The word on the street is if you have a jailbroken iPhone 4 now you too can access the full functionality of SIRI using a Cydia program called H1Siri. But, Before you run and download your copy know that they will send ALL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO CHINA!

According to Gizmodo – Grant Paul has detected that the hack sends your personal information through a server in China. And with personal information I mean email, SMS, calendar, contacts and location. Good luck with that.

Beware of the hacked Siri! If you really want it be patient or go get a damn 4s!

_ThejailBrokenAdmiN_

This works great for remoting into any of your internet accessible machines over your G3 connection or WiFi. I will throw together a tutorial in the near future but I had to share this with you in the mean time.

Have you had any luck getting

When we bought the first generation iPad for our three year old we thought it was awesome. It is a great learning tool and can keep her busy for extended periods of time in the car. It has replaced our portable DVD player and has given my wife and I some entertainment from slinging Angry Birds. The one thing I thought it was lacking was a front facing camera (or any camera for that matter!) This is 2011 - after all a free cell phone comes with a camera, right?

Why oh why would Steve Jobs hold off on the camera? Especially since he was seen with a iPad with a camera before the first genearation even launched. There has been code discovered in the first generation device pointing to a non-existant camera. The only reason could be to sell more of their next generation iPad 2.

I just finished reading a post titled Hands On With the New Apple iPad 2 By Clayton Morris via Fox News here. You can read the excerpt below and click through to watch the video.  More of my comments follow this excerpt.

“Wicked fast” processor? Check. Lighter and thinner? Check. Over 10 hours of battery life? Check. Front and rear facing camera? Check. With Steve Jobs on medical leave, Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller was widely rumored to be taking to the stage. That didn’t happen. Steve showed up and said “I didn’t want to miss this.” I was at the launch event, where Steve Jobs unveiled the new Apple iPad 2, and got to spend a few minutes hands-on with the iPad. The brand new case, called the Smart Cover, automatically wakes the iPad when you open it up. There are sensors built into the side of the iPad, and magnets on the cover and along the edge of the device combine to create this function. The magnets also mean the case is conveniently removable. Don’t want it on while you’re using the iPad? Just tear it off. In terms of the new features the iPad 2′s iOS 4.3 brings, one of the biggest is GarageBand. With it you can play drums or compose on a full-screen keyboard. I can already imagine my seven-month old sitting here, pounding on the virtual keys. I can record right from the app as well. With iMovie, the other big new addition, you can edit and watch movies right on the iPad. iPad 2 now includes two cameras, a front-facing VGA camera for FaceTime and Photo Booth, and a rear-facing camera that captures 720p HD video, bringing the FaceTime video chat feature to iPad users for the first time. More than a year after igniting the tablet computing craze, Apple’s Steve Jobs surprised the world by taking to the stage in California to unveil this: the second version of its blockbuster iPad

And here is more information on the specs and release information from suite101.com

So what is a guy to do with one of these first generation devices? We would love to use the iPad for iPad to iPhone FaceTime between my daughter and I. Now we will have to take a hit and loose money to upgrade. It really never pays anymore to jump on a products bandwagon until the second generation or after a service pack has been released. What are your thoughts? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.

This should have been easy. Macs are supposed to be easier to use than Windows machines right? Well no dice. You could not do it with out modifying they system. I tried over and over using VNC, Logmein, PcAnywhere and more…  Everyone of them would open my screen right on up, so anyone walking by could not only watch me work but also move the mouse or type on the keyboard! It was the end of the road when someone type hello into a spread sheet of a Production manager… Sonofabitch!

I found a hack courtesy of ArtOfGeek and added my Vine VNC server and a new port for the win!  My favorite quote from the article has to be:

I know, enough with the chatter, get on with the tutorial! Just follow these steps and you’ll be locking your Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard like it’s running Windows XP! Wait, did I just write that? Shudder. Sorry, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Here is the nitty gritty for ya:

1. Open Automator (in your Applications folder) and choose Service from the list of templates provided and click the Choose button.
2. In the left hand column under Library, select Utilities.
3. In the second column, drag “Run Shell Script” to the right hand pane.
4. At the top of the right hand pane where you dragged the Run Shell Script action, click on the menu next to “Service receives” and choose “no input”.
5. Copy and paste the following Terminal command into the empty text area of the Run Shell Script action:
   

   /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

   The entire command should be entered on a single line and note there is a space after “/Menu\”.

   

   Completed Automator action, ready to save (click to enlarge)

6. Choose File–>Save, and give the new service a meaningful name like “Lock Computer” that will appear in the Services menu. Once you’ve done that, you can go to the Services menu (located in the current application menu, next to the Apple menu) and your newly created service should appear there.
7. Next open System Preferences –> Keyboard –> Keyboard Shortcuts and select Services in the left column.

   

   Setting the keyboard shortcut (click to enlarge)

8. Scroll down to the bottom and under the General category, you should see your newly created service listed there. Select it, then Double-click close to the right side of the selected line to reveal a field where you can enter a custom keyboard shortcut. Enter an easy to remember but unique keyboard shortcut (I decided to go with ctrl+option+command+L), and then quit System Preferences.

