Jordan Ostreff

As noted by MacGeneration and in our MacRumors Forums, Apple is now allowing the entry level 21.5" iMac to be configured with a 1TB Fusion Drive.


The Fusion Drive is a built-to-order option for the iMac and Mac mini that combines SSD and traditional hard drives into a single logical volume.

With Fusion Drive in your iMac, disk-intensive tasks — from booting up to launching apps to importing photos — are faster and more efficient. That’s because frequently used items are kept at the ready on speedy flash storage, while infrequently accessed items go to the hard drive. The file transfers take place in the background, so you won’t even notice.

The 1TB Fusion Drive add-on is a $250 option and was previously only offered on the high end 21.5" iMac, high end Mac mini and 27" iMacs.

It’s not often that you get to say something like “Lewis and Clark RPG,” right? Not Lois and Clark, but LEWIS and Clark, the famous explorers from American history, who did a whole lot of exploring, have a trail named after them, and will always be associated with Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who traveled with them to serve as guide and translator.

The Meriwether Kickstarter project has 50 hours to go to get as far past the initial funding goal (which it hit today) as it can to help fund even more historical awesomeness, like special outfits for Lewis that raise his stats, the addition of a Girardoni Air Rifle, an endless arcade mode, and a bizarre nightmare dreamscape extra bonus level with giant sloths and wooly mammoths.

While they had me at historical RPG that I will be able to play on my Mac, the wooly mammoths sound pretty awesome and should be worth a donation or two, don’t you think? The bonus dream level will sum up how many Americans thought of the unexplored territories that Lewis and Clark explored. Also? Who knew that Lewis’ first name was Meriwether? Not me!

At the time, Americans thought of those lands the same way we might imagine a science-fiction world: filled with lush, bizarre plants, merciless superpredators, and people whose customs, appearance, and language were so different from their own, they seemed almost alien. To help embody that thinking, we want Lewis to have a dream before he actually heads out where all of America’s unconscious fears are portrayed. You’ll hunt wooly mammoths and giant ground sloths, council with Welsh-speaking Indians, and climb a mountain made entirely of salt, among other phantasmagorical challenges. History meets fantasy in this level where Lewis must master his trepidation and find the courage to voyage into the unknown!

To donate, or just read more about this fascinating use of gaming technology to explore history, check out the Merriweather Kickstarter page and be sure to watch the pitch video at the very top.

Source: Kickstarter

Thanks, Corvus!

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The Steam Holiday sale continues through this coming weekend, as the Valve-owned digital distribution portal extends its amazingly deep discounts for a wide variety of games, including the Mac variety, until 1 pm Eastern time on Monday, January 7th.

The Mac games included in the sale are some great ones, including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game we included in our top scariest games list last October. This formerly $19.99 game is now up for sale for a ridiculous $4.99.

You can get the entire Trine Collection, which includes Trine, Trine 2, and the expansion, Trine: The Goblin Menace, for your Mac for an easy $8.74, a full 75 percent off the usual $34.99 price it would cost you otherwise. Trine is a ton of fun, and well worth the nine buck on its own.

Civilization V: Game of the Year Edition is also 75 percent off, coming in at a delicious $12.49, instead of the more typical $49.99. If you dig strategy games, this is one of the best on the Mac or any other platform, really. You can also get the Gods & Kings expansion for a mere $7.49, as well. It’s highly recommended by my Civ-playing buddies.

Bastion, one of my favorite games, like, ever, is down to a hilarious $3.74 price, so go get it, please? The soundtrack is brilliant, the narrative is unique, and the gameplay is fun enough to keep you hacking and slashing well into the weekend.

If you’re a soccer fan, Football Manager 2013 is also on sale for 50 percent off, bringing this stats-happy, micromanagement, soccer-team manager game to your Mac for a mere $19.99. While it may not be my cup of tea, I’m sure there are folks out there who would love to obsess over a football team, putting it through its paces across a season or two.

So, if you’re looking to load up on some games for this weekend, pretending that it’s not a long haul till the next break from school or work, there’s at least five great Mac games that should strike your fancy, all available for distinct discounts over at Steam. Enjoy!

Source: Steam
Via: Joystiq

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Michigan readers, rejoice, as AT&T announced today several new 4G LTE markets in the eighth most populous state in the US.

Users in the following areas of Michigan should start to see the little LTE symbol at the top of their iPhones and Android handsets very soon.

Ann Arbor, Michigan
Beverly Hills, Michigan
Birmingham, Michigan
Monroe County, Michigan
Kent County, Michigan
Ottowa County, Michigan

“Our goal is for our customers to have an extraordinary experience, and they’ll be able to download, upload, stream and game faster than ever before on our 4G LTE network,” said Jim Murray, president, AT&T Michigan. “As part of the Metro Detroit community, we’re always looking for new opportunities to provide enhanced coverage, and our investment in the local wireless network is another way we’re accomplishing that.”

