Thankfully, there is an easy answer to this that covers most of your bases when dealing with CDs: Use the Apple Lossless Codec. It’s a fine way of compressing files into smaller packages than WAV rips without losing quality, and iTunes has supported Apple Lossless since 2004 which means it’s widely supported now beyond the Apple world.

But even though lossless files are smaller than uncompressed WAV rips, they’re still considerably larger than a good 320kbps or high-bitrate VBR MP3 file—usually between 2 to 3 times larger, depending on the song. And if you’re going to be listening to it all on your $US15 Magnavox computer speakers, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference, so stick with MP3. But if you’ve got good headphones or speakers, you’ll appreciate the added audio resolution and the pleasing absence of the compressed sound that even a well-encoded, high-bitrate MP3 can possess.

So if you’re ripping your new CDs and have plenty of storage (which is, after all, ridiculously cheap these days), make sure you encode in a pristine Apple Lossless file to save space over WAV but at zero loss of audio resolution.

But when’s the last time you bought a CD?

If you want to extend the lossless kick to your online music acquisitions, you’re going to invite a few more file formats into your life that don’t play so nicely with iTunes and iPods. Most common among these is FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec that is used to encode much of the high-quality lossless music you’ll find available to download on discerning Torrent sites and most serious live music archives (including the fabulous Archive.org treasure trove). So let’s deal with that little obstacle and get FLAC files to play nice with our iProducts, shall we? And even if you get tired of having 2-3 times less music on your iPod or iPhone, you can always keep a lossless copy on your home machine and re-encode to smaller MP3s for mobile use without losing the original.

What You’ll Need
• For OS X: Fluke (Free)
• For Windows: dBpoweramp (Free limited version will still get the job done)

Dealing With FLAC Files
While Apple Lossless is great for files you encode yourself from source, like we said, you don’t see it too often around the web, where FLAC is favoured. So to use FLAC files efficiently at home and on the go, we’ll need to do a bit of converting. But it’s all relatively painless.

For Mac:

1. Download Fluke, an excellent software package created by Dmitry Kichenko that provides nearly seamless support for FLAC files in iTunes. What it actually does is install a free QuickTime plugin to allow QT to play FLAC files in the OGG container, then fools everyone into thinking your FLAC is actually an OGG container. Confused? It doesn’t matter. It works.

2. Once Fluke is installed, you’ll have a Fluke app in your Applications folder. To add FLAC files to iTunes, just drag them onto the Fluke icon (you can keep it in your dock) and they’ll be converted and added automatically. If you have iTunes set to copy files to your library folder, it will do that.

3. Now you can play your FLAC file through iTunes like normal, with full tagging support just like an MP3 (the only thing you can’t do is add album art). If you’re going to be moving the file to your iPod, you can use iTunes’ built-in encoder to make a still-lossless switch to Apple Lossless, which should be almost the exact same size as your FLAC. Enjoy your audiophile vinyl rips the way they were intended!

For Windows
If you’re a windows user and dealing primarily with FLAC files, it may make mores sense to use Winamp or another non-iTunes media manager along with the standard FLAC codecs. But if you want to play FLAC on an iPod, you’ll have to convert it to something else eventually, so you may as well use Apple Lossless for better file size than a straight WAV.

1. Download and install dBpoweramp. You’ll get a trial version of the for-pay Reference version, but after 30 days it will rever to the free version, which will still convert FLAC to Apple Lossless, which is what we’re going to do.

2. Once it’s downloaded, right-click on any FLAC file on your computer and select “Convert to” and choose Apple Lossless in the drop-down. The first time you do this, you’ll be prompted to download an additional codec pack. Do that.

3. Once your codec is installed, you can select as many FLAC files at a time as you want and quickly convert them to Apple Lossless. For huge conversion jobs, you can use dBpoweramp’s batch encoder.

4. Add your new Apple Lossless files to iTunes, and you’re done!

Now go grab some well-recorded (and free) FLAC music from Archive.org. Ahh, doesn’t that sound better?

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Have a good weekend listening everyone! And if you’re into audio, you’re going to love Gizmodo next week. Stay tuned.

Lots of us have been using the iPhone 3.0 beta full-time. Now we’re rolling back, because it is decidedly NOT ready. Here’s how to downgrade back to 2.2.1 if you are in a similar predicament.

Being the compact Mac Mini (and involving 2.5-inch laptop drives), you knew it would be a bit more complicated than your standard, tower bay component swap. The process does require a few moments of soldering and careful notation of various internal wires/sensors, but the tutorial has big, beautiful pictures to hold your hand every step of the way.

