Mac users with Tivos have long been left in the cold when it comes to downloading video from their Tivo to their Mac. Series 2 Tivo devices let you hook them up to your local network with a USB ethernet or wireless adapter. Once hooked up, they can make their daily calls to Tivo HQ over the Internet instead of using a phone line. You can use Tivo Desktop to share music, photos or even videos from your computer to your Tivo. But only Windows users have been enabled to download video in the other, much-treasured direction, from their Tivo to their computer, so that they can hoard video files like digital packrats.

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Here’s an easy way to keep the weather forecast up-to-date in iCal under MacOS X. I’m sure some version of this will work with Outlook under Windows; I just can’t give you the exact commands to use for it.

iCal allows you to subscribe to calendars - it will periodically check if the calendar has been updated and import any changes. You won’t be able to edit the calendar, but it will always show up-to-date information in your iCal. This is a great way to share calendars with other people or to subscribe to calendars that are published on the Internet. I subscribe to calendars which provide US holidays, phases of the moon, and new movies release information.

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Apple’s Developer’s conference (WWDC) starts today, and as always there’s been a great deal of anticipation of the keynote speech where Steve Jobs was expected to announce new hardware, features of the next version of MacOS X, and other goodies.

This keynote was a little different… as we’re most of the way through Apple’s transition to Intel processors, there were a lot of certainties about the announcements - that Apple would announce a PowerMac successor, that it would be named “Mac Pro”… just the details were uncertain.
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Apple is offering several deals which can help save some dollars when you buy a Mac. Note that you need to buy everything together on the same invoice from the same store; the deals vary on where you can buy stuff from and still qualify for the rebate. And they are rebates - you’ll need to be fussy and clip UPC codes, save invoices, fill out forms and mail it all back to Apple.

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If you buy your new Intel Macintosh from Apple and you get it with additional RAM pre-installed, you’ll be paying through the nose for the memory. If you’re comfortable adding memory to your Mac (and it’s really not difficult to; it’s the most common hardware operation that end-users perform, and Apple has made it pretty easy to deal with) then you can definitely save a decent amount of money on the RAM.

Increasing the total memory in your Macintosh is likely the cheapest way to improve its performance. MacOS X really wants at least 512MB to start with, and if you’re doing anything memory intensive, say Photoshop, you’ll be very very happy to max out your RAM. Also, if you’re on an Intel Mac and you’re running older, non-Intel applications that are built for a PowerPC, you’ll be using “Rosetta” without knowing it, and you’ll definitely need some extra RAM.
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When I browse through add-ons of…almost any kind, really… menu bar, dock, Firefox plugins, Wordpress plugins… one kind that shows up very frequently is weather reporting plugins. Everyone seems to really want to know what the weather’s going to be like. Now when you live in New England, I get it, because the weather could veer off into the twilight zone with pretty much no warning, but when you live in the San Francisco bay area, you’ve got a pretty good confidence level that tomorrow’s weather is going to be like today’s, which was like yesterday’s - except for that catastrophic, freeway-slicking “rain shower” that may happen thrice a year… I suppose even people in the San Francisco area want to know what the weather will be like.

My favorite weather widget is WeatherPop. It lives in the menu bar under MacOS X and unobtrusively lets me know what’s going on right outside my window, and what to expect.

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Amazon continues to have the best retail prices for Macintoshes.

They’re offering a $100 rebate on the new MacBook. They also offer a $150 rebate on the MacBook Pro, a $100 rebate on the iMac and a $25 rebate on the Mac Mini.

The rebates are also very easy to claim… good going, Amazon! You can submit the rebate online without having to mail anything to them.

Checking the temperature of your computer CPU is one of those things that a lot of people seem to like to do, like be able to control iTunes from the status bar of their mail reader, or plugin an add-on to every other application in the world so that it can tell them what the weather is in its own distinctive way.

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Today Apple finally announced their iBook replacement - the new MacBook (non-pro), which replaces both the iBook line and the 12″ Powerbook. They come in black and white.

Don’t hold your breath for a 12″ MacBook Pro - the new MacBook does everything you’d expect from a 12″ MacBook Pro.

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This is old news for the PC world; unfortunately, the Mac version of Tivo Desktop is pretty far behind the Windows version. Tivo recently released version 1.9.3 of Tivo Desktop. The only documented change was universal binary support, allowing it to run at full speed on both PowerPC and Intel Macintoshes. (more…)