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One of the default pictures included with the iPhone is a beautiful image of the Earth as seen from space. Unless you weren't paying attention, you saw this picture when you first purchased your iPhone, and you can still view it by going to Settings --> Wallpaper --> Wallpaper; it is the second image provided by Apple. Here is what it looks like as a wallpaper on an iPhone.

If you have ever wondered where this photograph came from, a recent post from Gizmodo sheds some light on the subject, although to get the full story you need to go to some more sources, including this page from the Swiss Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science. Here is a short version.

Apple isn't known as an acquisitive company, even when it's sitting on a huge pile of money. So in February, when Apple COO Tim Cook downplayed the notion that Apple's approximately $40 billion in cash reserves could trigger a shopping spree, no one was surprised.

When Apple does buy companies, it's almost always tight lipped about how they'll fit into its strategy. But when you look at Apple's history, some acquisitions stand out in terms of adding important features to existing product lines or opening doors into new markets. Here we offer 10 examples of Apple acquisitions that made their mark.

Apple finally gave us the date the first iPads will hit store shelves: April 3. We've been closely following the touch-screen tablet since Apple first announced it in late January, but here's a quick guide for your most essential questions about the device.

There are two versions of the iPad. Apple announced Friday that the Wi-Fi version will launch in the U.S. on April 3, followed by the Wi-Fi and 3G-capable edition later in the month. Both versions will hit Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K. in late April.

The price depends on your 3G needs and how much storage you require. The iPad's Wi-Fi-only version will start at $499 for 16GB of memory, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G edition will cost $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB, and $829 for 64GB.

You can preorder both versions starting March 12, and you can order it for delivery from Apple.com or reserve a Wi-Fi version to pick up on April 3 at any Apple retail store.

If you've ever wondered what caused massive hard drive failure or what a pretty much destroyed hard drive looked like, there's an app for you.

Drive Savers has created the DriveSaver app for the iPhone, calling it the "first online hard disk drive simulator," which it is, in all likelihood. The app is free. Of course, Drive Savers isn't being completely altruistic here - they're a data recovery company and want your business. But for those who aren't intimately familiar with the interior of their computers, the app is pretty cool.

Be forewarned: Turn the volume down a bit before playing with it - it's loud.

Apple may be the world’s most famously secretive tech company, but it’s impossible to be completely secretive about a press conference if you want the press to show up. So the week before the company holds one of its product launches, it issues invitations. With an Apple event that supposedly involves a tablet computer a bit over a week away, it’s instructive to review past invites and how the world reacted to them.

Most modern Macs—except for the MacBook Air and some MacBook models—offer both FireWire and USB connections. When shopping for an external hard drive, then, you have many options for something that will work with your Mac. Today, USB hard drives are more common and less expensive than FireWire or even FireWire/USB combo drives.

But ubiquity doesn’t necessarily equate to superiority. All other areas of comparison aside, what many people want to know is how the two technologies match up in terms of speed. USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 480 Mbps, versus 400 Mbps for FireWire 400 and 800 Mbps for FireWire 800. To get a sense of real-world performance, however, we ran drive tests on both a 2.4GHz 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 160GB, 5400RPM internal hard drive and a Mac Pro 3GHz 8-core system with a 250GB, 7200RPM internal drive (each with OS X 10.6.2 and 2GB of RAM installed).

"NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa--radar, satellites, Santa Cams and fighter jets," reads the NORAD Santa Web site. "Tracking Santa starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system consists of 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. On Christmas Eve, NORAD monitors the radar systems continuously for indications that Santa Claus has left the North Pole.

"The moment that radar indicates Santa has lifted off, we use our second detection system. Satellites positioned in geo-synchronous orbit at 22,300 miles from the Earth's surface are equipped with infrared sensors, which enable them to detect heat. Amazingly, Rudolph's bright red nose gives off an infrared signature, which allow our satellites to detect Rudolph and Santa.

"The third tracking system is the Santa Cam network. We began using it in 1998, which is the year we put our Santa Tracking program on the Internet. Santa Cams are ultra-cool, high-tech, high-speed digital cameras that are pre-positioned at many locations around the world. NORAD only uses these cameras once a year on Christmas Eve. The cameras capture images and videos of Santa and his reindeer as they make their journey around the world.

"The fourth system is made up of fighter jets. Canadian NORAD fighter pilots flying the CF-18 intercept and welcome Santa to North America. In the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15 or the F-16 get the thrill of flying alongside Santa and his famous reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and, of course, Rudolph."

Every designer needs a good collection of free fonts, when working on design projects weather your designing for the web or for print its always essential to have a good collection of fonts. Fonts can be very expensive especially when working on a design project with a small budget. This is a collection of the best free fonts created in 2009.