That’s it! Go ahead and test your keyboard shortcut!  That locked your screen right? Now you can install Vine VNC Server on your machine change the port that it is listening on to 1111 or something other than 5900. Connect to your Vine server using UltraVNC using the IP address and the port like this 192.168.1.1:1111. That will keep your Mac locked and allow you to log into your machine keeping the screen locked. If you try to lock the screen and log in on port 5900 (built in screen sharing) you will arrive at the login screen and defeat the purpose of this hack!

You can read the full post at ArtOfGeek here

_TheMacinAdmiN_

Microsoft Outlook – created by Microsoft. Platform: Windows.

Microsoft Entourage – created by Microsoft. Platform: OS X.

Requirement:

Move emails from Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Entourage.

Common sense suggests:

In Windows, launch Microsoft Outlook, export everything to a .pst file. Copy this file to a USB drive or burn it to a disc. Copy it to Mac OS X, launch Entourage in Mac OS X and import the .pst file.

Well, that’s what I thought.

The real solution:

It turns out Microsoft does NOT support email interchange between Outlook and Entourage. I was horrified shocked Not Surprised to learn about this lack of interoperability.

Entourage can only import from it’s own archive format .rge or mbox files (text format files). Unfortunately, Outlook can NOT export to either of the two.

After doing some research and reading about convoluted methods of exporting one folder at a time from Outlook, converting those to mbox format and importing it in Entourage, I stumbled upon this excellent utility.

It’s a Windows application and costs $10. You can download it and pay for it online.

Simply install it on your Windows OS and launch it. It will automatically read your Outlook files and convert them to Mbox format, and PRESERVE the attachments!!

Once the export is over, copy the newly created mbox files and port them to Mac OS X. Launch Entourage and import the files. You will lose Outlook Rules though. Also, the folders will be renamed per ASCII standards i.e. no blank spaces. Blank Spaces will be replaced with underscores.

It’s possible that Entourage may suddenly not recognize mbox files either but don’t worry – there’s a work around. Import the mbox files in iMail. Then, import iMail emails into Entourage.

Another Microsoft horror story? What’s your take.

-Abhi Garg

I wasn’t sure who I should contact about this, so i am sending this to you. As of late, word attachments coming from my friend on a Windows XP Machine appear as “winmail.dat” files.

When I try to open these, the text runs about 150pp long, (it’s a 4page doc) and the text looks like this:

?<‡META †[1]0 ?Xt=”‡$.

It shows garbage like that over and over again. Admin Can you help me open them? If I forward the message on to a windows user it is fine! What gives?

Jodi have been dealing with this one for a while and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when they appear and when they don’t appear. We investigated the possibility of drag and drop causing it – but that wasn’t it consistently. But we found a utility called TNEF’s Enough for our Mac friends here:

http://www.joshjacob.com/macdev/tnef/

You can simply drag winmail.dat into this application and BAM! There is your data ma’am, can we do anything else for you today?

UPDATE: Fix this on your exchange 2007 server by doing this:

On the exchange server, go to global settings, Internet Message Formats, Default Properties, Advanced tab, for “Exchange Rich-Text Format” select “Never Use”.

This will prevent your Exchangeserver from using Rich-Text Format and creating winmail.dat files.

From TNEF’s website:

TNEF’s Enough allows Macs to read and extract files from Microsoft TNEF stream files. The files are usually received by SMTP based e-mail programs from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook users. The SMTP based e-mail program will usually receive either a MIME attachment named “winmail.dat” or a MIME attachment with the type “application/ms-tnef.”

The file is a rich text (or MAPI) message that is sent from Outlook to Exchange. When Exchange sends the message to an outside server it writes the MAPI message as a MIME attachment. The unfortunate side effect of this plan is if the Outlook user has someone in their address book as a person who can receive “Rich Text” then the user will receive the TNEF file whether the user uses Outlook or not.

TNEF’s Enough is a freeware application

_TheMac’nAdmiN_

Comodore64 back again to shed some light for any newly ordained Mac users that are carrying over from the M$ world. Since Mac is gaining a kind of strangle hold on the industry, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of guys like myself who have a PC for certain purposes and a Mac for others. In my case, it’s a Powerbook. But not just any Powerbook, this is one of the last Powerbooks made with a PowerPC processor, right before Jobs and Co. made the switch to Intel processors. In retrospect, it was one of my better purchases in life. Worth every penny, and keeps on tickin. Unfortunately, a lot of you didn’t stay on the PowerPC bandwagon, and jumped over (maybe not even by choice) to the new Intel Macs. From what I’ve seen and heard , they are quite the problematic little buggers. But my PowerPC Powerbook has been rock solid since day 1 (gleam.)

Shortly after buying this Powerbook over 2 years ago, I was rummaging around the hard drive for whatever pre-installed goodness I can come across a folder that looks like the image above. This collection of proggies is sure to make any former M$ user feel right at home.

