Category Archives: Apple

Capture Screenshots on Mac OS X

Capturing screenshots on the Mac OS is quite easy. You’ll just have to learn the commands. So, without further ado, here are the keyboard shortcuts to get you going.

How to capture an active Window

Command + Shift + 4

To capture an active Window, use the keyboard by holding the Command and Shift keys, and then pressing the number 4. You will see a crosshair with the screen axis numbers next to it. Press Spacebar to select the entire active screen. Click the mouse or the touchpad to capture the screen. If you want to just capture a small section of the active Window, hold and drag the mouse or touchpad, when you see the crosshair with the screen axis numbers when prompted. The screenshot will be automatically added to the desktop.

How to capture an entire screen

Command + Shift + 3

To capture the entire desktop screen, use the keyboard by holding the Command and Shift keys, and pressing the number 3. The screenshot will be automatically added to the desktop.

Who Will Be The Next Facebook?

Who will be the next Facebook? Wait! I’ll take that back. That doesn’t seem right anymore. A year ago, that might have been ok. Facebook as a startup before the IPO was quite a success, in terms of popularity, considering the number of users that have joined the social site. There were so much hype how much the company was worth.

Facebook as a company, after the highly anticipated IPO is quite another story. Facebook (FB) opened at $38 on IPO day. Today, a few months later, FB is faltering at $17.73. And it could go down even further. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. From an investment perspective, FB as a company is a major disappointment.

It’s a good thing, I don’t own any stock. Asking the question, who will be the next Facebook is no longer relevant. It has lost its meaning, luster, and it doesn’t really apply anymore. All this time, we should have been asking, who will be the next Apple.

Apple’s stock price has multiplied 56 times just the last ten years. Apple’s stock was a mere $12 a decade ago. If you have invested $100,000, you would have $5.6 million dollars today. That’s what you call a spectacular investment. For Facebook to get to even come close to what Apple has done is wishful thinking.

All along, we should have been asking, who will be the next Apple?

New Features of OS X Mountain Lion

What’s all the hype with OS X Mountain Lion? Will you upgrade to one for just a measly $30. That equates to about eight Starbux coffee drinks. That’s about a week’s worth of coffee to some people. If I can sum up all the new features in just a few words, they are: “iCloud, Notes, Reminders, iMessage, Notification Center, Power Nap, Dictation, Sharing, Facebook, Twitter, Airplay, Game Center, Gatekeeper, and Safari.” Got all that? All in all, over 200 new features.

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If you have five minutes to spare, Apple just released this video at Youtube which goes over the new features of OS X Mountain Lion. Now the question is, will I upgrade to one? Yea, probably. Most likely. I just have to go for a week without any coffee. That’s a tougher task than I imagined.

Thunderbolt Cables Are Still Expensive

Ever wonder why Thunderbolt cables are expensive. It’s not because Apple sells it exclusively for $49. Not anymore. Now, a few companies are selling Thunderbolt cables at roughly the same price. Even worse, some manufacturers are charging for $10-$20 more.

So, what gives? Ars Technica explains why the Thunderbolt cable will stay costly for a couple more years. The Thunderbolt cable uses a Genum transceiver, which is made from silicon germanium, an expensive semiconductor process, typically found on telecom equipment.

The cost of making the transceiver is high, coupled with other chips found in the Thunderbolt design. The cable also contains a separate microcontroller, power management and voltage regulation chips, which provide 3 volts power internally and 15 volt to power other bus devices.

Currently, there are 4 chips found inside a Thunderbolt cable. Plans are underway to combine the transceiver and microcontroller chip, as well as combine the power management and voltage regulator chip into one. It will cut the number of chips from 4 to 2.

In addition, the cable also uses high quality copper cable to meet the 10Gbps bi-directional data rate requirement. As most know, copper is expensive, which explains why it is a favorite for thieves to steal nowadays.

Nevertheless, consumers are stuck with the current Thunderbolt cable cost, a cable that’s still considered first generation. Costs will go down later as manufacturers find way to cut manufacturing costs, at the same time without sacrificing performance.

Mac OS Mountain Lion

Apple announced today, the Mac OS X Mountain Lion is due to ship in July for just $19.99. That’s about the same as 5 Starbucks lattes. The new OS will bring in a slew of applications and features available on the iPad and iPhone to the Mac.

Some of the new features will include “dictation, a Power Nap feature which updates your streams while the Mac sleeps and a tabview feature associated with the Safari browser, which allows you to zoom in and out. It will also get deeper integration with iCloud” according to Mashable.

Finally, here’s a video of the new features of the Mac OS Mountain Lion.

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Fix Flashback Trojan on Macs

As reported yesterday, over 600,000 Macs are infected by a Flashback Trojan botnet. The good news is, Apple has patched Java. You can visit Apple’s Support website and download the latest update.

http://support.apple.com/downloads/

Just a little background on the Flashback Trojan botnet per ZDNet.

Flashback was initially discovered in September 2011 masquerading as a fake Adobe Flash Player installer. A month later, a variant that disables Mac OS X antivirus signatures updates was spotted in the wild.

