There’s currently no Apple-provided method to securely erase your iPhone’s data, and previous owners’ data has been found on refurbished phones on sale at Apple. If you want to make your iPhone safe for resale by securely wiping any trace of your personal information from it, it’s possible—though not easy. Security guy Jonathan Zdziarski posted his method for doing so, which requires jailbreaking your phone (here’s how), then getting shell access to its hard drive, and wiping its two partitions clean using some command line fu. Warning: I have not tried this on my own iPhone, so proceed with the utmost caution. Zdziarski says the whole process can take an hour or two. Of course wiping your regular old computer hard drive is a lot easier—just grab a free utility like Eraser or Wipe Disk to do so. Update: There are a couple other good reasons to SSH into your iPhone—to copy music and other media off of it to your computer, to use it as a SOCKS proxy to get your computer online, to wirelessly sync it in Linux, and now, to wipe your data. iPhone Wipe [Nuclear Elephant via Hackaday]
The newest beta of Mac instant messenger Adium boasts a super-cool new feature—the ability to pop a new chat when one of your contacts starts typing a message to you (but before he or she hits Send.) Neat! [via]
One of our favourite Google products you forgot all about—Google Trends—now offers comparison data as a CSV spreadsheet-friendly file. You’ve got to be signed into your Google Account to see the “Export this page as a CSV file” link. Here’s the Google Trends comparison of searches for “GTD” versus “Lifehacker”.
Windows only: Let’s say you’ve put together a killer USB PC repair kit filled to the brim with antivirus, file recovery, and adware removal tools, but shortly after you plug your thumb drive into the infected machine—in the midst of your repair—your thumb drive is affected as well. Freeware portable application Thumbscrew protects your thumb drive from being written to so that your data remains safe no matter where it’s plugged in. Even if you don’t need it for PC repair purposes, it could still prove useful for keeping your files safe from the kids or something else along those lines. Thumbscrew is freeware, Windows only. Thumbscrew [Iron Geek via MakeUseOf]
Mac user Adam Laiacano came up with a neat way to embed his iCal calendar on his desktop—in text, using our favourite text calendar, Remind. You’ve already seen how to keep your calendar in plain text with Remind, and embed it on your desktop using GeekTool. Laiacano came up with AppleScript that converts his iCal calendar into Remind-friendly files to get the best of both worlds—the pretty iCal GUI, and the GeekTool text heads-up display. After the jump, see Laiacano’s desktop in full and get the script.
The Atlantic Monthly’s Nicholas Carr is worried that his increasing reliance on the internet for research and other information has made him stupid: …what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
The author dives deep into many perceived effects of the internet on the way he thinks, bolstering his argument with anecdotes about other technologies, like the printing press, and their very real influence our thought processes.
If you’ve clicked through to a company’s web site from a Google search only to be force-fed a minute-long Flash intro video before you get to the actual content, Google’s taken a step to make your life better by adding Skip intro links to results for web sites with intro videos. Handy.
Given the rate that Apple trashes Microsoft products, it’s pretty interesting that the most significant updates to the iPhone 3G and Mac OS involve adding Microsoft Exchange support. Tech site MacUser reports that the next version of OS X—10.6, “Snow Leopard”—is more of a performance upgrade than feature-packed release, but it will include Exchange server support out of the box for the corporate types who get their email in Outlook. Does this mean your Windows-only corporate office will open its doors to Macs? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Apple Previews Mac OS X Snow Leopard to Developers [Apple] The black and white of Snow Leopard [MacUser]Mac OS X only: Capture the attention of onlookers and enhance your presentation chops with Mouseposé, a simlple application that slightly dims your entire screen except for a halo around your mouse cursor. In addition to mouse highlighting, Mouseposé creates a special animation when you click, double-click, or right-click your mouse. It also displays your keystrokes in an overlay at the bottom of the screen, if enabled. In short, Mouseposé is a perfect tool for presentations, especially if you’re recording a screencast or something along those lines. The downside: Mouseposeé only works for 5 minutes at a time unless you’re willing to shell out $17 for a full licence. We mentioned it once before a couple years back, but it’s come a long way since then. Mouseposé [Boinx Software via Mac OS X Hints]
Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there’s a very good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a few clicks of your mouse.