Here is a rundown I’ve found courtesy of http://www.freemacblog.com/exploring-the-utilities-folder-on-your-mac/

Activity Monitor – Activity Monitor let’s you know what is going on with your computer. It can let you know where your memory and CPU is being used most.
Airport Admin Utility – The application will let you configure your Apple Airport products.
Airport Setup Assistant – This app is used when you first set up your Airport product. It’s an easy wizard for setup.
Audio MIDI Setup - You can use Audio MIDI Setup to configure the audio input and output devices you use with your computer, such as microphones and audio playback equipment. If you need this app, you probably already know how to use it.
Bluetooth File Exchange – If you have a cell phone or PDA with bluetooth, this application makes it very easy to send files back and forth. This is a great way to take your photos off of your phone, or to add ringtones to your phone.
Colorsync Utility – This app gives you access to to Apple’s Colorsync specs. In this app you can set different profiles. There is also a nifty calculator that can convert between RGB and CMYK. This is another of those apps that isn’t useful to most people.
Console – Console gives you a “behind the scenes” look at your Mac. While you see all the pretty pictures and graphics of Mac OS X, there is a ton happening in the background. Console lets you watch that. It’s especially helpful to see error or status messages.
Digitalcolor Meter – If you are preparing your work for professional printing and you have an Apple monitor, you can use DigitalColor Meter to match the color on your screen against several industry standards.
Directory Access – Directory Access lists the different kinds of services that Mac OS X can access. The list includes directory services, which give Mac OS X access to user information and other administrative data stored in directory domains. The list also includes kinds of network services that Mac OS X can discover on the network.
You can enable or disable access to each kind of service. If you disable a kind of service in Directory Access, Mac OS X no longer accesses services of the disabled kind. The different services can be found here.
Disk Utility – There is all kinds of power in the Disk Utility. Here you can reformat a disk, check and fix permissions, and so many other things.
Grab – Grab will let you “grab” screenshots of your Mac. Of course, you can already do this with key combinations, but Grab does have one nice feature. You can do a timed grab. Start the timer and ten second later the Mac will grab a screenshot.
Grapher – Grapher lets you create 2D and 3D graphs from equations.
OS 9 came with a graphing calculator. OS X versions before Tiger had no graphing options. But, with Mac OS X Tiger, we now have Grapher.
Installer – You’ve probably used Installer a hundred times and didn’t know it. Whenever you download a new application that comes in a package or a metapackage, Installer makes it possible to install that application.
Keychain Access – Keychain Access gives you access to the keychain. Duh.
Anytime you save a password to a site or a server or anything on the Mac, it is stored in the keychain. If you forget one of those passwords and it isn’t filling in automatically, you can access keychain with this application and find your password.
Migration Assistant – This is simply one of the most amazing applications. If you’ve ever purchased a new Mac and migrated from your old one, this is the app you used. You can also use it to get a use from a different machine.
Netinfo Manager – Netinfo is the built-in Mac OS X directory system. It stores information about users and resources and makes it available to Mac OS X processes that want to use it. This application helps you manage it.
Network Utility – Since I run a fairly large network of Macs this app is great. It makes it easy to ping machines, lookup name server and DNS, do traceroutes, port scans, etc. It also is a quick way to find info on your Network interfaces. (e.g., ethernet, airport, etc)
ODBC Administrtator – This will give you access to database management systems using Open Database Connectivity standards.
Printer Setup Utility – When you get that new printer and hook it to your Mac, this app comes to the rescue. It will lead you along to get the printer working.
System Profiler – If you need information about your Mac, here is the place to come. It will tell you about your RAM and your drives and your processors and anything thing else you’d need.
Terminal – This is the gateway to the true power of Mac OS X. It is a terminal emulator that will let you use the Unix base of Mac OS X.
VoiceOver Utility - Voiceover is a Mac OS X feature that lets you interact with your Mac via voice. It will read the text of websites, email, and documents. It also allows you to control your Mac using audible commands. Voiceover Utility lets you determine how Voiceover will behave.

Well, kiddies I hope this helps you settle into your new Mac a little easier. Some of these Utilities are clutch and definitely make me feel more in control of my MAC.

Til next time,
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

Well, it turns out that OS X has this little known feature built-in. You just have to select the file and hit “Command-I”. It will display the info as usual. You can then click on the arrow at the left of “More Info”. The “Where from” option will appear with the URL of where you got the file. The only thing I noticed is that it seems to work only when you download the file with Safari. It doesn’t look like Camino or Firefox records that info.

Remember if you already de-compress your archives this wont work – it needs to be the file downloaded.

_TheWhatchaKnowAdmiN_

Apparently you can – and get your IP and some other semi-important information as well. We can have this tidbit show up on your login screen each and every time you login with a lil’ old hack from MacOsXtips.co.uk

When you start up your mac and the login window pops up, you have a big shiny apple logo and the words Mac OS X. Below these words you usually see the name of your mac, whatever that may be. For most people that isn’t very useful, as you have to have a lot of the same models knocking around to get confused between computers, and luckily since Mac OS X 10.4.3, this line has been made much more informative.

