Sling Media has finally released SlingPlayer for Mac OS X in beta, after what seemed like some false starts. Sling Media first showed SlingPlayer to the public at MacWorld last January.

The SlingPlayer for Mac OS X allows Mac users to join the other Slingbox customers who wish to view their home TV natively on their Mac. With SlingPlayer for Mac OS X, customers now have the ability to watch and control their home TV from any Mac laptop or desktop located just about anywhere in the world.
Continue reading SlingPlayer for Mac OS X Public Beta Released…

The Jack-O-Lantern Screen Saver is free from Killer Robots displays realistic looking carved pumpkins whenever as your screen saver. Rotating with a flickering candle that will illuminate your “Mac-O-Lantern.”

Several carving designs are included, and you can even create your own to be displayed. No getting your hands dirty carving the real thing. Artificial pumpkin smell not included.

Just move your Mac to the window for all the trick or treaters to see! Also check out the Halloween Musical Tricks and Treats playlists on iTunes.
Continue reading “Mac-O-Lantern” – Use Your Mac to Decorate Your Window…

Spend Halloween night with George Romero’s classic 1968 zombie flick “Night of the Living Dead.”

“Night of the Living Dead” lapsed into the public domain due to neglected copyright notices and can be freely downloaded, copied and shared. Get Night of the Living Dead on DVD.
Continue reading Happy Halloween! Download “Night of the Living Dead” For Free…

QTAmateur, free – is a small, simple QuickTime video player that brings a lot of QuickTime Pro features to your Mac without having to pay for the $30 upgrade to “Pro.” QTAmateur can play any format that QuickTime can understand, allowing for “fullscreen” video playback, and export files to any format that QuickTime can write.

QTAmateur includes a Batch Export function which can convert any number of movies at a time to another format. Simply drag the desired movies into the window, choose the desired format, configure the output, and let QTAmateur take care of the rest.
Continue reading QTAmateur Allows For Full Screen Playback and Batch Exports…

Disco is a new slick DVD/CD “burning” application for OS 10.4 that is being featured at macZOT today for $14.95. While you can purchase Disco directly from Disco’s site, macZOT is running a deal where three lucky buyers will win a Lacie DL DVD Burner with LightScribe, and some sort of a bonus is included with every purchase. You’d better hurry though: as of this writing you have just under 12 hours to buy from macZOT, and after today, Disco’s price will rise to $24.95.

Disco has burning features that best the OS X’s Finder and slightly below Roxio’s $99 Toast 7. One feature Discography, is a built-in search engine that lets you search through all the files you’ve previously burned. Users can search when the file was burned, when it was last edited, and to what disc it was burned. A lot like CDFinder. Also Disco has a feature they call Spandex that allows burning content “across” multiple discs when it will not fit on one.
Continue reading Disco That Does NOT Suck!…

Apple has begun shipping the second-generation iPod shuffle. Various users have reported receiving confirmations of shipping the the tiny little iPods they ordered. One user confirmed the shipment of the new Shuffles with AppleInsider after receiving an email notice that the second-generation iPod shuffle had shipped, with delivery expected by November 3rd. Most users who received such confirmation placed their orders immediately after the device debuted at Apple’s last Special Event on September 12th. “I placed my order immediately after Apple’s press event, about five minutes after the Apple online store came back online,” one customer said.

If you use Gmail or Google Calendar you are probably aware there is this great “notifier” app from Google for OS X. If you are a user of Google’s revamped Reader service you might have wondered where the Google Notifier for Google Reader was? Well why wait.

With the free (unofficial) Google Reader Notifier you could have a unread count notifier for Google Reader, along with the official Google Notifier for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Continue reading Google Reader Notifier – The Missing Notifier…

Continue reading OS X Tip #124: Problems Playing AC-3 Audio with QuickTime?…

WordPress.com, the free hosted solution of WordPress, is now allowing you to use your own domain names. What this means when you set up a WordPress.com site, instead of the URL being MyGreatBlog.wordpress.com you can have MyGreatBlog.com.

If you already own your own domain, directing it to your otherwise free WordPress.com site will cost $10 per year. Alternatively, you can choose to purchase a new domain through WordPress.com for $15 per year. Sounds like a great deal. Especially if you want to use WordPress’ great software (ReelSmart is based on WordPress) and you do not want or have the expertise of setting this up yourself and hosting it yourself.
Continue reading WordPress.com Now Allows Your Own Domain…

Radiotastic, free – is a new Dashboard widget for listening and recording Internet radio. Supporting RealAudio, WindowsMedia, QuickTime, and MP3 streams, Radiotastic can save your favorite stations and streams.

