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Spotlight can also find answers to math equations

Restore your last browsing session in Safari

Another embarrasingly late and accidental discovery… I had no idea you could search all of your archived email from the iPhone Mail app! I use Gmail over IMAP so all of my email is stored in the cloud. Up until now when I needed to search for something I went to gmail.com in the browser and used the search function there. The other day I was scrolling through my mail in the Mail app and discovered that if you are at the top of a list of messages and scroll up, a search box will appear. And when you type in a search query it will give you an option to search on the server! I have a feeling I may be late to the party on this one but wow, very nifty.

This is the basic method I’ve been using to manually replace the SMS tones on my iPhone. Must be jailbroken obviously, and comfortable with SSH. You could also use DiskAid or the other similar file copy applications. If the tone isn’t available right away try restarting SpringBoard or rebooting to force Settings to refresh it.

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Sometimes when trying to restore a custom firmware to an iPhone using iTunes you get hit with an error 1600. There are a variety of causes but in my particular case, I screwed up the phone trying to change fonts and it wouldn’t boot. I turned to google and found about a million threads with various suggestions on how to make it go away. But none of them worked for me.

(There is a handy tool called iReb that will fix this issue for iPhone 2G and 3G, but it doesn’t work for the 3GS.)

And of course Apple stopped signing all previous firmware versions and restoring to official 3.1.3 would update the baseband, making it *currently* un-jailbreakable and unlockable. So, what’s one to do..I tried everything! Well, almost everything…

I was desperate and thought of one last thing to try. I put the phone in DFU mode and started an official 3.1.3 restore. It extracted the software and went to “preparing iPhone for restore.” At this point I saw an Apple logo on the phone. More waiting, and then I saw an empty progress bar appear on the phone. I continued waiting through the “preparing iPhone for restore” stage and the progress bar remained empty. Finally, after what seemed like several minutes the status changed to “waiting for iPhone.” I immediately unplugged the USB cable. The phone then rebooted into Recovery mode (or I rebooted it, don’t recall) but either way I knew that this was a step forward because I couldn’t even get it into Recovery mode before. At this point I force quit iTunes, restarted iTunes, and was able to restore my custom firmware!

The restore completed successfully and my baseband was not updated. Great success! Now I’m not sure if this has been attempted before but I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the interwebz. Try at your own risk of course, but if you need this you’re probably desperate anyway. In that case, hope this helps. At the time of this writing I’ve used this method twice, both with iTunes 9.0.3, once on a Mac and once on Windows. Yes, I’ve been screwing with my phone quite a bit.

Part of the reason I like to post tips and tricks to my blog is so I can refer to them later if I’m doing a fresh install or setting up someone else’s machine. But there are at least two tips I just thought of that I’ve never posted because they are automatic for me.

1. 2D Dock. I’ve just never been a fan of the 3D Dock introduced in Leopard. Here’s how to get it.

2. Recent Things Stack. There is a recent items option in the Apple menu but that requires two clicks. With this tip you can get there with one click. I typically keep it set to recent applications. Here’s how to get it.

Minimal Mac had a nice idea two weeks ago for discovering which apps should be on his home screen. I decided to duplicate the experiment. On Tuesday I cleared all of the apps on my home screen, except for the Phone, Messages, Mail and Safari icons in the Dock. (I agree that those four should not be moved in principle, but find they are by far my most commonly used apps anyway.) Over the course of the week, any time I use an app I move it to the home screen. After seven days, I’ll see what I have!

For reference, here’s what my home screen looked like before:

And here’s where I am after two days:

There are already three apps that I didn’t have on my home screen before!

Nice walk-through on how to use Smart Folders in Mac OS.

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Once again, a simple and intuitive solution to a problem that had been nagging me for a while. If you’ve ever changed the icons of folders in your user directory and wondered how to get them back to the originals, there is a drop dead easy way… Just Get Info, click the icon and hit backspace!

Post #4 claims an AppleCare “Genius” didn’t even know this. Why am I not surprised..

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Impressive that after over 6 years of using Mac OS I’m still discovering useful new tricks. If you use Mail.app and want to easily send mail using different email “aliases” (from addresses) this link describes the simplest way to do it.

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Make my MacBook Pro Hibernate

I agree, for my usage I prefer using hibernate (aka safe sleep) over plain sleep. I tend to sleep it for long periods and don’t like losing battery life. And since I have a super fast SSD, I hardly notice any difference in the time it takes to wake.

Why I always disable “Wake On Lid Open” on my MacBooks

I also made this change. I prefer to have more control because there are times when I may open the lid (say to clean it) and not want it to wake straightaway.

I’m not done yet though. I’m still on the lookout for a way to use the MacBook Pro in clamshell mode (with the lid closed) without a real keyboard or mouse connected. Often when traveling and what not I’ll connect it to an HDTV to watch a movie and will use my iPhone to control it. But since there is no real keyboard or mouse attached (only VNC) normal Mac OS clamshell mode doesn’t engage. I’ve tried InsomniaX but haven’t been able to get it to work. And it appears that project is now dead.

And last but not least it would be nice to disable USB wake as well. As in, when I unplug my iPhone on my way out the door in the morning it would be nice if my computer didn’t wake up.