Since this version, you can click on the name of your mac to show different statistics about your machine. Each time you click, it will cycle through different bits of information that are particularly useful when troubleshooting problems.
The order of the statistics are as follows:

• One click: Your OS X version number (e.g. Version 10.4.7)
• Two clicks: Your OS X build number (e.g. Build 7M271)
• Three clicks: Your mac’s serial number (e.g. WN1554LGPWW)
• Four clicks: Your mac’s IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.2)
• Five clicks: The status of any networked account
• Six clicks: The date and time (e.g. Saturday, July 25 2007 4:20:00 AM GMT)
• Seven clicks: Back to where you started, the name of your computer.

So you click a few times and set the information line to your favourite thing, but next time you log in, it has changed back to the name of your mac. To change the bit of information that appears first, you need to do a bit of tinkering in the Terminal (Applications/Utilities). Open Terminal and type the following command:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo info_name

Depending on which piece of information you want displayed, replace info_name with one of the following:

• SystemVersion
• SystemBuild
• SerialNumber
• IPAddress
• DSStatus
• Time

After doing this, hit return, and the next time you view your login window the information you chose will be displayed.

To change the info bar back to default, replace info_name with HostName [MacOSXtips]

Send us your Mac tips and while you are at it your Windows and Linux Tips as well. Email us your tips to asktheadmin dot com!

We will send you some swag if we publish your tip! Does that motivate you? Happy Saturday and we broke 1,000 RSS subscribers yesterday! Thanks guys!!

_TheJustMac’nAdmin_

It is possible to narrow your results down by specifying the type of file you are looking for by adding “kind:type of file”.

All of the tips I will offer up are going to be answers to questions I have either had myself or that I have identified as widespread issues. My first tip is a simple one, but also a necessary one.

The Question: What the hell happened to all the space on my hard drive.

While searching for an answer to this question I found a number of methods ranging from manually cataloging the contents of all my folders (who is really that anal retentive?) to terminal queries (who really uses the terminal?). Anyway my search for the best tool led me to Disk Inventory X (external link to product download site). This program is an excellent way to concisely see what exactly is on your disks. The program has been around for a bit, and it gaining a good bit of notoriety, partially because its so pretty, but also because it is damn useful.

Did I mention it’s totally free?

Disk Inventory X is an easy to use visualization tool that combs your hard disk identifying, grouping, and color coding each file. What you get is a full color representation, using treemaps, of your drive which allows you to see what files and file types are eating up your disk space. In my case, I identified 25 gigs (thats not a typo) of Samurai Jack cartoons that had been bit-torrented 2 years ago, and were sitting in a third level sub-folder where they had never been opened.

Disk Inventory X is a simple download, and once unpacked it only takes a few minutes to categorize your disk. After that, use the results to identify, delete, or relocate the file types that are eating up your space. Unfortunately Disk Inventory X cannot make the tough decisions for you, and cannot categorize files by taste, so it is up to you to delete all those N’Sync and Kenny G tracks you grabbed for that girl you were dating in 1995.

Check the program out, you won’t be disappointed.

Questions or comments on this tip? Post them in the comments section. What do you guys want to see more of?

Have you entered our “It’s A Fricking Laser Giveaway” Yet? What are you waiting for? This is as close to a real light sabre as you are going to get!

For those of you pumping out the discs and can’t keep up with what is where, Toast includes disc cataloguing software. Oh yeah, thats the geeky goodness we love!.

Toast Titanium 8 seems to have this burning thing down pat! I have a strange craving for jelly…

_TheToastyAdmin_

Alrighty Mac Fans and PC Fans we can all come together and help Mark from Florida.

We are looking into something called MACFUSE but if you got some ideas or comments hit us up!

_______________________________________________

Alright screw you all here is the answer.

First get an ide to usb controller or some sort of way to make your drive “External” now follow this from HacksZine.com:

If you want to share an external drive between a Mac and a Windows machine, you typically format the drive with a FAT32 partition. One problem you’ll run into, however, is that you can run into a file size limit if you’re dealing with really large files. NTFS gets around this limitation, but unfortunately the OS X NTFS driver only supports reading from NTFS partitions.

Thankfully, there’s a NTFS Fuse driver which you can use with the MacFUSE userspace filesystem driver. It supports full read/write capability, so you can use an external disk to swap large files between your Windows and Mac machines.

It’s a bit of a pain to install, but here’s the quick rundown:

Download and install MacFUSE – Link
Just get the DMG file and run the contained installer.

Download and install Fink. You need this for obtaining and building the NTFS Fuse driver

run the installer within the DMG file

drag the FinkCommander application to your Applications folder
Get NTFS Fuse driver. You need to configure Fink to use unstable packages and then install the ntfs-3g Fuse driver. Open a terminal and run the following commands.

