Mac owners often look on with envy at the Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs) in the Windows world. These are truly tiny laptops, often with 10" or smaller displays and weights that make a MacBook Air seem downright obese by comparison.
MoDaCo network founder and Microsoft MVP Paul O'Brien decided to get his OS of choice, Mac OS X 10.5.4, up and running on one of these little wonders. The machine is a variant of a recently released UMPC called the MSI Wind, which weighs in at 2.3 lbs and sports the new Intel Atom N270 CPU running at 1.6 GHz.
While Paul admits to a few small issues, he was not only able to load and run Leopard on the Wind, but he also documented the entire procedure in text and video (see above) if you want to make your own Ultra-Mobile Mac. After watching how easy the process is and finding out how inexpensive the Wind is, I'm tempted to try this myself! Be sure to let us know if you're successful at following Paul's footsteps.
If admiration of an iPod-powered Lego vehicle indicates that one is a nerd, then buy me a pocket protector and hike my pants up to my ribcage.The folks at BattleBricks have constructed just such a creature. Here's (briefly) how it works. There are two iPhones involved. The one on the vehicle displays certain colors based on commands issued from the 2nd controller iPhone via a Safari app written with Google's Web Toolkit. The vehicle executes a command based on the color it "sees."
You can download the source code for yourself from Battle Bricks. Think of the applications! Frighten children and small animals, attach a small brush and clear away dust bunnies or deliver very small parcels.
An enterprising OQO user has gotten Leopard running on his tiny PC. If you aren't familiar with the OQO, it is billed as 'a full PC that fits in your pocket.' It has a slide out keyboard and runs a full version of Windows, and not Windows Mobile.
According to trf's forum posting Leopard is running pretty well except that video resolution is stuck at 800x480 and the WWAN card isn't working yet. Check out this YouTube video to watch the OQO boot up (it takes about 2 minutes to fully boot). Leopard seems to be running fairly well on the OQO, but don't whip out your wallet just yet. As with all non-Apple hardware that is running OS X, this isn't supported by Apple.
In a recent post over at Ars Technica, they say that Mac OS X users could have their login passwords recovered through physically accessing the RAM. This comes after FileVault was proven to be cracked. The article notes that Mac OS X and certain applications store the user's password in memory, leaving it there after you've logged in. While locally-running apps cannot readily retrieve the password, someone could get access to the contents of RAM after the computer has been rebooted or shut down.
This could be accomplished by physical means and might require the hacker to remove the RAM cover on your Mac and chill the RAM, as suggested by Edward Felten's research team at Princeton. This freezing allows the information to stay on the RAM for longer than the normal 2.5 to 35 seconds -- allowing someone to place it in another computer and read the contents.
In a separate approach to the password-in-RAM vulnerability, CNET witnessed an EFF demo of an attack using a custom NetBoot "EFI memory scraper" to record the RAM contents on reboot and save the data as a file on another machine over the network -- the attackers were able to clearly find the login password in the file. Again, this attack requires physical access to the machine (in order to force the NetBoot via holding down the N key on restart) within a minute or two of shutdown. However, an attacker could conceivably target a machine that was locked or sleeping (with RAM contents 'live'), power it off and back on, and use the NetBoot attack immediately.
While Apple has been made aware of the attack (notified on February 5), no fixes for these issues were reported in the 2/11 security update. According to CNET, an Apple spokesperson said they were aware of the issues and were "working to fix it in an upcoming software update." Until this update comes out, you may want to set a firmware password for your Mac, or wait longer to leave your unattended Mac after a shut down. Alternatively, we have lovely TUAW-branded tin foil hats available for purchase.
This isn't the first time we've seen someone take macro photographs with an iPhone, but it is the most involved.
Last time, someone just held a pocket magnifying glass against the lens. This time, blogger Colin Devroe attached the lens from a dead digital camera to the back of his iPhone McGyver-style and produced some nice results.
But what about low-light situations? Colin has got that covered, too. He mounted a small, giveaway light he picked up at last year's SXSW's keynote to the iPhone and found that it functions as a nice flash.
Good job, Colin! You've demonstrated the answer to the question, "Why are you holding on to those old things?" (Answer: "Because I might need it some day").
David Clausen decided to celebrate the Mac's longevity by making something special. So, he gutted the case of a 512K Mac (the case is in great shape, by the way), then inserted the workings of a Mac mini and a grayscale monitor. Add to that a LS-120 floppy disk drive and a custom-built USB microcontroller (to use the original mouse and keyboard), and you've got one badass compact Mac. For more detail, check out the Flickr Set.
All because he wanted to "...experiment with creating a custom USB device." That's one heck of a device. Hey Dave, if you decide to sell these, let me know.
Picture it: you're riding in the car and a great song comes on the radio. You're dying to know what it is so you can go buy it ASAP but there's no satellite radio receiver to tell you what's playing. How can you find out what song it is? Whip out your iPhone, put it near the car speakers, and watch the screen. Poof! There's the song, artist, and album.
No, I am not kidding.
Our own Erica Sadun was inspired by someone who came up with the original idea, she set off to make it happen, and the result is Listen. It's still "very beta" but, hey, it's still one of the coolest iPhone hacks I've ever heard of. Go check it out and let us know in the comments how it works for you.
OS X and Macs are like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together. However, nowadays OS X is designed to run on Intel processors, which power most of the world's non-Apple make hardware, so it isn't odd that some folks might want to get Leopard running on a PC that Apple didn't make. If you are one of those people this link is for you.
The guys at Dailyapps have figured out how to install Leopard on a PC, and it only takes three steps. They also list all the things you'll need to get this going. This isn't a supported configuration, obviously, so some things might not work. You're on your own if you want to run Leopard on a PC, but Apple is more than willing to sell you a Mac with Leopard pre-installed.
