[Apple] New Mac Books Out Now

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We’ve all been expecting the release of the new series for the last few months. Mainly the MacBook Pro really needed a redesign. We feel like the displays look a bit like the LCDs manufactured by HP, but anyway those machines really look nice. Pricing might still feel like to to high in comparison to normal x86 Laptops. People on forums critisize that there is still no 11″ or 12″ on-the-road compatible machine. Anyway, four things are new with these Mac Books

  1. the 13″ MacBook model comes without firewire
  2. the case is laser cut in (almost) one piece.
  3. no real buttons but the special Glass Trackpad with corners assigned as buttons
  4. integrated graphics: NVIDIA 9400M combined with a 9600M GT switchable graphics chip

Prices vary at least between 1,300US$ and 2,000US$. You may find the new models on the US Apple store.

The german Golem.de got a vid showing how the manufacturing process of the cases is being done now (you may ask yourself – like we did – why the (asian?) faces of the factory workers are not being showed a single time). And Engagdet got a nice video showing the glass trackpad in action. Find both videos below.

Video is courtesy of Golem.de

Video is courtesy of Engadget.com

[MacOS] Recommended Apps: Witch

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All of us switchers know the situation: rather that switching from one application to another in Microsoft Windows we can switch from every window to another using ALT-TAB. The problem is such behaviour is not known to the Mac world.

The developer Peter Maurer puts it that way:

Sure, you can use Mac OS X’s Exposé to switch windows, but doing so can be very clumsy if you’re the keyboard-only type of user. And don’t all of these windows look just the same when they are scaled down?

Witch lets you access all of your windows by pressing a shortcut and choosing from a clearly arranged list of window titles.

And the best: it’s shareware (!) Sorry for the error before…

»Download Witch here…

witch-screenie.png

[Apple] Pictures of New Mac Book Series Leaked

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Three days to go until the new Mac Books will be presented to the world. On YouTube a video appeared that either shows a well done fake or it really is the new Mac Book Aluminium series. As Apple does not like to see pictures or videos of their products before their official launch we will not embed the YouTube video here.

You may go to YouTube and search for “X6jsJfiENAs“… Don’t wonder the quality is very bad…

[iPhone] HowTo Activate and Unlock using QuickPwn 2.1

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I. Abstract

This is a short HowTo since all of you by now know how to use QuickPwn, don’t you? in short: QuickPwn is an Après-Tool. Means: you let iTunes 8 do the update process and use QuickPwn afterwards to “open” your device. Note:

  • 2G iPhones can be jailbroken and unlocked
  • 3G iPhones can be jailbroken, but not unlocked
  • iPod Touch 1st generation can be jailbroken
  • iPod Touch 2nd generation can not be jailbroken

Our article will not cover the iPod Touch, but the iPhone.

II. Requirements

III. Warning

Jailbreaking and unlocking is illegal to be performed with iPhone devices that are part of a current agreement (mostly 12 or 24 months). You would violate your contract by jailbreaking and unlocking! Don’t do it.

  • If you’re updating: all your Cydia and Installer.app based applications will be lost and need to be installed again!
  • Make sure you make a backup of your data!

IV. Update iPhone firmware

  • connect your iPhone with your PC
  • start iTunes 8
  • choose your iPhone (under devices)
    itunes-01.jpg
  • hold the shift-key (on your keyboard) and do a mouse-click on the Update Button – a file-open window will pop up like this:
    itunes-02.jpg
  • locate the downloaded firmware 2.1 (named: iPhone1,1_2.1_5F136_Restore.ipsw) and open it
  • iTunes will begin to update your iPhone automatically
    itunes-03.jpg

    itunes-04.jpg

    itunes-05.jpg

    itunes-06.jpg

    itunes-07.jpg

    itunes-08.jpg
  • After having updated the iPhone will reboot. If you are using an already Pwned iPhone it will remain activated and unlocked, you only need to jailbreak.

