Pierow’s Prattle

• Fully Use Your Apple Keyboard in Windows with Apple Wireless Keyboard Helper [Windows Downloads]

• iPad CF and SD Card Readers Make Transferring Photos to iOS a Snap [Stuff We Like]

• What to Do If You’ve Forgotten Your iPhone’s Passcode [How To]

Now that you can no longer purchase Snow Leopard from Apple, it might be a good idea to make a backup of your install media.  Here’s how to do that in eight easy steps:

1. Insert your Snow Leopard DVD.
2. Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app.
3. In the left side of the window, select the “Mac OS X Install DVD”.
4. Click “New Image” from the Disk Utility toolbar and select where you want to save the temporary image. For “Image Format”, choose “DVD/CD master” and for “Encryption”, choose “none”.
5. The image extension in the “Save As” box will be .cdr (this is what you want) — click “Save”.
6. Once the temporary image is created, it will show up on the left side of the Disk Utility window. Select it.
7. Insert a blank dual-layer DVD
8. Click “Burn” from the Disk Utility toolbar.

“The Wrongulator is no ordinary calculator, its actually the world’s worst calculator as it never gives the right answer, ever!  If your calculator has been exchanged for this one then every single calculation you’ve entered in it has been wrong. It is perhaps the cruelest practical joke you could inflict on your office colleague and the chances are, without being told, they’ll probably never guess….well not before it’s too late anyway! Mwhahahaha!”

[£4.95 at RED5]

“If you have been troubled by recent revelations that your cell phone can be used to reveal details of your personal life, this item will probably boost your concern level. It turns out that there is actually a commercially available device specifically designed for sucking data out of your handheld. In fact, Cellebrite Ltd. (www.cellebrite.com) has just released Version 2.0 of its Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), designed to provide “law enforcement and government intelligence agencies with new capabilities for improved extraction, retrieval, and analysis of mobile phone data.” (more…)

Facebook remembers everything that has ever been posted to your wall.  It’s a very cumbersome task but you can actually scroll back through all of the history on your wall by manually clicking (and waiting).  You can also remove the posts from your wall by clicking the ‘X’ to delete each and every individual post.  Sound time consuming and boring?  It is.  Enter Clean My Wall.  (more…)

Unionhawk at Lifehacker discovered a way to find the serial number of your IOS device (iPod, iPhone, etc.).  Useful if the device needed to be reported stolen.

“My brother’s iPod was stolen earlier today (set his bag down and left it unwatched for 2 seconds, came back and it was gone). We didn’t have the serial number, however, I was able to find where iTunes stores every serial number of every iPod that has ever been synced with that iPod. Just go to ~\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\iTunes\iPodDevices.xml, and it lists all serial numbers. Then you can check each serial number here to ascertain which one you’re looking for based on the model: [selfsolve.apple.com]“

“…The new Commodore 64 is a modern functional PC as close to the original in design as humanly possible. It houses a modern mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a Dual Core 525 Atom processor and the latest nVidia ION2 graphics chipset. It comes in the original taupe brown/beige color, with other colors to follow…”

[Commodore USA]

Wicher posted on Smörgåsbord about an interesting problem.  His Atheros card was set to use the US regulatory domain even though he was in The Netherlands.  This limited his ability to use wireless channels 12 & 13 which are allowed in Europe but not in the US.  “iw reg set NL” did not resolve the problem (read the article for an in depth explanation of why) so he found a work-around.  It seems that the crda (Central Regulatory Domain Agent) application as compiled under OpenWRT does not require a digital signature – allowing the accompanying database to be modified.  With the newly updated crda database, he was able to access all 14 available channels.  (Though admittedly, channel 14 is not authorized for use in Europe)

(more…)