Cult of Mac: a blog about the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone - and the people who love them

It’s dangerous and illegal, but I like listening to music when I’m riding my bicycle. Nothing like a bit of techno to get the blood pumping on a foggy morning. Trouble is, sound-isolating earbuds — the ones you jam deep in your ear canals — can get you killed. They sound great, but they block that [...]


A freelance designer quit his job in the most original way yet. He created a custom warning dialog resembling the unexpected quit dialogs in OS X.
The message, posted on his work machine, says:
“The designer you treat like shit has quit unexpectedly.
Your company and other employees are not affected.
Click Renegotiate to discuss terms for new contract. [...]

More Thanksgiving iPhone app sale action.
At 8:00am ET tomorrow, the CoPilot Live turn-by-turn GPS navigation app will go on sale for $19.99. The app is normally $35 and has got generally good reviews. Gizmodo calls it the best cheap GPS app (it has some quirks, but what do you expect for $35? I mean $20?).
The [...]

Ommwriter is different. It’s a text editor, perhaps better described as a “writing environment” because text editor makes it sound like something you could write code in. And I can’t see many people using it for that.
Ommwriter plays ambient music and soundscapes while you work. The splash screen encourages you to stick headphones on while [...]

It’s dangerous and illegal, but I like listening to music when I’m riding my bicycle. Nothing like a bit of techno to get the blood pumping on a foggy morning. Trouble is, sound-isolating earbuds — the ones you jam deep in your ear canals — can get you killed. They sound great, but they block that [...]

Ommwriter is different. It’s a text editor, perhaps better described as a “writing environment” because text editor makes it sound like something you could write code in. And I can’t see many people using it for that.
Ommwriter plays ambient music and soundscapes while you work. The splash screen encourages you to stick headphones on while [...]

Until I tried Neuhaus Laboratories’ T-2 vacuum tube amp, I thought I had a pretty good speaker system hooked to my Mac. It was a three-piece ensemble with a pair of nice satellites and a honking big subwoofer. It pumped out 200-watts and I thought it sounded great.
But then I hooked up the T-2 Amplifier, [...]

Ninja Assassin the movie is an anticipated Hollywood swords and sandals epic from James McTeigue, director of V for Vendetta, with a story from J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5 and the only Spider-Man comic in which Dr. Doom cries (though the artist allegedly came up with that last bit).
It’s also now an [...]

If you jailbreak your iPhone, the first thing you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO is change the default filesystem password.
When you jailbreak, the filesystem’s password is set to the common password “alpine.” As people usually don’t bother changing this password after performing a jailbreak, it’s really easy for hackers to get access to any jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch [...]

Convert your mild-mannered Mac Pro into a hard drive speed demon.  Stuff it with drives fast enough to work with full-quality, uncompressed video. Get more than 300 MB/s on your internal drives! It’s so easy even I can do it!
I’ve been working in video production for the last 20+ years. When you’re working with video [...]

Some readers might remember the fuss a few weeks ago, when Snow Leopard came out and people noticed that it did something screwy to the way files behave.

By removing support for Creator Codes in 10.6, Apple also removed the system’s hitherto built-in ability to distinguish which application created a file, and re-open it in that [...]

George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released blackra1n RC3, which is an update to a 1-click jailbreak that adds activation options and an add-on blacksn0w, which unlocks latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS baseband version 05.11.07. To use blacksn0w, make sure you have this new baseband (check under Settings –> General –> About –> Modem Firmware) [...]