IV. QuickPwning it :-)

  • Let your iPhone plugged to your computer
  • Close iTunes
  • Start QuickPwn 2.1-1
  • You will be greeted with the Device Detection screen, click the right-arrow to proceed:
    quickpwn-01.jpg
  • on the next window, click the Browse button to locate your iPhone1,1_2.1_5F136_Restore.ipsw firmware:
    quickpwn-02.jpg

    quickpwn-03.jpg
  • QuickPwn will check if the firmware matches the version currently running on your iPhone and will allow you to proceed (click the right-arrow):
    quickpwn-04.jpg
  • the next windows allows you to select, what you want to install. We recommend to install both Cydia and Installer.app. If your iPhone has not been unlocked until now, here you can also choose to simunlock it. As we are quite conservative: we never change the boot logos, but this seems to be a matter of taste. After having selected, click the right-arrow button to proceed.
    quickpwn-05.jpg
  • For safety reasons, QuickPwn will remind you to leave your iPhone plugged to your computer, click the right-arrow button to proceed
    quickpwn-06.jpg
  • Read and follow the instruction on this window very carefully! QuickPwn will help you counting!
    quickpwn-07.jpg
  • After that, QuickPwn will take control and perform the following actions automatically:
    quickpwn-08.jpg

    quickpwn-09.jpg

    quickpwn-10.jpg
  • When all the tasks have been completed, QuickPwn has finished.
    quickpwn-11.jpg
  • Your iPhone will perform some more actions for the next few minutes. It will show it is changing the NOR and so on and will reboot then.

After having rebooted your iPhone will be perfectly jailbroken and unlocked

V. Final words

Guys, we hope we could clarify some more things here than others did. We appreciate your comments on this. Kudos to all of you and remember to consider our sponsors, they really got the coolest offers ;-) Kudos fly out to the iPhone Dev Team! Live long and prosper, guys.

[Stories] List of Berlin Policemen’s fon numbers leaked

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It seems like Germany is about to overlap our British fellows. The union of the Berlin Police (GdP) had to admit yesterday that a list of Policemen’s cell fon numbers has been leaked to the internet. Besides fon numbers of normal policemen the list also includes numbers of executives working in special task forces. It now is suspected criminals may use cell phone locating techniques to find out the where-abouts of specific executives. Policemen are prompted to change their number as soon as possible.

[iPhone] Recommended Apps: Avatron Air Sharing

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We already reported about Avatron’s Air Sharing some weeks ago. This really is the App of the Week. Avatron Air Sharing allows copying files from and to the iPhone wireless, thus allowing to use the iPhone similar to a portable hard drive. The only condition is to use a WebDAV compatible up- and download program. Moreover it is an excellent PDF reader. It stores the pages of all the PDFs you’ve opened yet.

Find some more details and the AppStore Link here in our recent article…

[Stories] Germany now Losing Private Data, aswell

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Recently we reported about how different british administrations and companies deal with data privacy of their employees and customers. They lost so many data, we continental Europeans never thought we could ever make that up again.

As a German, I can now proudly tell you guys: T-Mobile Germany alone lost more data sets during a hack than you guys have lost knowingly lost since 2007 ;-) The T-Com’s data sets consist of fone numbers, names, streets, account numbers, email addresses and so on. All in all 14 million cell phone customers’ data sets have been stolen. Moreover T-Com officials had to admit, that besides all the datasets of us John-Doe’s, they lost also lots of datasets by politicians, celebrities and so on. And now the real deal: that hack took place two years ago, but the T-Com didn’t tell their customers (me sic!). Parts of the datasets have obviously been already offered for sale on the internet yet.

The T-Com says this was not an amateur hack. I hope we can believe them…

[Stories] German Unity Day

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For you guys around the world: today is national holiday here in Germany. Eighteen years ago, both German states became reunited. A day where we may pause for a moment and look back, what happened.

Our team members have been born between 1968 and 1975 – all of us in the western part of Berlin. Having grown up in the 1980s our consciousness eventually told us, that it possibly is not normal to live in a city that was surrounded by a Wall. We could buy everything and we had a western standard of living. But the military police was driving in the streets from time to time and so did helicopters fly over our heads every day in the morning and in the evening. We were caged. Comfy caged…

This way of caging 2 million people continued to have an effect a long time on after the reunification in 1990. For many people from Berlin-West until now it still is strange to be able to drive around the surrounding area of Berlin. We never learnt to drive through the hinterland. Many of us still say “driving to the east”… Anyway all of our team members nowadays live in the eastern part of Berlin and we really feel at home here. It seems our desire for finding out what behind the wall is, has been pleased in the end.