In the past few months, Flashback has evolved to exploiting Java vulnerabilities. This means it doesn’t require any user intervention if Java has not been patched on your Mac: all you have to do is visit a malicious website, and the malware will be automatically downloaded and installed.

Another variant spotted last month asks for administrative privileges, but it does not require them. If you give it permission, it will install itself into the Applications folder where it will silently hook itself into Firefox and Safari, and launch whenever you open one of the two browsers.

If you don’t give it permission, it will install itself to the user accounts folder, where it can run in a more global manner, launching itself whenever any application is launched, but where it can also more easily detected.

As a precaution, you should probably update to the latest Java release from Apple’s website. Just choose the OS X version you are using. I have Lion or OS X 10.7.x. Download and run the package. The patch takes less than one minute to install. It’s a quick and easy fix.

Raspberry Pi

Watch out Apple, there’s another fruit in the market. Yesterday, I was ogling Apple’s TV which sells for just $99. That has to be one of the most affordable hardware sold by Apple. Except for the iPod shuffle, which sells for a mere $49. Which brings me to my main topic today, the Raspberry Pi, a full-fledged computer being sold for just $35. Did I hear that right?

The Raspberry Pi is powered by an Arm-based processor. It’s about the size of a credit card. It comes with a HDMI port, 2 USB ports for connecting keyboard and mouse, an audio output, a composite output for old-style TVs and monitors, an Ethernet port for the network, and a SD card slot for loading the operating system. It runs on just 2 watts of power, and it boots in less than 15 seconds.

The best part of it all, it runs on Linux, an open-source operating system. Since it’s open-source, you can do practically anything to it. Currently, there are 3 Linux distro images available for the Raspberry Pi. They are: Debian squeeze, Arch Linux ARM, and Fedora 14 Remix. There are many potential uses for the Raspberry Pi, such as a media center, cafe internet workstations, robotics, to name a few.

Finally, here’s a video of the Raspberry Pi. Yea, I want one or two.

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The New iPad

Apple announced today the release of the new iPad. Apple has made it quite clear to not call the new tablet the iPad 3 or iPad HD or by any other name. It’s just simply called the iPad. Can we call it iPad 2012?

The problem with just calling an iPad just an iPad is, it is extremely confusing for potential customers to differentiate one iPad from another. Imagine going to an online store other than Apple, and ordering an iPad. You’ll start questioning whether it’s the original iPad, the iPad 2, or the new iPad. It is confusing.

As expected, the new iPad comes with a retina display with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 That’s a total of 3.1 million pixels, which by the way, has more resolution than the 1080p HD display. The iPad is powered by an A5X processor, with quad-core graphics, an iSight Camera with a 5-megapixel backside camera, 5-element lens, IR filter and ISP built into the processor and 1080p video recording.

It will sell for $499, $599 and $699 for the Wi-Fi-only models in 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB. For iPads models with LTE 4G, the cost is $629, $729, and $829 respectively for the same capacities above.

Out of the two products revealed today, I’m more interested with Apple TV. It sells for only for $99. You can watch 1080p HD movies and TV shows directly from iTunes. You can also play Netflix, YouTube, and Vimeo videos, catch MLB, NBA, and NHL games live or on demand.

Pretty neat.

iPad 3 Coming Soon

Rumors has it that the iPad 3 is just a couple of weeks away from being introduced by Apple. Several sources indicate the special release date is going to be March 7. Speculations indicate that the new iPad will have these new features: a retina display with a resolution of 2048 x 1536, a quad-core processor, a better camera on the front as well as in the back, and finally 4G LTE networking.

Now how accurate are these rumors? Nobody really knows. But chances are that one of these features will make it on the iPad 3 is pretty good. It may not be all the features mentioned above. However, it is possible that one or two unanticipated features will surface and catch everyone by surprise.

By the looks of it, the iPad will essentially be the same size and design, but it could be slightly thicker if the bigger battery rumors are true. We’ll just have to wait several weeks if the rumors are really true.

Install SSH Server on Ubuntu Desktop

So you just installed the latest version of Ubuntu on your desktop. You want to access your spanking new Ubuntu machine from another computer. There are two ways in accomplishing this: (1) the fast and easy way via SSH, or (2) the slightly more difficult way via graphics called Remote Desktop.

Let’s say we go with the easy route in this article. We want to access it via SSH. I’ll follow up with another article how to access your Ubuntu desktop using Remote Desktop. So, we want to access your Ubuntu desktop via SSH. What we need is a SSH server. We can easily install OpenSSH Server by just installing the SSH server from the Terminal.

Install SSH Server

$ sudo apt-get install ssh-server

Done. Simple.

SSH Client

Your remote computer must have a SSH client to access your Ubuntu desktop. I recommend that you use Putty if you are a Windows users. Putty is a SSH client program to access your Ubuntu desktop. If you are a Mac or a Linux user, you can simply use the Terminal. Access your Ubuntu server by invoking the SSH client.

# ssh 10.10.10.10

That’s the IP address of my Ubuntu desktop. You can specify a hostname if you have an internal DNS that’s working. You can also specify the username and the port number if you using a different port from the standard port 22.

# ssh 10.10.10.10 -l username -p 2222