• /sw/bin/fink configure
• Use defaults, except answer YES to use the unstable tree
• /sw/bin/fink selfupdate
• /sw/bin/fink index
• /sw/bin/fink scanpackages
• /sw/bin/fink install ntfs-3g
• Reboot
• Mount your drive
• First, make sure it’s unmounted in disk utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility – select drive – click unmount)
• Make a mount point: mkdir /Volumes/ntfsdrive
• Mount the drive: /sw/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/disk2s1 /Volumes/ntfsdrive
• Replace /dev/disk2s1 with your external drive’s device. You can find this in Disk Utility.

The last step is all that you’ll need to repeat in the future to connect to your NTFS drive. After executing the mount command, the drive will appear on your desktop and you should be able to write files to it! [HacksZine.com]

Let us Know How It Works Out In The Comments!

_TheMacinAdmiN_

I am not a Mac user, but I know a lot of you are out there are. Either way, these commercials are really funny, and I am always down with spreading some holiday cheer. (Did you read my Sys Admin Night Before Christmas poem yet? or The Admin’s Holiday Geek Gift Guide?)

Well, without any further interruption, here is the commercial straight from Apple:

You know I realize that I am falling into the evil Apple trap by propagating their commercial more across the internet, but I really don’t care. I love these commercials, and think they are hilarious! Which Mac versus PC commercial is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

Edit: Did anyone hear about the Mac/Pc commercial that had Windows running on a MBP? I heard it was hysterical.

-El Di Pablo
of Bauer-Power

We’ve had the honor of meeting up with the guys over at Gelaskins. Their products were one of the more popular products at the CES pre-show and Digital-Life Show, mainly because of the sexy designs they use for their Gelaskins. Really wicked stuff. But there’s more to Gelaskins than meets the eye. Beyond the sick designs they’ve used for their products, they’ve also seemingly took great pains to make sure the products are easy to apply, and guess what… IT WORKS.

I wish screen protectors were this easy, because I’ve never had a device with a screen, that didn’t also have an air bubble or two. But this was a pleasure to stick on. It seems the Gelaskin is somehow porous, and air bubbles can be dissipated just by pressing on them. It literally took me 10 seconds to stick this thing. When I noticed it wasn’t perfectly centered, I peeled it off and gave it another go. Once again the product stuck on with no issues, snags, snafus, or the such.

The guys at Gelaskins were nice enough to provide us with a bunch of different sizes and designs, so pretty soon we will be running a Gelaskins Giveaway contest. Sponsored by Gelaskins and Ask The Admin, of course. So stay tuned kiddies, these things are gonna be the hottest new accessory for pretty much every piece of high-end electronics you own, phones, laptops, and everything in between.

I like Gelaskins.

C64
Happy Holidays

I’m here to talk briefly about the current state of Smartphones as well as what we might come to expect from Android and the capability of open source phones.

As of right now, there are only three major options being used in the US for smartphones and PDA phones. You have RIM’s Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Apple’s iPhone/OSX. Sure, you also have niche devices like Helio’s Ocean and the T-Mobile Sidekick, but predominantly, these three are what makes up the high end phone market today. Overseas however is a different story. Nokia and Symbian have pretty much dominated the industry and is slowly seeing market share build over here. While each of these platforms is unique, they share very similar features from one to the next. Higher end camera’s, internal memory, and the ability to install software are just three things that separate them from your mom’s flip phone. It sounds great to be able to install software on the phone, but it’s not as easy as it would initially seem. This is where the drawbacks start.

For years, Blackberry devices were almost locked airtight when it came to 3rd party applications. It is only recently that you can point your browser to a site and get games, tools, and enhancements for your device. Microsoft has been steadily improving their Windows OS and offering two lines options depending on your style of handset; Smartphone and Pocket PC software. Apple came along and shook the industry up a little bit this summer by introducing us to phones using the same user-friendly, sexy OSX that graces many of their computers.

With an entirely touch based phone, it opened up a lot of doors and enticed your tech enthusiasts and prosumers. This was the way of the future, right?

The iPhone was not without its detractors though. There were two major gripes coming from the community. First was that there was no way to add applications to the phone. A user was confined to the pre-installed package of programs, no matter how nice or easy to use. Secondly, people were turned off by the fact that they had to sign up to AT&T for service. With a phone already selling at $400-$600, people were not ready to plunk down another $150-$200 to get out of a contract with their current provider. So what happened next? To address these problems, people began dissecting the phone literally from day one. They were looking for ways to ‘open’ the phone up and unlock it. ‘If it takes a SIM card, it has to work on T-Mobile or another carrier’ was the general consensus. It didn’t take long for people to figure out how to jailbreak their handsets. Now, it’s a game of cat and mouse with Apple releasing their updates and hackers releasing patches. In the meanwhile, Apple comes out and says that they will be releasing a developers kit next year so that users can enjoy new ways of taking advantage of all that the iPhone offers.

For the last two years, people have speculated as to what Google’s role might be in the cell phone industry. Months ago, when the news started to really pour in that a ‘gPhone’ was in the works, the blogs and tech sites began to wonder as to what this phone would look like and how it would work. Mock-ups and ‘leaks’ were hitting the internet on a regular basis. As time went, the industry conversations gravitated towards not just one handset called a gPhone, but rather a few models using a Google based operating system. Was Google creating a brand new operating system for phones? Well, yes and no.

