flop ya mac out

The guys get themselves some 2.0 action - in the iPhone department. Jason continues to craft his master travel plan, and Daniel learns how to Precipitate.

As someone who is gearing up to head overseas, I’ve put my laptop into somewhat of a lock-down mode, password protecting everything to make sure that it can’t be molested if it falls into the wrong hands abroad.

However, the drawback of such tight security is that (with the omission of physical labelling), if my laptop falls into the right hands, there’s no way the finder can figure out who the laptop actually belongs to.

Enter this handy hint, sourced from Apple’s own Leopard Security Configuration Guide. The hack allows you to place a custom phrase in the OS X Leopard Login Screen, just above the user name and password.

Crank up the terminal, and enter the following:

su [your admin username]
sudo -s
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText “This laptop belongs to Jason Deacon, and you don’t.”

Of course, you may want to garnish your welcome message with maybe a contact phone number, email address or more impressive message than the example here.

The beauty of this hack is that as your contact details change when you travel, updating them is a simple as re-entering this into terminal. No more re-printing labels on the road, and you’re able to enter much more information here, too.

The Apple Security Guide is a good read, which I thoroughly recommend if you’ve got an eye for that sort of thing. We’ll explore more security tips in time!

Bubble Bobble, Canasta and turkeys are all things that do not get discussed in this special pre-iPhone 3G episode. Some MobileMe is thrown in for texture along with some Microsoft to sour the dish and a sprinkle of Telstra bashing is added to taste.

Dan and Jase dive into the jungle of iPhone 3G plans released thus far. And is Apple getting physical for the corporate world? Bob gets epic with his feature film explaining iPhone 2.0 Software and Telstra scores an elephant stamp from Jason.

Who would win a wrestling match between Steve Balmer and Steve Wozniak? Jason whispers sweet nothings about saving space. iPhone 3G release looms closer and eBay comes under scrutiny by the ACCC.