Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky’s book Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works will hit the shelves on January 25th, but that hasn’t stopped juicy tidbits of information from leaking out beforehand. An extended excerpt from the book hit the web today, and it reaffirms what we cultists already know: Apple is very, very secretive.

According to Lashinsky, Apple dances on the “link between secrecy and productivity” with excruciating precision. In fact, the only things Apple seems to prize more than its products are its secrets.

Some bits and bobs of tech just never seem to go away entirely no matter how much tech you own, and just as you always need to have a printer around for that rare printout, there’s always a need to have access to a scanner to digitize the stray scrap of paper or mottled receipt.

With so many people now ditching their laptops for iPads, the iConvert aims to fill a niche. Featyring a front feeder adjustable from between 2- and 8.5-inches wide, the iConvert can scan almost anything normal sized you throw at it, and digitize them directly to your iPad’s picture folder as 300 DPIs.

Pretty swank for the mobile road warrior looking to keep his portfolio of documents as svelte as his iPad 2. Couple this with an OCR app, you’re all set. $150 when it goes on sale in February, courtesy of Brookstone.

While the feature is currently still in beta, Apple is yet to extend Siri support to apps that aren’t already baked into the iOS operating system. But did you know that the company’s own Find My Friends app, which debuted alongside iOS 5 last summer, does include Siri support, allowing you to locate your pals using only your voice?

Here’s you to find your friends using Siri.

In last week’s Friday Night Fights, Cult of Android’s Vincent Messina and I argued about what was superior: the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display versus Android’s 4+ inch superphones. In my argument, I posited that one reason Android phones had such huge displays was because it allowed them to cram more battery into the device, but as it turns out, there’s a better reason: Android sucks at scaling UI elements.

Yesterday, we told everyone who was still rocking a jailbreak under iOS 4.3.3 (mainly iPad 2 users) to upgrade to the soon-to-be-jailbroken-for-A5-devices iOS 5.0.1 now, before Apple releases iOS 5.1, which closes the vulnerability. If you don’t, you might lose your chance for a jailbreak for good.

Here’s the caveat though. If you’re on an iPhone 4S and if you want to carrier unlock it down the line, don’t upgrade. iOS 5.0.1 has a different baseband than iOS 5, and while the Dev Team has an exploit for iOS 5 that they hope will lead to an unlock, they don’t know when or even if they’ll be able to crack open the later update.

I’m undoubtedly the least musically inclined person I know, which makes me furiously jealous as I watch my guitar playing friends pick up a guitar and serenade girls à la John Mayer. I need to learn how to play guitar, which is why I’m excited about this new iPad guitar accessory we came across at CES.  Ion Audio, makers of the iCade iPad arcade machine, unveiled their newest accessory that helps users perfect their guitar shredding chops on the iPad, so that even those of us without musical talent can look cool playing guitar.

Here’s a new cultural phenomenon: hand-me-down handsets. Owners of Apple’s hugely-popular iPhone are more apt than other cell phone consumers to either hand down their old device or sell it on the secondary market, researchers find. Indeed, Apple and carriers are discovering older iPhones are still money makers even after the latest device has grabbed the spotlight.

Do you have an old first or second gen iPod touch or iPhone? If so, you’re probably pretty red-faced with jealousy about all of those cool new iOS 5 features you’re missing out on: multi-tasking, reminders, iCloud, homescreen folders and so on.

There’s no reason your face has to be so flushed, though. Thanks to Whited00r, you can get iOS 5’s best features on your old iPod touch or iPhone 3G, no jailbreak required.

Remember the images of Android as unstoppable? Uh, it’s slowing down. Seems someone threw an iPhone 4S on the tracks and derailed the growth of the Google mobile operating system among new smartphone buyers. After the iPhone 4S’ October release, Android’s popularity with new phone buyers dropped from 61.1 percent to 46.9 percent.