Google was in fact working with a couple dozen other companies on an operating system. An open source one to be certain. This list of companies behind this project reads like a “Who’s Who” in the technology industry. In the handset corner, you have Samsung, HTC, LG and Motorola. In the carrier corner, you’ll notice Sprint and T-Mobile. Looking further down the list, you’ll see other major names like eBay, Intel, nVidia, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments. This group of companies is known as the Open Handset Alliance.

So what happens when all these guys come to the same party? Magic. What else would you expect from today’s movers and shakers? I can almost guarantee that these companies have their hands in at least one thing you touch or use every day. We have total confidence that Android will not just become a major player in the phone industry. We believe that just by merely existing, they will revolutionize the market and force some of today’s names to either adapt their own model or risk extinction. Google and their friends have been doing their homework and listening to people for a lot longer than you think.

If you look through AskTheAdmin’s posts on open source, it’s almost universally in favor of it. Take a look at some of the software you’re probably using right now. Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Flock, home-brewed DVR’s, XBOX Media Center, etc. Let’s also consider what happens when you work on projects socially like Wikipedia. The power and potential is limitless. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even imagine the kind of phone I will be holding a year from now.

Please stop by AndroidGuys.com if you’d like to stay up on developments. Also, please be sure to leave us feedback.

Thanks again to everyone at AskTheAdmin for their support!

Scott Webster | androidguys@gmail.com

(Edit From TheAdmiN: Do you guys like what you see? Do you want us to make this a weekly spot for The AndroidGuys?)

It goes like this – If you are a Mac user and a online content porn coinsurer then you might already be infected. This Trojan masquerades as a codec to aid in your free porn viewing pleasures. Spam has been flooding the Mac forums, that I have just started to check out. I thought nothing of it until I read about this Trojan horse. Then I did a little investigating and it turns out the virus writer has put a social spin on it – offer free porn then prompt the user to allow a download and install it as root.

Now your DNS has been altered to intercept and hijack web requests to PayPal, eBay and several unspecified banking sites.

So let me get this straight you get no porn and these guys are trying to steal your dough! Not cool man. Very not cool.

The dirty program is called OSX.RSPlug. You can read the full story on this threat over at Intego [Via Mashable]

_ThePhotoShopingAdmiN_

Over the past couple of days, I’ve talked to a lot of people who aren’t pleased with Leopard’s new dock–interestingly, some them were actually annoyed enough to go through the pains of tweaking the Dock in order to make it better fit their idea of how the Dock should be. After seeing some of their ideas, I decided to try my hand at “modding” Leopard’s dock. Here’s what I came up with:

High Contrast (New)

Low Contrast (Old)

High Contrast
If you have a chance, let me know what you think! If you want this dock for your own, you can send me a donation at–just kidding. The zipped file, available below, contains the new dock images, instructions, and Apple’s original image files in case you want to restore the dock to its original hue.

Enjoy!

Note: I had trouble finding a place to put this file (I kind of doubt that Tuncer would approve of putting this archive–as small as it is–up on MGF), but thankfully, I finally figured out how to use my old Earthlink account’s convoluted WebLife online storage. w00t!

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware.

The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows. Full Review.

Why does this give me the creeps? I know I know it is Halloween and all but this sent a chill up my spine. Apple makes better Windows hardware than any PC manufacturer – how can that be? Say it ain’t so guys… With the way things are going my next laptop might just well be a MBP! Wow I never thought I would say that let alone post it.

The dark side is calling… Actually I can never remember is Apple the dark side or is it Windows? Meh! They are all evil.

Happy Halloween From Everyone @ AskTheAdmin!

_TheUndeadAdmiN_

Who wants to send their task bar layered with AOL IM windows and Random Fire Fox Browser Pages on to let the board of directors know how you spend your time?? No I didn’t think so.

If you can relate then this tips for you, faithful Windows User:

Alt + Print Screen

Hit that and BOOM you have a screen shot in your clipboard of only your active window. Leaving behind your slacker goodness and only passing along the relevant stuff. This will work with all Windows OS’s 2000 or better.

Hit or Miss? Do you guys want more tips like this or other stuff?

Edit: Here is the same tip but better for OSx From Reader Sandy:

Sandy said…

And also, if you’re running OSX: Command-Shift-4 does the same thing, and also saves the image to your desktopfor easy attachment to e-mails. For windows with rounded borders, the little bits of desktop that would be visible at the corners is automatically removed.

It looks like we will be doing a lot more Mac tips thanks to our free iMac. This quick mac tip can save you alot of time by giving you quick access to an ultra magnifier built right into OSX. It’s done, without any prior setting changes, by holding down the Ctrl key while ‘zooming in’ (from bottom to top) with 2 fingers on the touch pad. Now maybe this is a trick that some people knew about, but I was shocked when a friend of mine showed it to me this weekend, oddly enough way far from civilization in the Catskill mountains. We both happened to bring our (previously unbeknown to us) matching Power books. I thought I had all the shortcuts down, but I concede my friend Junior had a great one that I had no clue about.