Also, to make things a bit easier, they’re offering a 1TB, 5400RPM upgrade kit for $US250 that includes all the necessary tools and components. You could maybe do it cheaper, but that’s how these guys pay the bills for these fancy tutorials. [iFixit]

There are a lot of netbooks on which you can install and run OS X, but if you’re mindful of the handy comparison chart those lads at Boing Boing Gadgets have compiled, you’ll know that the Mini 9 is about as ideal a platform as you’ll find for a Hackintosh ultraportable: Everything from wi-fi, sound and the function keys down to the optional integrated mobile broadband card and the SD card reader are supported and work as they should. No hardware compromises at all. It’s awesome.

Generally, there are two ways to approach a Hackintosh install: Using a “slipstreamed” OS X installer image that’s been modified to install on non-Apple hardware, or using a $129 factory-fresh retail OS X install disk in tandem with a special bootloader that does the necessary tweaking to let the install happen. The former can be easy enough, but it’s pretty much illegal since it contains a pirated OS X install disk, and on top of that you’ll run into all kinds of problems should you ever want to upgrade your OS or software via Software Update.

By using a retail OS X disk, you stay mostly out of pirate waters, and ensure that once everything’s up and running, you’ll be as close as is possible to having an actual Mac. Here we’re doing that, using a method referred to as the “Type11″ install, cooked up by a fellow of the same handle and his colleagues over on the MyDellMini forums, a fantastic resource.

Even though we’re using a standard retail-purchased copy of OS X, the disclaimer: Apple does not like Hackintoshing. It violates the OS X EULA, and probably won’t make the Dell folks too happy either, should you need to return your hacked Mini 9 for service. So, as always, proceed at your own risk.

On a personal note let me tell you, it’s worth it. The Mini 9 is a beautiful OS X machine. So let’s get started.

What You’ll Need

• Dell Mini 9 With 16GB SSD or higher (8GB SSDs will techincally work, but it will take some fiddling not covered by this guide)

• Retail copy of OS X 10.5.x (NOT an OEM copy that comes with a new Mac)

• A USB flash drive 8GB or higher

• An external USB DVD drive

• The “Type11″ Bootloader: DellMiniBoot123v8.01.iso.zip (download link in this forum post)

• Blank CD to burn bootloader image (I actually used version 8.0 of Type11 on my CD-if your boot process with 8.01 is different than what’s spelled out in this guide, you can download 8.0 here. Both should work.)

• Windows PC for preparing the flash drive (if DVD drive works fine, this is optional)

Preparing Your Boot Loader

The easiest way to use both the Type11 bootloader (burned to a bootable CD) and your OS X install DVD is via the external USB DVD drive. The catch is, some drives are mysteriously not compatible with installing OS X on the Mini 9. Mine was one of those drives—the bootloader CD would work without a hitch, but it would choke on the OS X install disk every time. Thankfully, it’s also possible to run both the bootloader and the OS X install disk off of a USB flash drive. I’m going to spell out my method here, which actually included both approaches, but try an external DVD drive first, and if yours is compatible, your life will be a little easier than mine was. On the other hand, if you don’t have an external drive, you can give the USB flash drive method a shot.

The general approach here it to boot from the Type11 bootloader, which allows you install, run and update OS X; once you’re up to 10.5.6, you can install a suite of Mini 9 specific drivers so you don’t have to rely on the bootloader anymore.

1. Unzip the DellMiniBoot123v8.01.iso and burn it to a CD with Disk Utility or a similar Windows tool (don’t just drag the ISO file to a disk). Pop that disk into your external DVD drive, connect it to your Mini 9 and power it on, then press 0 (zero) at startup to bring up the list of bootable devices.

2. Choose CD/DVD from the list, which will bring you into the bootloader. Choose the first option, “Install Retail OS X 10.5″ which will bring you to a command prompt that says “boot:”

3. Take out the bootloader disk and pop in your retail OS X install DVD, keeping the PC running. (You can power your external drive off and then on again to make sure everything’s kosher.) Press Escape at the boot: prompt to bring up the drive options. The Type11 installer uses hex codes to choose which device you’re booting from, which you can assign at any time from the boot prompt by pressing escape: enter “9f” for the external DVD drive or “80″ for the primary internal SSD. Here we’re booting from the external CD drive, so press escape, Type “9f” then press enter.

4. At this point, the OS X installer will either load or it won’t. If it does, great. You can skip to step 12. If not, you’ll need to do what I did, and transfer everything to a USB flash drive to install that way.

Preparing a USB Stick Instead Of/In Addition To a Boot CD

This is based on a tutorial found on the MyDellMini forums by “bmaltais”—bigup to him.

