Mac

Apple buyers eyeing an iMac now have a choice between a conventional hard drive and a solid-state drive.

Speedier than their mechanical counterparts, solid-state drives are available as options on both the 21.5-inch and the 27-inch iMacs. The 21.5-inch iMac offers a 256GB SSD for an extra $300 and a 512GB SSD for an extra $600. The 27-inch model presents the same options and throws in a 768GB SSD for an additional $900.

If those figures seem too pricey, buyers can stick with a regular serial ATA hard drive. Apple includes a 1TB hard drive in the overall … Read more

A virtual private network, or VPN, is a method of securely connecting to a network from a remote location, and is commonly used in work environments. While some institutions require the use of third-party VPN client software, others allow the use of Apple's built-in VPN clients.

In these cases, you can choose to enable the VPN menu in the OS X menu bar, and can then use it to quickly establish a VPN connection. However, if you are regularly connecting to your VPN, you may choose to also implement a hot-key shortcut to speed things up a bit more.… Read more

OS X comes with a number of fonts, and if you install third-party software such as Microsoft Office or Adobe's Creative Suite, your system may be inundated with them. This may not be that big of an issue, but if you want to see what a font looks like before picking one to use, having to slog through a large list to do so is impractical.

Fortunately, there are several options in OS X for previewing fonts that can help streamline the process, some of which may be more available or useful than others:

Font menus In most word … Read more

Users who often work with video files may need to add customized closed captioning. TitleExchange for Mac's complicated menu and lack of user instructions make it a problematic application, despite its basic functionality.

TitleExchange for Mac comes with a free trial version with unknown limitations. A full version is available for a payment of $45. After initiating the installer, the user must accept a lengthy licensing agreement. After this is completed, the program installs into the applications folder. There did not appear to be any technical support available. After a long loading period, the program starts up in a … Read more

In this week's episode of Hooked Up, Kevin Frazier hangs out on the set of "NCIS" with actress Pauley Perrette, who plays Abby Sciuto, the show's fan-favorite quirky forensic scientist. She talks about her role as the social media ambassador for CBS during "Tweet Week" and how she used Twitter to help keep the Hope Gardens shelter for families open.

Pauley bring hers own tech on set, including the dirtiest Macbook you've probably ever seen, and she shows us some of the fun set pieces in Abby's lab. She also talks about … Read more

After a slight delay from its expected release date in September 2012, Belkin's Thunderbolt Express Dock is now available, at a price of $300. Such docking stations have become popular with the advent of Thunderbolt ports in Apple Macs.

Like other Thunderbolt docks, the Express Dock has a number of different I/O ports to enhance your Mac's connectivity options, with three USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, 3.5mm audio in and out, and two Thunderbolt ports.

In its initial press releases, Belkin suggested the Express Dock would include an eSATA connection; … Read more

While using OS X, you may discover a folder at the root of the hard drive, called Damaged Files. You may wonder why it's there and what's in it.

This folder, which less commonly is found at the root of secondary storage volumes you have mounted, results from the system's automatic file system checking routines (fsck). These routines may run after a power failure, a kernel panic, or if you boot to Safe Mode by holding the Shift key at startup. In this routine, the system will check the inodes in the file system structure (folders and … Read more

Yesterday, along with the genuine release of Game Dev Tycoon (Windows demo; Mac demo; Lite version for Windows 8), developers Greenheart Games treated some online gamers to an extra "gift" in the form of a cracked version of the game, which they then seeded via BitTorrent protocol.

Soon after seeding the cracked version of the game, thousands of users downloaded it. As those players progressed through the game--which takes players from producing games in a garage to becoming global leaders in the industry--establishing and growing their companies, they were blocked from proceeding further with the following, not-so-subtle hint--delivered … Read more

The OS X Finder offers a number of different views for organizing folder contents; however, in some of these views you may notice periodically that contents will shift around. This usually is not an issue, but sometimes it may result in the window view switching to a different position, resulting in you losing your place. This can be especially frustrating when you are managing a long list of items in a folder and the view keeps returning to a specific locaiton in the list.

This generally happens because you have the Finder view listed by date modified or a similar … Read more