How to make an OS X Lion USB thumb drive

Here are three different ways to put Lion on a USB thumb drive. If you buy and install Lion from the App Store  it downloads all 3Gigabytes from the App Store, installs Lion, then deletes the installer!  So when you go to install it on another machine it needs another 3Gigabyte download! Here’s how to make a re-usable installer.

Option 1: Put a full bootable Lion installation on the USB Drive with a recovery partition.

What you need: an 8G thumb drive and OS X Lion from the App Store.

What you get: A USB stick you can boot off and repair your Lion installation from.

Download the Lion installer from Apple App Store. DO NOT INSTALL IT ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR THE INSTALLER WILL DELETE ITSELF. MAKE A COPY OF THE INSTALLER.  If you have already installed it and it has deleted itself,  go back into the App store and click on ‘purchases’ and next to Lion it will say ‘Installed’. Now option-click on ‘purchases’ and ‘installed’ will change to ‘install’ so that you can re-download the installer.

Format your Thumbdrive using a GUID Partition Table, and ‘ Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’, then you can run the Lion installer and install Lion onto the thumb drive.

More info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

Option 2: Create a Lion Recovery Disk.

You’ll only need a 4G USB Drive for this option.

How to Air Print to ANY printer from your iPod, iPad or iPhone

Apple has introduced a ‘print’ button onto iPads, iPhones and iPods to allow you to print directly to a printer from your iOS device. Unfortunately  you need a special AirPrint enabled printer. Thankfully there is a free application called ‘AirPrint Activator’ that allows you to print to any printer, here’s where to get it and how to use it.

AIRPRINT

On your iPhone at the bottom of some apps is a ‘share’ button. If you click this button you get a menu of different ways to share the content, one of these options is ‘print’ as shown below.

Share Button