If you ever listened to the radio and wanted to quickly record a song or interview Radiotastic, might be the answer. The free version allows for recording up to 15 minutes of this radio stream to AIFF, AAC, or Apple Lossless, making it very iPod friendly. Upgrade to the Pro version allows for unlimited recording and email support.
Continue reading Radiotastic Widget is Radio For Your Dashboard…

Apple announced today that their entire MacBook Pro line has been revamped and now sport the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB of shared L2 cache, making them up to 39 precent faster than the previous Mac Book Pros. All the MacBook Pros now have double the amount of RAM, Superdrives dual-layer DVD burners, and Firewire 800 ports, even the 15 inch models which previously only has a single-layer DVD burner and no Firewire 800 port.
Continue reading Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Arrive…

Skype releases the “Gold” version of their Voice over IP (VoIP) communications software for the Macintosh. Skype for Mac 2.0 is now available for free download.

Skype 2.0 for Mac supports free audio and video calls to any other Skype users, no matter what platform they run Skype on. Conference calls with up to four people at a time are also free.
Continue reading Skype 2.0 for Mac Goes Gold…

Firefox 2.0 will be officially released tomorrow, but I have downloaded the official release i
from this directory on the Mozilla Foundation’s FTP servers. It installed on two of my Macs without any problems and just about all my extensions (now called add-ons) were easy to update.

Firefox 2.0 offers aesthetic enhancements, usability improvements, and an assortment of useful new features, including support for built-in spell-checking, phishing protection, Javascript 1.7, and session persistence. For a full list of Firefox 2.0 new features check Mozilla’s release notes.
Continue reading Firefox 2.0 Released Day Early…

Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction

Thanks to YouTube for the video.

TalkingPanda’s iWriter, $12 shareware with free trial – makes it easy to create useful iPod “study tools” for both students and teachers at any educational level. iWriter can make an engaging learning program for the iPod in no time flat without any much in technical skills. iWriter is available for Mac OS X or Windows.
Continue reading iWriter Creates Study Tools for iPod…

In January 2001, Apple released iTunes, software for managing digital music collections after absorbing SoundJam and its developer. Apple then launched the first iPod on October 23, 2001. The first iPod had 5GBs of storage and cost $399, a price that analysts at the time considered too high. I bought one the day it was released. In 2003, Apple releases iTunes into the Windows world, allowing PC users to enjoy the Apple experience. Windows users in good numbers swapped their “jukebox” software and moved away from Windows Media Player, in favor of Apple’s iPod and iTunes for managing their digital music.

Every music-player manufacturer, and companies that have tried jumping into this market, have been playing “catch up” ever since. Some analysts and people without vision, instantly labeled the iPod a “TOY.” What they did not realize was Apple was not just selling a portable music player, like Sony did years ago with the Walkman. Apple was creating a “platform.” Well five years later I think it is clear that the iPod is far more than a “toy” or just a personal music player.
Continue reading iPod Turns Five – Quite Some “Toy”…

This is a tip for WordPress users trying to manage their blog using Apple’s Safari on OS X. WordPress is a great free blog engine that ReelSmart, and many many other sites are built on.

If you have your own WordPress blog installed and ever tried to add a post using Apple’s Safari browser you may have noticed that there are no editing buttons, called “quicktags” to allow for easy editing of your posts. I will show you how to change that.
Continue reading Using WordPress Quicktags With Safari…

LaCie LightScribe drives are now Mac compatible, with the release of its LightScribe Labeling software for the Mac (and also released for Linux), making it the first to make LightScribe technology compatible with all major platforms. While some Mac users have had LightScribe drives installed and functional for a while now, LaCie’s software was not Mac-compatible until now. LightScribe allows you to “burn” high quality labels from your DVD drive onto the disc.

LightScribe drives can etch pictures or text directly onto your CDs or DVDs, without using a printer, sticky label paper, or worse yet a sharpie. The drive itself uses “direct-to-disc” label burning to etch it right there onto the disc.
Continue reading LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Macs…

I am going to let you in on one of my secrets. People are always amazed when they contact me with a Macintosh question about their particular machine, how I always know details about the Macintosh model they have. It seems to them, that I am able to spit out which video card, size hard drive, RAM, CPU, etc. They think I am a genius with an amazing memory. OK, I will share my secret. I use Mactracker. I have for years.
Continue reading Mactracker One of My Secret Weapons…

Adobe has released a beta of a Flash Player 9 for Linux announcing that it is working on 64-bit editions of Flash. The final Flash Player 9 on Linux is scheduled for early next year. The beta version of Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux is now available on Adobe Labs, at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/.

According to Adobe’s FAQ, the Linux Flash Player will support the same features as Flash on Macintosh and Windows.
Continue reading Adobe Releases Flash Beta for Linux…