5. Open up Disk Utility and partition your USB drive (8GB or larger) into two partitions: one 200MB FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition named “TYPE11″ and one with the remainder of the free space formated as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) called OSXDVD.

6. Move to a Windows PC (I know, I know), plug in your USB stick and download Syslinux-this is a utility that will make the FAT32 partition of your USB stick bootable. With the Windows Command Prompt, cd over to the “win32″ subdirectory of the Syslinux directory you downloaded and type the following, where “F:” is the drive letter for the TYPE11 partition on your USB stick:

syslinux -ma F:

You won’t get any confirmation, but if you receive no error messages, you’re good: This copies a single file named ldlinux.sys (invisible in Windows) to the USB drive to make it bootable. Pop it out and go back to your Mac if that’s what you’re using.

7. Now, unzip the Type11 ISO (instead of burning it to a disk) and copy the whole directory structure to the TYPE11 partition. Do NOT overwrite the “ldlinux.sys” when it asks—you want to keep the one you copied over with Syslinux.

8. To fill up the other partition, insert your OS X install DVD and, in Disk Utility, select it and choose “New Image.” Save it to the OSXDVD partition of your USB drive as “live.dmg” with “compressed” as the type and encryption set to “none.” This’ll take about a half hour to rip the DVD to an image, which should weigh in at around 6.4 GB give or take.

9. After that’s done, go to Terminal and copy your mach kernel file to the OSXDVD partition by typing this:

sudo cp /mach_kernel /Volumes/OSXDVD

10. And finally, download this zip file, uncompress it and copy the System and Library folders inside to your OSXDVD partition. This is the last bit of magic needed to make your Mini 9 think it’s working with an actual OS X install DVD.

11. On your Min
i 9, restart it and enter the BIOS setup by pressing “2″—and make sure legacy support for USB devices is enabled. Now, reboot and select the boot options list by tapping 0 at startup and choose USB Storage. Select the OSXDVD partition to boot from and press Enter. This should load up the familiar Apple and the OS X installer window.

Install OS X

While you’re installing and doing initial configuration of OS X, everything will be all warped to 800×600 rather than your Mini’s native 1024×600 res. Don’t worry, this will be fixed soon enough.

12. The first thing you need to do is format your SSD. Bring up Disk Utility in the installer select it at the highest level possible. Go to “Partition” and make it a single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition. Before hitting Apply, go to Options and select GUID Partition Table. Then hit apply.

13. Now, go back to the Installer, and install OS X to the SSD you just partitioned. You will definitely want to choose to customise your install to save SSD space—I would ditch all the printer drivers and language packs you don’t need to save space. If you install with the default options though, don’t worry—all can be removed later. The install will take about an hour, so go fix yourself a drink. You may come back to an Install Error message at the very end (I didn’t), but if you do, don’t worry. It’s normal.

14. Once OS X is installed, it’s still not ready for use right off the drive. On your first reboot, make sure you boot back into the Type11 bootloader on your CD or flash drive, as your new OS X partition is still not bootable without it.

This is, however, where a bit of weirdness set in for me. The Type11 partition on my USB disk would NOT recognise my fresh OS X install on the Mini 9 SSD. It just would not boot it. The Type11 boot CD I had made (with version 8.0 of Type11) DID recognise it, however, and booted it just fine. So bear that in mind here—even if you weren’t using an external drive before, you still might need one.

15. So now you boot back into the Type11 CD and choose option 1 (”Install Retail OS X 10.5″) again, even though you’re not installing. This takes you back to the boot prompt. This time, hit Escape, and type the code “80″ for your SSD (as opposed to “9f” for the external DVD). Press enter, and then back at the “boot:” prompt, type “-f” with no quotes before hitting enter again to boot. This will load all of OS X’s kernel extensions (.kexts) to make sure wi-fi and everything works. OS X should boot, and you’ll go through the typical OS X setup process. Notice the webcam and—hopefully—networking are already working!

ONE MORE NOTE: If networking isn’t working, don’t panic. On my first boot from the SSD, wi-fi didn’t work. But after a restart and another boot from the bootloader CD (with the “-f” option) it worked fine. Throughout this process, if anything is screwy, before you panic and start Googling new strategems, simply re-do the last step that failed—it’s often that easy.

Free Up Space and Update OS X to 10.5.6

Now that you’ve booted from the fresh install on the SSD, it’s time to update to 10.5.6 (if necessary). After a default install, I only had a gig and change left on my 16GB SSD, so I had to dump some programs I wouldn’t need as well as all the printer drivers found at /Library/Printers. There is an app called Monolingual which can also help clear some space by removing unwanted language files and stripping out all legacy PPC code from your universal binaries.