You’d better visit Berlin, gals and guys. Come here and find out why all the other who came here, want to stay here…

» Wikipedia on German Reunification…
» Wikipedia on German Unity Day…

[Windows] Unleash Vista with Language Packs

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I. Abstract

One of the obstacles with Windows in earlier times was: you could not simply change the language from say german to english or german to french. For me as a german loving the languages this always was a big prob. I saw the easiness of changing languages under Linux and wondered. Now with Windows Vista you can also install and use up to 16 different languages.

As always with Windows operating systems there are also limitations: changing of languages is (officially) only supported by Windows Vista Ultimate. Although you might choose any language during installation of Windows Vista Basic or Home Premium or what ever, you sadly will not be able to officially change it once you installed it. But by digging the dark places of the net, we found there are ways to change the language even in non Ultimate versions. With the help of a tool called “Vista MUI Tool”, which is being developed by some chinese guys, you can enable multi language on all Vista versions. Anyway this topic will not be covered here, because we ain’t got no Vista Basic version here. But we confess to come back to the “Vista MUI Tool” in a short while, simply because activating functions that have been disabled is an interesting topic for all of us, isn’t it?

The following short article will deal with changing the language in an Vista Ultimate version by using onboard tools – no modifications required. As an ultimate user using it in english you’ll enjoy the following advantages: you will have access to the  Windows Ultimate features (english only!) and to tons of different Widgets, that are also available in english, only.

II. Premises

For following this little tutorial and for playing with me the following 15 minutes, you need the following:

  • Windows Vista Ultimate (go and buy it, it really got cute effects, once you got used to it, you wonder how crappy XP looks like in contrast)
  • Have Administrator privileges
  • a little concentration, although there won’t be too much Zen in this article

III. Installing new languages

Have Vista booted and be logged in as user with admin privileges. In the following example we’re gonna install a french language pack while we are running an english language version. Do the following:

  1. Click the Start button and choose the Windows Update:
    vista-language-pack-01.jpg
  2. The Windows Vista Update window will open and you click show available updates (on the screenshot partly german: verfügbare Updates anzeigen)
    vista-language-pack-02.jpg
  3. A window gets opened then where you can choose your updates, besides the language updates there may be others, but hic et nunc we’re not gonna deal with those. Choose the languages you wanna install and click the install button.
    vista-language-pack-04.jpg

    Note: (automatic background download and) installation of languages takes time. We experienced it may take up to 10 minutes per language pack. So better install them manually, not all of them at once. Each language pack is 300-500MB download size and requires between 1GB to 2GB space on your harddisk!
  4. There will be a security question if you really want to install the language pack. Click the Continue button.
    vista-language-pack-04a.jpg
  5. The download begins and then it gets automatically installed. This will take time now. Instead of wasting your precious time, you may consider some advertisements on our site, would you?
    vista-language-pack-05.jpg

    vista-language-pack-07.jpg
  6. When the installation is finished and your screen looks like that (at least the symbols ;-) You’re good to go then.
    vista-language-pack-08.jpg

You may repeat this step with as much language packs you need.

IV. Activating the new language

So after having prepared all the required languages, we really like to use them. Do the following:

  1. in Vista click the Start button and open the Control Center
    vista-language-activ8-01.jpg
  2. In the area Clock, Language, Region choose Change display language
    note: click the Control Panel Home button, in case you’re in Classic View
    vista-language-activ8-02.jpg
  3. In the field Choose a display language select your language and click the Apply button
    note: after having clicked Apply it may take some seconds to some minutes
    vista-language-activ8-03.jpg
  4. Windows will want you to log out to apply the language changes:
    vista-language-activ8-04.jpg

After logging in again you’ll have the selected language set

V. Final words
That should do for the moment. Next time we’re gonna take a Windows Vista Basic and unleash the language pack thing there. Ob Duh…