Open iTunes to preview and download songs from various artists including Weezer, Sarah McLachlan, Mannheim Steamroller and more!

Over the past two weeks, TidBITS readers around the world have been suggesting ideas for this year's 2009 TidBITS Gift Guide. Suggestions have included Apple hardware, games, utilities, USB devices, speakers, laptop bags, iPhone apps, and many more esoteric items. Now it's time to whittle down the suggestions into a guide to the top items to get for the Mac geeks in your life (and to add to your own list too, of course).

Please take a few minutes and vote in the 2009 TidBITS Gift Guide Survey, which is now open. Rate each item on a 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is the lowest ranking and 5 is the highest. If you're unfamiliar with an item, you can either check it out via the link provided before voting or just skip it. We'll collect votes through the end of the week, tally them, and publish the final results by 7 December 2009.

TidBITS has hit the decimal 1K of issues, enumerated as M in Roman numerals, 1111101000 in binary, and woo-hoo in English! Adam shares where they're at these days, and explains how they now determine success.

The North Coast Mac Users Group is putting on their 16th fundraising event!

The MCE or Macintosh Computer Expo is being held this year at the Petaluma Community Center in Petaluma CA and thousands of Macintosh enthusiast come from all over the North Bay to visit with Macintosh product vendors and attend informational workshops. Since 1991 the show has grown in attendance from around 300 to over 1,000 and is now the largest Expo of it’s type in the North Bay and second only to Macworld in San Francisco.

This year brings a new location and 10 exciting speakers and 3 different tracks. It will take place on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 from 10am to 5pm at the Petaluma Community Center in Petaluma, CA. There is free admission & free parking.

A beacon of creativity with boundless energy, Chase Jarvis is well known as a visionary photographer, director, and social artist. In The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You, Chase re-imagines, examines, and redefines the intersection of art and popular culture through images shot with his iPhone.

The pictures in the book, all taken with Chase’s iPhone, make up a visual notebook—a photographic journal—from the past year of his life. The book is full of visually rich iPhone photos and peppered with inspiring anecdotes.

Apple first started advertising their products in the late 1970s. The 80s showed a wide variety of ads, some of which served to convince consumers that they should purchase a computer, and specifically an Apple.

These ads were text-heavy and light on images, as were many computer and technology ads from that era.

Apple ads really came into their heyday during the 1990s, with the “Think Different” campaign, which became very popular as they featured a number of famous people.

Here’s a stunning compilation of some of Apple’s most notable advertisements from the 70s until the present day, including a few videos ads.

Here is a list of applications and their compatibility status with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the most recent operating system from Apple. Please collaborate by sharing your experiences using each application and by adding applications not already listed.

There are now four categories: UNKNOWN is for apps that are untested, OK for apps that work fine, NO for apps that do not work, and WARNING for those with some problems.

The Apple logo is one of the most famous logos in the world. Apple fans not only put this logo on their vehicles to show their loyalty, they go to the extreme of tattooing themselves with it, a level of dedication very few brands achieved. The logo is admired for it's simplicity and many meanings that people attach to it.

There are many theories about this logo and many of them are just that. Find out the truth, read the interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of the original Apple logo, who will tell you all about his design.

Apple gaming has come a long way in a short time, and estimates suggest there are over 13,000 games on the App Store. This means if you've just got yourself a new iPhone 3GS, 3G or iPod touch, the choice may be overwhelming.

Here is our pick of the best iPhone/iPod touch blockbuster games so far, with direct links to the App Store should a game take your fancy.

Apple introduced AirPort Wi-Fi networking just about 10 years ago at Macworld Expo (summer edition).

Watch the video of Phil Schiller jumping from a platform onto an inflatable pad while holding the "toilet seat" edition of the iBook. Jobs notes in the keynote that Apple worked over 18 months with Lucent to develop the system, which explains why AirPort worked more easily and better than any other 802.11b systems for years to follow. (56K modem! 10 Mbps Ethernet!)

Daisy Disk is the perfect example of one of those tools that should be built right into OS X.

It's the latest in disk visualization utilities -- software that scans your hard drive and lets you know which files are being hard drive hogs. But, it's the added features that turn this from basic to "wow, why didn't Apple develop something like this?"

Each section of your drive is color-coded for its specific purpose. The closest parts to the center of the graphic are the root levels. Going further out will net you very specific details on file sizes. Clicking on one section move it to the forefront and let you see everything on that level. When you get down to the files themselves, tap the space bar to preview the file. Then, right click to expose those files in the Finder, then do what you wish with them. Then, click on the inner circle to go back out to the level above. For smaller files and folders, it's better to use the list on the side rather than try to pick things out of the wheel.