16. Once you’ve cleared up enough space (if necessary, you’ll need around 6GB), go to Software Update and install the 10.5.6 update. This will take a long-arse time too (the SSD, strangely enough, seems to actually be slower on tasks that take tons of reads and writes).

17. After it’s done, restart, and boot into the Type11 bootloader one last time. This time you don’t have to use the “-f” flag. Once you’re booted, go to the DellMini9Utils folder on your Type11 CD or flash drive and run the DellEFI installer. This will load all of the Mini 9 .kexts and drivers as well as a special bootloader to boot your SSD install. Choose the easy install option and just let it do its magic.

18. After it’s done, you’ll be asked to reboot one final time. You won’t need to boot from the Type11 CD this time; you should boot straight off of your SSD like normal, and enter upon your fresh new OS X desktop, now in gloriously correct 1024×600 resolution. Awesome!

Configs, Tweaks and Fun Stuff

You’ll notice right away that OS X runs fantastically on the Mini 9. I was really stunned, and you probably will be too. Here are some things to make it even better:

• Follow this tutorial to get your mobile broadband working if your Mini 9 has it. Network preferences should recognise it out of the box.

• If you’re especially OCD, you can run the “AboutThisMac.pkg” inside the Type11 utilities folder to change “Unknown Processor” in the About This Mac window to the correct 1.6GHz Atom designation.

• This is a neat trick for fooling pesky oversized windows into shrinking themselves for your small screen.

• I haven’t had luck with this, but you can apparently enable some multitouch scrolling action on the Dell’s Synaptics touchpad by following these instructions.

Conclusion

So congrats, now you have a 100% functional OS X netbook. I’ve been using mine for a few days now, and it’s quite the machine for basic netbook activities-surfing, IM, email. It connects to my shared AirPort disk and streams my video collection (even high-def files) perfectly, and also backs up wirelessly over Time Machine. The 9-inch screen will make even your lower-res full-screen video look fantastic—YouTube or Hulu, QuickTime trailers and video rips are a pleasure to watch. Watching an episode of something in bed without lugging my 15-incher in with me is really nice.

In addition, I think I may have found the perfect toilet computer. No one wants to fight Windows on the throne. And of course it’s amazing for travelling. I’m about to take a trip to Cairo, and I’ll be bringing this little guy without a doubt.

Resources

Many thanks to everyone at the following sites:

• DellMyMini Forums: Mac OS X

• DellMyMini Forums: OS X: FAQs and How Tos

• OSX86 Wiki Guide

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your own Hackintoshing, and have a great weekend!

People buying new iPhones with 1.1.2 software will find that it’s not possible to install applications, like the must-have LucasArts game emulator. This video tutorial will teach you how to easily install applications and bypass activation in the iPhone. It’s not as straightforward as previous versions, but anyone can follow it.First, a few notes and warnings:
• Although it works great and is an easy procedure, do it all at your own risk.
• This process will NOT UNLOCK your iPhone. Only use it if you have a valid AT&T contract in the US or a T-Mobile, O2 or Orange contract in Germany, England or France.
• If you have an iPhone with 1.1.1, you don’t really need to upgrade to 1.1.2 at all, so you may save yourself the process and keep using 1.1.1 and enjoying your apps.
• Did I say RUN AT YOUR OWN RISK? OK.
• Since we don’t have chapters in our videos, you will have to pause the steps by hand.

Now, before starting the video tutorial you must download all the software you need for this:

• INdependence v1.3 beta 2 if you have a Mac or iBrickr if you have a PC.
• 1.1.2 Jailbreak
• If you have iTunes 7.5, you must download the Mobile component of iTunes 7.4.x (read the iNdependence Readme file for the download location and follow the simple instructions there).
• Apple Firmware 1.1.1

If you are using a Windows PC you will have to replace the Mac apps in the video with the Windows equivalent. In other words: instead of iNdependence use iBrickr. The jailbreak 1.1.2 file will work in both platforms, but you have to use the Windows.bat file. [Based on Trunkz's guide in Hackint0sh]

There’s no rock music, no B-actor on a skateboard, no spunky cheerleaders. The video, which you can watch for yourself, has nothing that would even apparently appeal to a youngin’ besides the fact that it comes in .mov form. Nevertheless, Conn’s Sec O’ State says, in her own press release:

“In today’s world it’s difficult to reach voters, especially younger ones, unless you’re using the same technology they use. So, I took a cue from my teenage children and decided we’d produce videos that people could download, and then watch when and where they want.”

My favorite line from the film is when they say the ballot looks like a “standardized test or lottery ticket”—they left out “depending on whether your collar is white or blue.” [YouTube and Conn Secretary of State via AP]