Did anyone else know about this?

Commodore 64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

Edit: The feature was introduced in the first Aluminum powerbooks to run 1.5GHz. Earlier aluminums, the Titanium, and almost all iBooks are missing this capability. Some (not all) of the earlier machines can accommodate the third-party iScroll hack to obtain this feature, but it doesn’t interact as predictably with the control button as the Apple feature.Also, someone else reminded me to add that you also have to turn the two-finger scrolling ON in System Preferences, or else this tip won’t work either._TheAdmiN_

Someone sent us a HUGE 24″ Intel iMac. That’s right we said someone because we have no idea who. That didn’t stop us from firing the bad boy up and seeing what she got.

2.13 ghz Intel processor, 2 Gigs of memory, 250gb hard drive and a beautiful 24 inch screen. I just downloaded and installed firefox. Now I’m staring at this Monster like… Now What??

I downloaded the Remote Desktop Client Beta from Microsoft’s website so now I can remote into several severs and desktops using the new screen real estate available. Alright so I have an over glorified KVM on my hands!

It looks like we may just be covering the Leopard launch after all! We will try and get a copy over the weekend. If our wonderful anonymous Mac giver has a copy – you know where we are at. Obviously.

Should we be scared? What me worry??

Check out these pictures of the new iMac intimidating our Windows Machines.

We don’t care what your intentions or hidden agendas are random gift giver! Free stuff supersedes any evil agendas. Just don’t be asking us to be your cash agent in the Untied States. We don’t want to hear about your hundreds of millions of dollars you need to get out of your country – we’re onto that one :)

_TheSurprisedMacAdmiN_

So, many users who have switched from PC’s to Macs think that disk fragmentation is a concern in OS X, a problem that needs fixing. Truth is, except in very limited circumstances, its not a problem. In fact defragmenting an OS X disk can cause more harm than good. Fragmentation often creates a problem when small additions are saved onto files and overtime these little files end up spread all over the disk, slowing the machine down. However, innovations in software and hard drive technology (capacity, cache size, read speeds) allow many modern applications to rewrite the revised file in its entirety rather than saving all of the little attachments off in the recesses of the disk. Further, in recent OS X versions (10.2 and especially 10.3) Apple used delayed allocations of volumes (waiting for a batch of additions rather than writing each one as they come up) and automatic behind the scenes defragmenting of slow growing files for applications that do not rewrite the file each time it is re-saved. These changes negate the principal effects of defragmentation, and make the benefits of any defrag tiny.

Thats all great, but how can defragmenting actually hurt? Well straight from Apple’s mouth: “there is also a chance that one of the files placed in the “hot band” for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.” Basically, one of those many thousands of tiny files that are almost never used, may be moved to a place on the disk where the OS takes a bit longer to find, and while it looks, you wait.

However, I said there are very limited circumstances where you may see a performance gain from defragmenting and there are. Those situations have two common characteristics: 1) a nearly full hard drive 2) work with large files that are repeatedly revised such as RAW images and video. Working with these types of files on a near-full disk can cause problems if all of the little saved bits of commonly accessed data are spread across the disk, and thats where defragmenting can help. Otherwise defragging on the Mac is just not worth the effort. So kick the habit, and drop the urge to defrag that disk.

Resources:

Apple’s official stance of defragging OS X.
The tool I recommend if you insist on defragging your Mac’s disk – Disk Warrior X

One more thing: This should be the most obvious of all Mac tips, but before you do anything to your Mac disk – BACK UP. _JustiN_

So, many users who have switched from PC’s to Macs think that disk fragmentation is a concern in OS X, a problem that needs fixing. Truth is, except in very limited circumstances, its not a problem. In fact defragmenting an OS X disk can cause more harm than good. Fragmentation often creates a problem when small additions are saved onto files and overtime these little files end up spread all over the disk, slowing the machine down. However, innovations in software and hard drive technology (capacity, cache size, read speeds) allow many modern applications to rewrite the revised file in its entirety rather than saving all of the little attachments off in the recesses of the disk. Further, in recent OS X versions (10.2 and especially 10.3) Apple used delayed allocations of volumes (waiting for a batch of additions rather than writing each one as they come up) and automatic behind the scenes defragmenting of slow growing files for applications that do not rewrite the file each time it is re-saved. These changes negate the principal effects of defragmentation, and make the benfits of any defrag tiny.

Thats all great, but how can defragmenting actually hurt? Well straight from Apple’s mouth: “there is also a chance that one of the files placed in the “hot band” for rapid reads during system startup might be moved during defragmentation, which would decrease performance.” Basically, one of those many thousands of tiny files that are almost never used, may be moved to a place on the disk where the OS takes a bit longer to find, and while it looks, you wait.

However, I said there are very limited circumstances where you may see a performance gain from defragmenting and there are. Those situations have two common characteristics: 1) a nearly full hard drive 2) work with large files that are repeatedly revised such as RAW images and video. Working with these types of files on a near-full disk can cause problems if all of the little saved bits of commonly accessed data are spread across the disk, and thats where defragmenting can help. Otherwise defragging on the Mac is just not worth the effort. So kick the habit, and drop the urge to defrag that disk.

