Hacks Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

DIY iSight night vision camera

by Lauren Hirsch (Dec 8th, 2009)

Now that most all Apple computers come with their own built-in iSight, the standalone iSight has taken a bit of a back seat. It always was a gorgeous piece of Apple art, though, and I really wanted to use it in a functional way. An easy way was to ...

Create a Time Capsule gift box

by Dave Caolo (Dec 8th, 2009)

If your Time Capsule is among the recently deceased, don't toss it just yet. The folks at Instructables have published photos of a dead Time Capsule that's been converted into a quite handsome gift box. The process looks like it was simple enough: ...

DIY DSLR iPhone

by Tim Wasson (Dec 2nd, 2009)

Sure, you can take the commercial approach and just buy a telephoto lens for your iPhone, or hack together a macro lens, but if you're looking to combine the two into a hacked-up telephoto lens held together with a heaping of duct tape, look no ...

Holiday Gift Guide: Hackintoshable Dell Mini 10v

by Erica Sadun (Nov 25th, 2009)

Update: This deal seems to be dead for now, possibly until Friday. (Apparently the TUAWlanche we set off hit the "LIMITED QUANTITIES AT THIS PRICE" limit.) We will update the post when and if it goes live again. Later Update: It's baaaaaaaaaack. ...

Dangerously driving a car with an iPhone

by Tim Wasson (Nov 10th, 2009)

Here at TUAW we've seen lots of uses for the iPhone as a remote control, but if you were watching and thinking that those projects were way too safe, then the guys at Waterloo Labs have got you covered. They approached the project with a low budget ...

Perhaps Apple won't block Atom support after all

by Dave Caolo (Nov 5th, 2009)

There was a report this week that Mac OS X 10.6.2 will block Atom support, leaving Hackintosh owners stuck at 10.6.1. Intel's Atom processors have been used in netbooks by MSI, Dell and ASUS for their low cost and modest energy consumption. ...

Apple's iTunes Affiliates site briefly subjected to image swaps

by Josh Carr (Nov 3rd, 2009)

Our friends over at OS X Daily passed along their story noting that Apple's site for iTunes Affiliates was vulnerable to a cross-site URL trick, letting you substitute your own images for the ones normally displayed on the page. Since the site is ...

Blacksn0w unlocks iPhone OS 3.1.2 and baseband 05.11.07

by Josh Carr (Nov 3rd, 2009)

For the last several months, anyone who had updated to iPhone OS 3.1 or greater without following a pre-update procedure lost the unlock on their iPhones due to new software in the modem firmware or the baseband. Using the at+xemn crash as an ...

Dutch hacker accesses jailbroken iPhones, requests €5

by Dave Caolo (Nov 3rd, 2009)

Running a jailbroken iPhone has its risks, as a Dutch hacker has demonstrated. Specifically, he used a bit of port scanning to find jailbroken phones with SSH running in his native Netherlands. From there, he sent unsuspecting users a message that ...

Mac OS X 10.6.2 rumored to block Atom support, foil netbook OS X booting

by Steven Sande (Nov 2nd, 2009)

In a move sure to rile up the crowds of people (including our very own Erica Sadun) who have converted cheap Intel Atom-powered netbooks into tiny MacBook-like hackintoshes, several sites are reporting that Apple will kill support for the ...

Putting an SSD upgrade in a 24" iMac

by Tim Wasson (Nov 2nd, 2009)

SSDs, or solid-state drives, are all the rage in portables these days. They come in MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs directly from Apple (with the appropriate upgrades, of course), and we've seen people upgrade their old-school mechanical drives, hack ...

iPhone app claims 95% piracy rate

by Mike Schramm (Oct 28th, 2009)

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/security/iPhone_app_claims_95_piracy_rate'; With all of the success stories coming out of the App Store, it's been pretty easy to forget the problem of piracy for most developers. Not so for Fishlabs, who've posted over ...

Inside the new 27-inch iMac

by Mike Schramm (Oct 24th, 2009)

You know by now that once Apple announces a new piece of hardware, it's only a matter of time before someone gets their hands on one only to rip it up and tear every little piece out to see what's in there. And that's exactly what iFixit did with ...

With a rebel Dell, Psystar tries more, more, more

by Sang Tang (Oct 22nd, 2009)

Psystar, that pesky little thorn in Apple's side, has released Rebel EFI. According to Psystar, the app, available for $49.99 through the company's site, "allows for the easy installation of multiple operating systems," including Mac OS X, on a ...

TUAW Tips: Get a better view with Quick Look

by John Burke (Oct 2nd, 2009)

Quick Look is such an awesome feature of Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, making it really fun and easy to view files and folders from anywhere on your Mac. But what happens when you have a folder with multiple items and want to get a better idea of what's ...

Weather Widget with time, updated for Snow Leopard

by TJ Luoma (Sep 27th, 2009)

Back in 2005, John Gruber wrote about Hacking Apple's Weather Widget to Show the Time of the Last Update. I was disappointed to learn that my customized Weather widget no longer worked in Snow Leopard, and for some reason John's instructions no ...