1. Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu
2. Open Terminal
3. Paste (or type) the following command: defaults write com.apple.Finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1
4. Relaunch Finder

After my post earlier this week about transmitting Mac audio, readers contacted me about extending this solution. Although they liked the idea of direct audio while working out on a treadmill or exercise bike, several stated that they also wanted to watch from the sofa once the spouse or the kid go to sleep. The idea was the same: audio transmission to an iPhone or iPod touch. The source was different. They wanted to watch live cable TV or their TiVo. And for the punchline, their media center Mac lacks a tuner. Was there a similar quiet Mac-based solution that would let them transmit the TV audio from these non-Mac sources?

If your Mac has a microphone jack, internal or even through an external USB solution, the answer is yes. You can easily connect your TV audio to your Mac just like you would connect it to a pair of speakers. Run a cable between a spare audio output (modern TVs usually offer more than one, if not, you can use a splitter) to the microphone jack on the Macintosh. On my low-end TV, this means an RCA stereo cable that feeds to a standard stereo minijack plug.

Setting up the Mac host is simple. Instead of feeding audio via Soundflower, as described in the earlier post, choose your microphone audio input in the Skype settings. Start a call to your iPhone or iPod touch, switch the TV source (usually via a "Source" button that picks which signal to watch, such as Composite 1, Component 2, etc.) to your normal cable or TiVo input. Set the external speaker volume to zero. The signal arrives at the Mac microphone independently of those speakers.

You may find that the audio out signal tends to be on the low side. Many TV speakers provide their own amplification. If this is a problem for you, you can hook in an inline amplifier. (I use an old Radio Shack 277-1008C.) Alternatively, you can boost the audio via a third party program like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro.

This solution takes a few more cables, components, and connections than the Mac Audio-to-iPhone through Skype set-up discussed in the earlier post. But if you have the cables on-hand already, it offers an inexpensive solution compared to many other wireless TV headsets on the market right now.

TUAW reader David wrote us to ask how he could view .erb files (Rails development) in Quick Look. The fact is, there are a lot of plain-text files with extensions that Quick Look doesn't recognize. It's relatively straightforward to tell Quick Look to treat these files like any other text file and preview them as plain text; it does require diving into plist files and possibly breaking an application, so don't dive in unless you're comfortable and fully backed up. Read on for a short tour of Quick Look hacking basics ...

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

If you've got a MacBook Air SuperDrive and you've been hankering to use it with other computers (Mac or PC), tnkgrl over at tnkgrl Mobile has a solution. With a $9 part and some intestinal fortitude, you too can make your MBA Superdrive universally compatible.

Using the drive with other computers has been a desire from its inception. After some experimentation, tnkgrl found that simply replacing the IDE to USB bridge within the drive did the trick. Of course, that means removing the daughter-board and relocating the 12 MHz crystal. For an experienced hardware hacker, no sweat. For the average Joe, well, it's quite obviously an at-your-own-risk situation.

Check out the post at tnkgrl Mobile for the details.