Fieldrunners invade Central Park!
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Awesomeness, Games, Hacks, design, iPhone
Everyone knows one of the best parts of Jailbreaking your iPhone is that you can customize the look and feel of your iPhone, but did you know with a little digging you can also customize your apps as well? (And cheat to high heaven? Check out my cash stash).
Fieldrunners is still my all-time favorite iPhone app, however with no real updates in the past few months, I decided it was time for a facelift. I did a little poking around in the Fieldrunners app today, and decided to do a quick test. A few minutes of sloppy Photoshop work, and I have my very own Central Park NY “Grasslands” map!
Oh no! The Fieldrunners are marching on Center Drive!
The cool thing is you can pretty much make any map you’d like. Here we see the Fieldrnners attacking my desktop.
The orange robot must NOT get to my Mac Chick folder!
MacBook hacked to add “right-click” in Windows
I’m always amazed at how much extra space seems to be inside the black and white MacBooks, given Apple’s obsession with slimming things down. First someone was able to add a second LCD screen behind the MacBook’s main one, and now InsanelyMac forum member jboy21 has crammed a usb mouse inside his black MacBook to add right click functionality.
“Basically ive taken a standard logitech usb mouse, hacked it down to its very bare essentials, inserted inside the case along with a usb hub.
Ive tapped into the usb connection between the motherboard and bluetooth module, attached the hub and rerouted the cable for the bluetooth module to the hub.
Ive placed a small piece of metal (which is attached and insulated on the L-bracket) underneath the right mouse button to make the contact.
All the boards are located in a spare ram module slot, ive already got the maximum amount of ram on one stick so i didnt need it anyway.”
An impressive feat of engineering. Of course, this hack would have been totally unnecessary if he hadn’t first ruined his Mac by installing Windows on it…
I have tiny balls! (Thanks to Magnifique!)
Fans of custom OS themes rejoice! Magnifique is here!
OK, so maybe shrinking those jolly, candy-like buttons wasn’t my FIRST gripe with the Leopard interface, but it’s nice to have a choice, isn’t it?
Magnifique is a free app that lets you view and install a range of themes in their library, or make your own. Have you always wanted black windows (preferably with hard to read text?) Well, now you can!
As you can see, it also changes theme colors across applications as well as the Finder. And reverting back to the default theme is a breeze. So, assuming this isn’t Spyware, it’s pretty sweet. You can download it here.
[via Lifehacker]
Woz signs a hackintosh Dell netbook – doesn’t like red
Matthew Smith ran into Steve “Three Left Feet” Wozniak the other day, and just happened to have his hacked Dell mini 9 running Leopard and sharpie with him. The results are magical.
Got to briefly meet Steve Wozniak as he was doing some press for Dancing with the Stars. I showed him my Dell Mini 9 with OS X Leopard installed on it (and an Apple sticker sloppily applied over the Dell logo.
He said, “Oh my god, that is so COOL!”And: “Is that really the color you wanted?”
Then he graciously signed it. I then ran away and giggled for about 45 minutes.
[via BoingBoing]
Apple flooding the App store with more useless Apps
Filed under: Hacks, Humor, Slow News Day, design, iPhone
To date, Apple’s iPhone apps have been fairly solid efforts, although the same cannot be said for the majority of 3rd party iPhone apps out there. However, it looks like Apple has decided to jump on the “bloatware” bandwagon. Check out this invite for the WWDC.
Not only is Apple apparently using a jalbroken iPhone to hide the app names, but it looks like they plan on releasing no fewer than THREE new applications for the letters “E” and “R”. I’ll admit I’m anxious to test them out, but three just seems like money grubbing. Why aren’t they taking their own advice, and allowing users to purchase additional E’s from within the E app itself (assuming they like it)? Given that iPhone screen real estate is at a premium, this just seems like poor design. Boo Apple! Boo!
Hey, those apps don’t have labels! Apple must have WinterBoard installed on page 3!
Worse than being sent to the Spice Mines of Kessel
Oh, the humanity! Such a fate should not befall any droid, let alone a Mac mini.
Above: You should see their bidet Well, on the plus side, at least using the Mac mini as a toilet paper dispenser ensures that the toilet paper is delivered in the proper, “overhand” method, instead of that ridiculous “underhand” style that some lower functioning people sometimes use.
Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader Vonspace for the tip!
[via Macity]
Apple Logo LCD mod is the coolest thing I have seen today
Check out Eddie Zarick’s rather impressive MacBook Apple Logo LCD mod. By adding a tiny second monitor to his MacBook, positioned directly behind of the Apple logo, Eddie is able to display anything from photos, to video, to the live feed of his iSight camera, which makes for a very cool transparent effect.
