Completely Dim an iMac Monitor

For unknown reason, Apple does not allow an iMac Monitor to go completely black via the brightness control. Furthermore, the energy saver setting does not allow an interval less than 1 min. These can be annoying that the monitor keeps switching on while some others are VNC+ing the machine. Although there is no official "solution" from Apple, there is some free utility programs which can do the job. For example, this can turn the iMac screen completely black and can be recovered with a hotkey combination.

HyperTerminal for Windows Vista/7

HyperTerminal is not included in Windows Vista/7. If you want to use it, you will need two files: hypertrm.exe and hypertrm.dll

To obtain these two files, you may either Googling it online or if you have a Windows XP machine, you may find them in the following paths:

• C:\Program Files\Windows NT\hypertrm.exe
• C:\Windows\system32\hypertrm.dll

Copy both files to your Windows Vista/7 machine and remember to put them into the same directory.

Connecting to HTTPS with Untrusted Certificate from iPhone OS

By default one can use NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection to connect to a HTTP/HTTPS server. However, the iPhone OS may block the connection if the HTTPS server does not have a trusted certificate (e.g. a self-signed certificate is considered untrusted). After some Googling, here is one of the solutions: Adding the following two functions to the NSURLConnection delegate.