If you were planing to buy a new hard drive for you Macintosh, now is a great time. OWC (Other World Computing) has just announced a huge price cut on their 500GB SATA Drive. In case you did not know, 500 GB is a lot. By a lot I mean about 500 hours of SDTV or about 89 hours of HDTV. This drive is made by Maxtor and has SATA I/II 3.0G, a 16 MB buffer, a 5 year warranty, and is 7200 RPM. They are now selling for a mere $133.99 which makes it about $.25 per gigabyte. It can be found at http://macsales.com. (Limit of 2 per customer.) Link updated

Click here for OWC Special

Editor’s note: This PR came in from OWC and I am a huge fan of their products and service. That said, I am traditionally not a big fan of Maxtor drives. They were recently purchased by Seagate (who’s products I love) and these Quickview drives are brand new, plus backed by a full 5-year Seagate fulfilled Maxtor factory warranty. So, when you add the awesome prices, OWC sales and support, and a Seagate backed warranty, these drives may be worth at least looking into.

Title: Toast 8 Titanium
Price: $79.99 [after $20 mail-in rebate]
Availability: Now
Publisher: Roxio

Recently we talked about the TiVoDecode Manager which enables Mac users to download television shows recorded on TiVo over the home network. Now Roxio with its latest version of its award winning CD and DVD burning software, Toast 8 Titanium, has decided to try its hand at it. The difference is Roxio is officially endorsed by TiVo to provide this TiVoToGo solution for the Mac.

For this review, I’m only going to focus on the TiVo Transfer side of Toast 8 Titanium, but will take a look at the rest of the application in a later post. If there are specific questions you might have about Toast 8 that I should address in later posts, please leave a comment below.
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This is an old ad for the original Apple Lisa, and yes that is Kevin Costner.

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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 173. Apple first fiscal quarter 2007 results, Jobs not out of stock options woods yet. Apple charges 2 bucks if you want 802.11n. Norway says iTunes DRM is illegal. Apple Security update 2007-001. Apple Store loses 42 iPod Nanos to thieves. Apple planning a Super Bowl event? Best upgrade? More Memory. More than 2GB of RAM in a Core Duo? Cracked Macbook made new again. The pre-AppleCare checklist. Review: Slingbox TUNER. Thanks to Alex Lindsay and Pixel Corps. Where to buy Samson products.

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New music, Little Boy by Once Just ( iTunes )

Promos: The Illustrative Designer Podcast, Dan’s Mathcast, and Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE)

Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night, and this is only Thursday morning. — Yellow Submarine (1968)

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There is a huge new update to the award-winning application EarthDesk. EarthDesk is a program that lets you replace your normal desktop with a 3D map of the world that shows current sun, moon, and city illumination as well as real-time global cloud coverage. This software is sort of like having a screensaver for your desktop background combined with Google Earth. With this latest update of EarthDesk it becomes a Cocoa application and has moved from being a stand-alone application to a Preference Pane. It has an icon in the menu bar for quick and easy control of EarthDesk and the user interface has received a complete overhaul. EarthDesk is $19.95 and can be found at http://www.xericdesign.com. Upgrades are either $9.95 or $12.95 depending on which version you have.

I find dealing with money boring, but at the same time if I have a spending spree my online banking access is not always bang up to date. This can sometimes cause me a problem, as I have all my fresh shrunk wrap purchases on the table, but don’t know if I have enough left for a steak ‘n’ chips or if I will have to manage with cheese on toast.

This is where Cha-Ching steps up to the mark. This superb money manager from Midnight Apps promises to breathe some fun into managing your money. Well, the title gives it a good start, as do the icons within the app. Everything has a feel good factor.

Most of the time the app is split into a three pane view. The vault on the left gives you quick access to your paid and pending transactions, as well as an account list. Setting up an account is easy, you name it, assign a bank name to it, starting balance, and type of account. You can choose from checking, savings, credit or online. There is even space to enter the URL of the bank, which can then be viewed at any time using the ‘online’ tab, instead of having to go into your internet browser. Within the aptly named ‘Vault’ you can also set-up budget accounts, along with folders and smart folders for organizing and sharing across a network.
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A previous post on the MacCast blog discussed some practical predictions on Apple’s iPhone, and the MacCast community commented on it. Some aspects we collectively got right, others not so much. Let’s take a look.

How Apple would create iPhone

• Prediction: Not from bottom up.

• Reality: from scratch.

I underestimated Apple’s dedication to this device. Yes, they created the iPod which is a data retrieval device. I thought because the iPhone was a different animal, one that both retrieves data, but creates it as well, that Apple wouldn’t spend the resources needed to build a mobile device. Boy, was I wrong. Severely wrong.
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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Macworld 2007 Part 4. A collection of interviews from on and around the show floor at Macworld. I have chats with MacLife, Storyist, ArtRage, Boinx Software, TeachMac, and Other World Computing (ModBook).

Links:
Samson Technologies
MacLife
ModBook
Storyist
EarthDesk
ArtRage2
Boinx Software
TeachMac
Other World Computing
RouteBuddy
Arkady

Maccast’s Macworld coverage powered by Samson Technologies

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Things that save me time are always high on my list of priorities. When presented with a device that could turn typed documents into useful pieces of text I was up for taking a good look. The product is the IRISPen Executive, which is a small handheld pen type scanner, with a small scanning head that captures three or four lines of text at a time.

From the offset, the IRISPen may not sound that impressive, but it is the usefulness of this little device that wins me over. More often than not I find myself reading something in a magazine and wanting to quote it in an article I am writing, or perhaps email it to a friend or colleague. Under normal circumstances I would have to type it, or scan it and send as an image. With IRISPen I can slide the scanning head over the text and, voila! The text is transferred into MS Word or my email application (for example). This alone saves me so much time.
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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Mac Podcaster Meetup 2007 Part 2. A live recording of the Mac Podcaster Meetup recorded at the Apple Store in San Francisco on Thursday January 11th 2007. A special thanks goes out to the podcasters, Apple, Inc. and the Apple Store, and all the people who attended the event. Also, a very special thank you to Alex Lindsay and the Pixel Corps for recording the event.

Podcasters:
Adam Christianson, Maccast, Mac Roundtable (https://www.maccast.com)
Leo Laporte, Mac Break, TWiT (http://www.twit.tv)
Ken Ray, Mac OS Ken (http://www.macosken.com/)
Alex Lindsay, Mac Break, TWiM (http://www.macbreak.com/)
Scott Bourne, Mac Break, iLife Zone (http://www.ilifezone.com/)
Merlin Mann, TWiT, 43 Folders (http://www.43folders.com/)
Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times, MacNotables (http://www.suntimes.com/)
Derrick Story, O’Reilly, The Digital Story (http://www.thedigitalstory.com/)
Dave Hamilton, Mac Observer, Mac Geek Gab (http://www.macobserver.com/)
Chris Christensen, Amateur Traveler (http://www.amateurtraveler.com/)
Bill Palmer, iProng Radio (http://www.iprong.com/)
Shelly Brisbin, Blogger & Podcaster Magazine (http://brisbin.net)
Stuff, Pomcast (http://www.pomcast.com/)
Don McAllister, Screencasts Online (http://www.screencastonline.com/)
Tim Street, French Maid TV (http://www.frenchmaidtv.com/)

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