As cool as this is, if there’s room for a second LCD behind the main screen then I think Apple’s engineers have failed miserably with the MacBook, totally ignoring their company policy of “making all things as small as they can possibly get, even if it compromises the end user experience“.
Thanks to faithful Macenstein reader iShervin for the tip!
[via CrunchGear]
Ok, I Jailbroke my iPhone. So now what?
So last night, around midnight, I decided to Jailbreak my iPhone – the main impetus being I wanted to check out xGPS. Of course the first attempt using QuickPWN didn’t work for some reason, so I had to restore my iPhone, then try again, experiencing success sometime around 1:30 AM. Since then I have had only a little free time to poke around Cydia, the Winterboard and such, but from what I have seen, there appears to be almost as bad a ratio of “crap to gold” amongst Jailbroken apps as there is on iTunes. I’m kind of an impatient fellow, so please forgive me as I attempt to cut to the front of the line here and pull from your collective experiences in the Jailbreaking world.
Above: Surely there has got to be something cooler to do with a Jailbroken iPhone than throwing Domo behind my apps and changing my battery to orange…
Now that I have jailbroken this bad boy, what should I be doing with it? Thus far I have skimmed through a couple themes, all of them god-awful. I have discovered I can skin my battery to be anything from Zelda hearts to an Energizer battery, and I have discovered the joys of the Categories app, and now have all 9 pages worth of my apps neatly tucked away into a page and a half of folders. But what else should I be checking out? What are the actually WELL DESIGNED themes? Can I get custom SMS sounds on here? What are the killer apps that I can’t get on iTunes? Leave me your hints in the comments, and hopefully we’ll all learn something (but mainly me).
DIY iMac
When faithful Macenstein reader Joven wanted to buy a new iMac but found himself coming up short on funds, he did what any good Mac Geek would do – he built his own!
Joven already had an LCD monitor he was happy with, but loves the “Where’s the computer” design of the iMac. So he purchased a Mac mini, drew up some brackets in SketchUp, and headed to the garage for some good old fashioned aluminum bending!
“You can bend aluminum strips by hand. What I did was, first measure everything according to my design ( I posted the plan here: http://www.protodojo.com/downloads/ProtoDojo_BIGMac_final.pdf ). I drilled the holes using my drill press and cut the raw strips down to size with a hacksaw. Then placed the strip in a vise and bent it by hand. You also could use a rubber mallet instead. After that, it just screws in to the standard VESA mount holes on the back of the LCD.”
Joven says he wanted to avoid the $50 cost of commercially available VESA mounts, but I know for me, once I factor in the cost of buying a Drill Press, hacksaw, and a new LCD after I somehow ruin the first one, odds are I could have afforded 2 iMacs. Still, if you are handy, and not a total spaz like me, feel free to download Joven’s blue prints and have at it.
Interview: Examining the seedy world of Mac OS X Forensics
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Awesomeness, Hacks, Security
We all know that good guys use Macs, and the bad guys use PCs, right? Well, so do law enforcement agencies, which is why nearly 100% of the training given to law enforcement’s digital forensic specialists has traditionally dealt with how to handle a Windows machine at a crime scene. But what about the one or two “bad Apples” (pun intended) out there? What if you are a first responder to a crime scene and you find a MacBook sitting there amidst all the piles of “Mary Jane” and illegally pirated copies of Beethoven’s Big Break? What do you do? Or worse yet, what if YOU are the Bad Apple, and you want to try to protect your MacBook from the Feds during your next raid? How should you go about it?
Well, luckily for both good and evil Mac users alike, Ryan R. Kubasiak, Dave Melvin, and Reggy Chapman – three Certified Forensic Computer Examiners (and Apple Certified Support Professionals) with some pretty impressive (yet top-secret) law enforcement forensic credentials have started an online resource dedicated to Macintosh digital forensics, and it’s free to the internet community. Mac OS X Forensics aims to arm all of you would-be CSI officers with an overview of the various Mac OS system and security features, and how best to poke around in a system you feel may contain data you need.
“The field of digital forensics is still growing by leaps and bounds,” says Kubasiak, “but the Macintosh side is still quite small. It is very difficult to find qualified and interested individuals when it comes to the Macintosh operating system.”
Technologies such as FileVault, Boot camp, Back to My Mac, and even something as simple as “Spaces” might throw off a newbie to the Mac platform looking to check out your data. As a seasoned Mac user, you may think you know Read more