Resources:

Apple’s official stance of defragging OS X.
The tool I recommend if you insist on defragging your Mac’s disk – Disk Warrior X

One more thing: This should be the most obvious of all Mac tips, but before you do anything to your Mac disk – BACK UP. _JustiN_

I have a MAC OS X, VER 10.4.9 and previously used Missing Sync for Windows
Mobile 3.0.0 to sync up my MDA, now that I have upgraded to the WING I can not
sync up using Missing Sync for Windows. Is there a script that I need to down
load? I am attempting to sync via Blue tooth.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Now the major change between the wing and your MDA is that the Wing is an
official WM6 device and needs active sync 4.5 to function. They have not made
this available to Mac Osx users just yet (big surprise). So we have snagged
Racquel a work around compliments of kirankonathala.wordpress.com

Here’s the email: (Edit They Updated The Missing Sync for $40 to support wm6)

Missing Sync has done a great job with WM5 synchronisation
services but they refuse to port the same app to WM6 devices – they say that no
‘Real’ WM6 device has ever been released but thousands of devices at XDA Devs
are powered by mighty WM6!! Well,so what about us,Mac users? How can we sync our devices for appointments and contacts (mail and files follows!).Well,I have been
using a practical solution – A free MS Exchange Server with which you can
Active Sync your Windows Mobile on the go with WiFi/3G/GPRS/EDGE!!
This guy,Austin provides this free service (MS Exchange Server).Check it out at http://port88.org/SignupSignup for this great service.Shoot out
any questions just in case

Let us know if this works out for you or do you need another solution? Don’t worry I’m sure Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about you and an update for Active Sync for Mac should be on its way! (don’t hold your breath)

A common complaint we have heard about the iPhone is that it does not support
MMS. Or does it? Afterall, MMS is basically just glorified email
aliasing.

Email? Now that’s something the iPhone can do!

Since you can email pictures you have taken, to send a picture to any cellphone just email it to the recipient’s MMS email address. All you will need to do is enter the recipients 10 digit number into the appropriate carrier field.

United States Carriers Listed

• Alltel = xxxxxxxxxx@message.alltel.com
• AT&T = xxxxxxxxxx@mms.att.net
• Boost Mobile = xxxxxxxxxx@myboostmobile.com
• Cingular (AT&T) = xxxxxxxxxx@mms.mycingular.com
• Einstein PCS = xxxxxxxxxx@einsteinmms.com
• Sprint = xxxxxxxxxx@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile = xxxxxxxxxx@tmomail.net
• US Cellular = xxxxxxxxxx@mms.uscc.net
• Verizon Wireless = xxxxxxxxxx@vzwpix.com
• Virgin Mobile = xxxxxxxxxx@vmobl.com

Thanks HackTech!

Here’s a nice way to recover notes from your iPhone without having to mail them to yourself–although it’s not for the faint of heart. James Duncan Davidson located where iTunes stores its iPhone backup data–at least mostly. There’s an error in his write-up.

It’s actually stored in your home folder’s application support directory in MobileSync/Backup. For me, that works out to be /Users/ericasadun/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup. But getting back to Duncan Davidson’s story, he took a peek at those files and noticed they were some sort of compressed SQLite3 files.

Following on that, “Mr. Flip”, who is one of the iPhone web developer Google group members posted this simple extraction utility written in Perl. When run, it converts each of the backup files to a normal well-named SQLite3 db file. Following Flip’s directions, I then downloaded a copy of the OS X version of SQLite Browser from Sourceforge and used it to view the contents of the backup db files.

Interestingly enough, when viewing the db files directly from the command line (via sqlite3 notes_01.db and .dump)

I discovered that the iPhone saved my entire history of edits for my note files as well as the actual final content.

Boys and Girls Thank The Gizmodo:

Richard Baguley, chief cellular ninja over at WirelessInfo.com, just
published a number that, when called, turns your iPhone into a mobile field testing
station. Suddenly, up pops a new menu (as you can see on our own iPhone at left)
that provides detailed reporting on strengths and characteristics of the cell
towers in your area, plus a load of other nerdy networky factoids. In other
words, you can see things that AT&T might not want you to
see.

What’s cool is that you can even enter field test mode during a
call just by tapping the iPhone’s “Add Call” icon, then the field test number.
But before I give you this magic number, it is my duty to share Richard’s
warning.

NOTE: Although it seems that most of the information is read-only
(so you can’t change anything), field modes like this have the potential to
damage your phone and possibly interfere with the phone network. We are
providing this information as-is; we cannot be held responsible if anything you
do in this field mode damages your phone or the phone network.

There, now that the warning is out of the way, here you
go:

*3001#12345#*

Dial that, and have fun fiddling. If you do discover anything
freaky, please report back to us, and, of course, to Richard. If you whack out
your iPhone in the process, don’t come crying to me