Despite being decked out with new Macs, iOS devices, and accessories, customers visiting Apple’s SoHo store in New York City yesterday had better things to look at than the gadgetry. During a Q&A with White Collar star Matt Bomer, one crazy lady who had quite clearly been riding the magic jaybone decided it was a good time to rip off her shirt and begin screaming gibberish.

When your company is 120-years-old and synonymous with the light bulb, it can be difficult convincing prospective workers that you’re hip and with it. But GE thinks it has what it takes: the iPhone. An executive says its support of the Apple handset helps new employees see the global conglomerate as a ‘contemporary company.’

Wouldn’t it be useful to click a link in Finder that showed only files accessed or created today, yesterday, or within the last week? That would make it significantly easier to find files you’ve been working on but forgotten the location of.

Users of OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard already have this at their fingertips in the Finder sidebar, but Apple saw fit to remove it from OS X Lion, its latest release. Here’s how to restore it.

Since Apple launched Siri on the iPhone 4S back in October last year, hackers have been working their socks off to port the intelligent assistant to other iOS devices. But it seems all their hard work may have been wasted, because one guy claims he got Siri on his new iPod touch simply by restoring from an iPhone 4S backup.

Despite rumors that suggested its previous seed would be the last one before a public release, Apple has seeded another build of its OS X Lion 10.7.3 software to registered developers. The latest release sports the build number 11D46, and is available to download now from the Mac Dev Center.

Apple is expected to revolutionize television with a set of its own later this year, and while we’re all expecting the device to feature Siri, there’s very little else we know about it. But according to a relatively new Apple patent, credited to Steve Jobs, it may also feature digital video recording capabilities that allow you to save your favorite shows for viewing at a later date.

I rather like the look of these handmade wooden iPad stands from Woodpad here in the UK.

aTV Flash (black) from FireCore is the ultimate solution for supercharging your jailbroken second-generation Apple TV. It introduces some terrific features that we’d all love to have on the device as standard, including a web browser, weather and RSS feeds, a Last.fm radio, and support for a huge variety of media formats.

But aTV Flash is even better with its latest update, which adds even more features and greatly improves your Apple TV experience.

I’m lucky: the real Stonehenge is only about 40 minutes’ drive from my front door, so I can go and visit whenever I like. For students of prehistoric monuments who live further afield, the Stonehenge Experience app for iPad offers a tiny glimpse of what this ancient English stone circle is all about.

If you need information from Wikipedia, you’d best get it very quickly; in just a few hours, at 9 P.M. PST (5:00 UTC for our European readers), a coalition of sites across the web — including Wikipedia’s English site, Boing Boing and Reddit — will go dark for a day, displaying this page instead of their usual home pages.

Apple is looking to open a 7th retail store in the bustling metropolis of New York City, according to NY Daily News. The new store would be on Austin Street in Forest Hills. There are already 5 stores in Manhattan and one in Staten Island.

As Apple’s upcoming education event in New York City draws near, more information is leaking out about what to expect. The latest word on the street is that Apple exec Roger Rosner is in charge of the company’s digital textbooks tools.

The Wall Street Journal believes that Apple is set to unveil a new “digital textbook service” Thursday. As the head of iWork at Apple (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers), Rosner has been working on textbook creation tools for this week’s event.

For years, you’ve always been able to buy a Mac and get a $100 rebate for a free printer from Apple. That is no longer the case. The “Buy a Mac, get a free printer” promotion has officially been discontinued by Apple starting today, January 17th.

The suspense is nearly unbearable. After weeks and weeks of waiting for the iPhone 4S/iPad 2 untethered jailbreak, the release is only days away.

An interesting report from Boy Genius Report claims that Research In Motion is eyeing Samsung as its new daddy. The defunct BlackBerry-maker is apparently considering a last resort to stay afloat amid depressing sales and investor qualms.

According to BGR, Research In Motion wants to sell itself for up to $15 billion to Samsung. Considering the patent war that companies like Apple are fighting at present, Samsung could buy RIM to reinforce its patent portfolio. (Although RIM’s own portfolio may not be that valuable after all.)