices (the program that Mac OS X uses to open URLs) doesn’t know how to open the bookmarks:// protocol. So here’s how to create the Dock entry and make it fully functional:

1. Create a new Safari bookmark for the URL bookmarks://
2. Drag this bookmark to your Dock, which will create a springy ampersand.
3. Download and install the freeware MisFox. In the program, click the Protocol Helpers tab and press the New button. Enter the Protocol bookmarks, and for the Helper, choose /Applications/Safari.app.

   Now the Bookmarks bookmark in your Dock will open y…
   
   

You can use your iPhone to check if a household remote control is working. Start the Camera application, then point the remote in question toward the camera. Be sure the end of the remote with the dark plastic filter is facing the back of the iPhone. If the remote’s batteries work, and the remote are functional, you will see a light glow in the picture of the remote in the iPhone’s viewfinder window.

This can help narrow down a balky remote as to being broken or just having bad batteries.

This trick isn’t unique to iPhones, but takes advantage of the camera’s sensitivity to infrared light, and the fact that you never go anywhere without your iPhone!

I had OpenStep running in a virtual machine for quite a long time before I got the idea to extract and convert the Ni.snd to something that OS X can play back.

For those who don’t know: OpenStep had many of the same system sounds found in today’s OS X. However, OS X lacks the most important one from OpenStep — it’s the “Ni” sound from Monty Python’s Knights who say Ni. This hint presupposes that you have access to an OpenStep installation, as I don’t know if the sound was included with NextStep.

1. In OpenStep, find the sound file, which is located at /NextLibrary/Sounds/Ni.snd
2. Somehow, move the file over to your Mac. Since I use a virtual machine, I first tried to use NFS for that, but failed miserably. So I installed OmniWeb 3 and mailed the sound file to myself. Astonishing that the webmail site (GMX) even worked in the old browser, but it did …
   
   

Time Machine automatically excludes hot folders like /var/tmp and /var/vm and Library/caches from its backups. But it does not exclude, by default, the Downloads folder.

If you are like me, things in your Downloads folder are mainly transient items that have not yet earned the status of permanent guests on your hard drive. So add this to your list of excluded items by using the Options button in the Time Machine System Preferences panel.

I invite readers to add comments suggesting other overlooked folders with lots of churn that should not be backed up by default.