Despite being packed with information, a dictionary usually gets scant attention: You look up a word to check its spelling or definition, maybe skim its etymology, and then return to what you were doing. But if you consult Wordnik, you could easily find yourself embarking on a languorous exploration of the English language.

Wordnik provides definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition; the Century Dictionary; WordNet 3.0; and the GNU version of The Collaborative International Dictionary of English. Synonyms and antonyms are pulled from Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition, and Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms. Definitions from Webster's Unabridged 1913 edition also occasionally make appearances.

There's more to a word than its definition, of course, and Wordnik supplements the basic information in several additional ways.

It's iPhone Day here in the U.S. and seven other countries: Apple's new iPhone 3G S goes on sale.

The lines outside Apple stores aren't the same as they were last year, when the iPhone 3G first went on sale, quenching all sorts of pent-up demand. But they exist -- plenty of iPhone fanatics and pre-order customers are waiting to pick their new gadgets up.

If the calendar is about to flip over to summer, it must be time for Apple to roll out another smartphone. Just as summer 2007 saw the release of the original iPhone and last summer brought us the iPhone 3G, this year, we’ve got a new model to obsess over—the iPhone 3G S.

And we won’t have long to wait before this new phone winds up in our hot little hands. Apple announced the iPhone 3G S during Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote; it plans to release the iPhone 3G S next Friday, June 19.

Can’t wait until then to find out all you can about the iPhone 3G S? We’ve perused Apple’s product pages, talked to company executives, and made some educated guesses about what you can expect from this latest addition to the iPhone family.

I had been looking forward to this past week for months. I imagined immersing myself in session after session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, getting an under-the-hood look at where the Mac platform is headed. Alas, just a few minutes into the WWDC keynote address, the reality became clear that I would instead spend a week in the Macworld Lab testing new Macs. Why? Because early in the WWDC keynote, Apple executive Phil Schiller announced the company’s new laptops.

After a mad scramble, we got our hands on the six new MacBook Pros and ran them through our benchmark tests.

Watch Philip Schiller, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, unveil the new iPhone 3G S, the new MacBook Pro family, and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. See the video-on-demand event right here, exclusively in QuickTime and MPEG-4.

I love my iPhone 3G. It’s fun, it’s useful, and it continually amazes me that Apple was able to enter a market it previously had zero role in and instantly cause the rest of the industry to start playing catch-up. Anyone who who has one will tell you that the absolute best part about it is the variety of applications, or “apps”, that are available for it, both free and paid.

Having used it for several months now, I’ve compiled a top ten list of free iPhone Apps that every single user should have. I attempted to organize them in order, but they’re all great in their own regard, so, without further ado and in no particular order.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

The 10.5.7 Update is recommended for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.

Back up your computer prior to installing any updates. Quit any open applications before starting the installation. Do not interrupt the installation process.

You may experience unexpected results if you have third-party system software modifications installed, or if you've modified the operating system through other means. (This does not apply to normal application software installation.)

Products Affected -Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.5.1, Mac OS X 10.5.2, Mac OS X 10.5.3, Mac OS X 10.5.4, Mac OS X 10.5.5, Mac OS X 10.5.6.

To update to Mac OS X 10.5.7, use Software Update or the standalone installer.

Twitter’s meteoric rise to ubiquity is proof positive that the world, in all its complexity, is eager to embrace simplicity. Wielding more impact on social networking than most communication tools this generation has yet seen, Twitter is one of those universal phenomena where the product name self-conjugates. To engage with Twitter is to “tweet.”

Biz Stone, one of the firm’s co-founders and director of communications, never imagined that this real-time short messaging service would have such immediate impact on how people communicate. Twitter lets everyone within a network of contacts know what is going on in each others’ lives, from the mundane to the dramatic. Limited to 140 characters, Twitter messages, traveling over multiple networks and devices, have touched the lives of families needing help during natural disasters, strangers becoming friends, and politicians reaching out to their constituents.

At the uniquely styled Twitter office–the top floor of an old warehouse South of Market in downtown San Francisco, where flocks of birds are appliquéd on the walls and healthy lunches are served family style–the Mac is everywhere and Apple solutions enable creativity on a daily basis. In keeping with the casual, open office theme, Twitter’s common areas are equipped with Mac mini and iMac systems, Bluetooth keyboards and mice for presentations and demonstrations, and Apple Cinema Displays.

Even if you have just a few favorite apps or a 5+ screens full iPhone, we know you’re always looking for the next great application that will change your gadget life forever. So here is a list with the best 10 websites where you can find daily recommendations.