Free Magazine Hack!

Want to read magazines on your computer and pay nothing to do it? You can if you own an iPhone. The folks at Zinio have teamed up with Apple to give iPhone owners free access to a selection of modern publications. The catch is, of course, the whole iPhone thing. I don't have one.

But now comes the hack. Some clever hacker has figured out that you can simply change a setting in your browser so that you look like an iPhone user when visiting the magazine site. Normally, this would be a pain in the ass and you would find yourself constantly changing your "user agent settings". If you set up Firefox to think it's an iPhone, many websites load in a "portrait" style format to try and accommodate you. But we can use another little hack to make this easier - the User Agent Switcher Firefox Add-On.

Go get your add-on here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

Next, click Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options. Now you are going to Add a new user agent. There's not a lot to this.

Name it something like "iPhone" and then paste this into the User Agent box:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)



Now, select your new user agent by clicking Tools > User Agent Switcher > iPhone.



Now, browse to the magazine site: http://www.zinio.com/iphone



Read some magazines.

Props to whoever figured this out. It wasn't me. I'm just passing along this awesome little hack.