Copy off Springboard, patch it, put it back onto your device and reboot. It's what I'm running on my iPhone and touch right now and it works beautifully.
Of course, once you have all that space available to work with, what are you going to do with it? I put together a TUAW webpage launcher using the OpenURL kit I posted about a few weeks ago. Now I just tap to launch TUAW.
If you'd like to download your own TUAW launcher, you can grab a copy from the Samples folder in my OpenURL kit. You'll also find instructions there for creating your own website launchers.
Over at website "Jon's Thoughts on Everything", you can find a web-based equivalent of OpenURL. I actually found it harder to use. For me, it involved more work than just adding an icon and editing two lines of text but you might enjoy using it.
The iPhone has a tiny speaker that distorts at high volume. To listen to music without headphones or external speakers, you'll need an amplifier. If you're a cheapskate with disdain for hygiene, check out this homemade version, rigged up by camh. The benefits include:
Security. No one will walk off with an iPhone that's been stuffed inside this thing.
Eco-friendly. Instead of putting a used, tattered roll of toilet paper into the trash, it goes on your desk.
Economical. Enjoy a memorable audio experience at a fraction of the cost of decent headphones. John Williams via a 5 inch cardboard tube stays with you.
Chick magnet. Nothing says "I have expendable cash" like an iPhone...in a roll of Charmin.
Enjoy your enhanced iPhone.
Update: Erica Sadun tested her own TP iPhone Amp against a cone made of stiff paper and a non-enhanced iPhone with a Radio Shack sound level meter (part 33-2055) at both the 60 and 70 dB base settings. Here are the results:
At 4 feet line of sight, there was no difference at all between any of them. They all measured pretty much the same 65 dB for the same segment of song played at the highest volume.
At 2 feet line of sight (yes, she used a ruler and tape markers), the same procedure yielded:
No enhancement: 68 dB
Toilet paper: 70 db
Stiff cardboard cone around iPhone: 75 db
A final test with no enhancement and the iPhone turned 45 degrees away from the sensor at the same 2 feet distance yielded 65 dB.
Regular readers of Daring Fireball know John Gruber has an almost unhealthy fascination with the Helvetica font, but sometimes fanaticism pays positive results. Today he posted a hack to make the iPhone Notes application use Helvetica rather than the much despised Marker Felt font. The hack involves actually modifying the MobileNotes.app binary with a hex editor on your Mac and is thus probably not for the faint of heart. Needless to say you'll also need to have already hacked the iPhone enough to get access to the MobileNotes.app binary in the first place, but if you just can't stand Marker Felt here's a way to fix it. Gruber also warns, however, that there's no telling how long this hack will work, particularly with the forthcoming firmware update.
TUAW reader and Flickr user sninesixposted this snapshot of the USB CPU fan he rigged up to cool his PowerBook. When the original fan died, sninesixfound an old fan he had lying around, removed the wires and hacked a USB cable onto it.
He then removed laptop's keyboard and positioned the fan just above the CPU. With a USB keyboard connected, he was back in business. Well done! You can watch a video explanation here.
If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply upload photos into our group Flickr pool. Each Sunday we'll comb through the most recent entries and declare a "Rig of the Week!"
One caveat-- while this program doesn't require a separate install of AtomicParsley, the application that makes the metadata edit possible, it does still require AAC encoding on the sound file-- Joe says he might add in mp3 to AAC conversion at a later date, but he doesn't really have to, as it's easy enough to figure out how to do that.
But once you've got the AAC file, just drag it onto this little wrench phone thing, and iTunes (the current iteration, anyway) will play nice with it. Thanks, Joe!
The iPhone application community continues to amaze me-- this time, Engadget's got the heads up on an iPhone video conferencing system, made possible by not only a cool little piece of code (designed for a C4 contest) that fetches an iPhone's camera input and feeds it out to another iPhone via a webserver, but also these ingenious mirror settings that work as a little periscope around the phone, and let you both see the image on the front while the camera on the back grabs yours. Wild!
The Ecamm folks are old hands, apparently, at the ingenious use of mirrors around an Apple camera, but this definitely tops anything I've seen in the past. Just an amazing hack, both in terms of software and hardware. Unfortunately, the source (for either hack) isn't available yet, but they promise that something is coming soon. In the meantime, just bask in the glow of what these iPhone guys are capable of.
The iPhone Alley crew are on fire with iFuntastic, their iPhone hacking and modification tool. Just over a week ago they released v2 that brought custom ringtones and reordering apps, and now v2.5 ushers in another major milestone of iPhone hackery: a full file browser and manager. If you've been waiting to dig into your iPhone, edit images and logos or get to even more serious tinkering, this is likely the tool you've been waiting for.
Other new features in this version include replacing any system sounds and coloring iChat SMS balloons. Unfortunately, iFuntastic 2.5 doesn't support PowerPC Macs just yet, but iPhone Alley has promised that the next version - which is set to arrive "any day now" - will.
More details on the changes in this new version and a download link are over at iPhone Alley.
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In a recent post over at 
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OS X and Macs are like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together. However, nowadays OS X is designed to run on Intel processors, which power most of the world's non-Apple make hardware, so it isn't odd that some folks might want to get Leopard running on a PC that Apple didn't make. If you are one of those people this link is for you.
The iPhone has a tiny speaker that distorts at high volume. To listen to music without headphones or external speakers, you'll need an amplifier. If you're a cheapskate with disdain for hygiene, check out this 
Regular readers of 
TUAW reader and Flickr user 
Last night, Joe sent us a GUI app he put together for 
