Tips & Tricks: 10/25/11

OS X Daily: Check What Software Updates Have Been Installed in Mac OS X

Check What Software Updates Have Been Installed in Mac OS X
Apple TV Set Being Developed by the Creator of iTunes
Increase the Contrast of a PDF to Sharpen & Darken Text

Check What Software Updates Have Been Installed in Mac OS X

Posted: 25 Oct 2011 01:11 AM PDT

Check installed software updates

Forget what Software Updates you’ve installed? You can easily check in Mac OS X:

Open “System Preferences” from the  Apple menu
Click on “Software Update” and then choose the “Installed Software” tab

From here you’ll see the precise installed date and time, the software update package name, and the version of each update listed.

This list can be helpful to look through for troubleshooting purposes, or if you’ve ignored some updates and plan to install them manually through the command line or by downloading the packages from Apple.

Apple TV Set Being Developed by the Creator of iTunes

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 07:51 PM PDT

Apple HDTV

More details have emerged regarding the development of an Apple TV set. Hot off the revelation that Steve Jobs was interested in creating a Apple television, Bloomberg is reporting that the creator of iTunes is now working on the Apple HDTV project:

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project.

Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple's internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn't public.

Bloomberg also mentions that Apple has a prototype in the works, and the TV set may be released sometime between 2012 and 2013. Two of the features of the HDTV set may be iCloud integration, which Steve Jobs himself mentioned, and the inclusion of Siri, the personal assistant and voice-based interface currently exclusive to the iPhone 4S.

One of their sources does caution that “it's not guaranteed that Apple will release a television”, and Bloomberg notes that outside of the comments made by Steve Jobs himself in his biography, Apple hasn’t acknowledged the projects existence, which isn’t unusual for the secretive company. The current Apple TV set-top box sells for $99 and runs a variation of iOS.

Increase the Contrast of a PDF to Sharpen & Darken Text

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 10:32 AM PDT

Increase contrast of a PDF

With Preview you can adjust the contrast of a PDF, this makes the text sharper and darker, and for scans or dubious quality PDF’s this makes them significantly easier to read.

Open the PDF with Preview
From the ‘File’ menu, choose “Export”
Click on the “Quartz Filter” drop-down menu and choose “Lightness Decrease”
Choose “Save”

For a very practical example, I noticed this was sorely needed after downloading Guy Kawasaki’s freely available “The Macintosh Way” book, which is a great look at early Apple history. Unfortunately the PDF’s text is very light making it difficult to read, but the Quartz Filter mentioned above greatly helps this. The downside you may notice with some files (including The Macintosh Way) is an increase in noise. That noise is most noticeable on older PDF’s of scanned books or documents, and at times the trade-off may not be worth it.

Increase the contrast of a PDF to make the text more readable

Gizmo's Freeware: Use This Undocumented Keyboard Shortcut for Faster Text Editing in Windows

Link to Gizmo's Freeware: Top selections

Use This Undocumented Keyboard Shortcut for Faster Text Editing in Windows

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 11:30 PM PDT

Hmm, this is interesting; a useful Linux shortcut that works in Windows as well. Just as interesting are the additional suggestions made by some of our users in the comments to this article.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/use-undocumented-keyboard-shortcut-faster-text-editing-windows.htm

HackmeOut !

Download Varalakshmi Vratham | Sri Suktham Audio

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 10:51 AM PDT

Hi guys,I know this is totally out off topic but I want upload this as a tribute to my grandfather.He is a very good and talented person with a lot of interests and one of them being Telugu Literature.In this post I'll be providing 2 of hist recording which will help you to person "Varalakshmi Vratham" and "Sri Suktum" in Telugu.These recordings give you a full detailed description of the pooja and how to perform it along side.Even though the quality of sound is not perfect it still audible.This is also a valid pooja for Telugu Lakshmi Pooja

Here is the Download Link for both the files.These are audio files.

Sound 1.mp3

Sound 2.mp3

Note: Both the recordings are in Telugu and only people who follow Telugu can understand this Pooja.Please leave a "Thanks" comment if it came of use.My mother will someday show it my Grandad !

If your not understanding what is going on! Just skip this post and go the next one!Its hard to explain.

Keywords: Varalakshmi Pooja,Varalakshmi Kalash Pooja,Sravana VaraLakshmi Vratham

Hack Facebook Password Recovery

Posted: 24 Oct 2011 10:08 AM PDT

This is a very good technique that can be used to restore and retrieve any Facebook account as long you have at least smallest of a clue of the person whom you want to hack.If not,I'll provide you a few sties which will help you find out more about him and quite easily answer his recovery settings.Even though this method has only 50%-50% chances of recovering a password.It is at least worth a try.If not we have to go to other alternative options of Facebook Hacking

Matching Faces

I thought about this method as I was showing a friend through Teamviewer the pictures that Facebook was showing me to identify the target's friends. And obviously, I was clueless because I did not whom i was even trying to hack.

What did I do? Well, as you can see the screenshot.

1.Suspicion

2.Security question

3.Confirm Identity

4.Confirm identity by identifying the friends on that account.

Before you try answering any of the questions go to some of these sites and check out what they do.They give you list of email address,nicknames,phone number and other details which the user would have entered on the "World Wide Web".

1.http://com.lullar.com/

2.http://www.pipl.com/email/

3.http://www.spokeo.com

4.http://www.emailfinder.com

5.http://www.zabasearch.com/

6.http://www.zoominfo.com

Facebook provides the names of the target's friends. So, use that information to essentially bypass the security of identification by searching those names on Facebook search and matching the faces based on the Target's friends.

It will only ask you match faces if you are logging in with the correct password or if you get picked up from a different location.

Note that will need an extra Facebook account to search, otherwise Facebook does not let you search. Close the 'Suspicion' page and log in to your extra or your actual Facebook account and search for the Target's friends.

Be sure to notice where your target lives so on the results you can compare whether if the friend is the matching face or not. Be sure to notice the names of the friends as well.

For example, if the name choices are:
George Bush
Adolf Hitler
Barrack Obama
Mohammed Ali
Lee Chang

And the picture given is of an middle eastern descent looking person, you should obviously go with the name that sounds middle eastern.

Once you match the faces for the identification questions. You should be able to get in without a problem.

Apart from just blindly following this method.You should also try to apply a little of your head into this game.You can actually chat with your victim and extract all the details !