It looks like AT&T, like Verizon and Sprint before it, is finished rolling out new service to the more populous areas of the country, and now is settling in to bring the service to less dense areas that still need it.

Sprint recently started rolling out LTE coverage of its own, including Anderson, IN, Clarke County, VA, Harrisburg/Carlisle/Hershey, PA, and several others. Verizon rolled out 29 new LTE markets just last month, mostly across Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and Washington.

If you’re in one of the areas in Michigan above, let us know if you’re seeing LTE or 4G in your neck of the woods in the comments below.

Source: AT&T
Via: Android Central

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We’re in the holiday spirit here at Cult of Mac, and it’s with that spirit in mind that we are offering a great freebie to our valued readers. With MacX Video Converter Pro, you can convert various videos for playback on all your Apple devices.

And you’ll be able to do it for free.

MacX Video Converter Pro is a feature-rich, high quality, and incredibly fast video converter that’s enables users to view any video with 420+ video/audio codecs and advanced HD video decoding engine. It’s an all-in-one video converting solution with top quality, easiness, fast speed and high-efficiency. You can even download website-embedded videos from YouTube, Myspace, Metacafe, and more so that you can keep them for local storage.

The other feature that this app offers is the unique ability to convert multi-track HD videos into a variety of formats, including:

M2TS MKV AVCHD HDTV BDAV MPEG-TS

This gives users the most convenient way to choose preferred audio language track, as well as create VOB files from video to burn your favorite videos to DVD for a backup.

While we’re in the giving mood, this freebie won’t last for long. In fact, the provided license will expire on December 26th so make sure you install it upon redemption (Note: No additional licenses will be provided after expiration).

Grab this freebie from our Cult of Mac Deals page today!

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Want More Freebies And Deals On Mac Software And Apple Gear? Sign Up Below!

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Mobee, best known for its chargers for Apple’s peripherals, has three new products that will debut at CES 2013, including a compact battery, a speaker, and a universal charging cable.

Magic Juice ($79.99), Mobee’s compact battery solution, is designed to provide a full charge for an iPad or two charges for an iPhone. The battery is the first charging solution that can be recharged wirelessly, using a Mobee flat charging station, which includes the Mobee Magic Feet and the Mobie Magic Charger.

Magic Tunes is a double wireless speaker, meaning it uses Bluetooth to play audio and also recharges via the same Mobee flat charging station. The small rectangular speaker includes an integrated microphone, for use with Skype, FaceTime, and Conference calls.

Magic Link is a simple charging cable that has the ability to be switched off and on. When an iDevice is fully charged or unconnected from the cable, it will switch off to save energy. The Magic Link works with all Lightning, 30-pin and Micro-USB connections.

Mobee’s products will debut at CES 2013, which begins on Jan. 8 and ends Jan. 11.

According to Web analytics firm Net Applications (via Computerworld) Apple's OS X Mountain Lion is now the most popular version of OS X, just five months after its July 2012 release.

During December, 32% of all Macs that went online were running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Usage of Lion, the previous iteration of OS X, dropped from 30% to 28%.


OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, first introduced in 2009, remains widely used despite its age. As of December 31, it still represented 29% of Mac Internet usage. Snow Leopard remains for sale on the online Apple Store and has been lauded for its stability.

Easily accessible and reasonably priced upgrades have always enticed Apple users to embrace operating system updates. Apple famously boasted about selling a million copies of OS X 10.7 Lion in its first day of availability, and Mountain Lion also saw rapid adoption numbers.


Net Applications collects its data by tracking browser usage of 160 million monthly visitors from around the world on approximately 40,000 websites, offering a picture of the active user base of browsers and platforms at any moment.

A bug in Google's text-to-speech engine is causing Google Now and Google Translate to interject the phrase "he now praises the iPad" into sentences that end using phrases such as "end with," "enraged with," and "filled with."

The mysterious phrasing, which first came about in October 2012 on the Android support page, was publicized by Hacker News last night, resulting in some hilarious sentences.

One altered spoken sentence, for example reads, "Larry Page used to use an Android. But that is now at an end, he now praises the iPad."


This bug can be easily reproduced using Google Translate. Type any sentence, end it with one of the key words, and the text-to-speech option on the site will add "he now praises the iPad" to the sentence.

There's no word on why this phrasing exists in the code, but Hacker News speculates that it is an error in the algorithm. The original sentence came from a MacNN article posted in 2011, quoting Hearst Magazine president David Carey: "Describing the negotiations last spring as being filled with 'so much drama,' he now praises the iPad."


Theoretically, Google's algorithm improperly incorporated this sentence, causing the bug. Thus far, Google has not resolved the problem, so for the time being, Google Now and Google Translate can still be used to create humorous sentences.

More than $600,000 worth of counterfeit Lighting cables were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at a routine customs search in Anchorage, Alaska (via 9to5Mac). The cables had arrived from China via plane and were designed to look like Apple's $19 Lightning to USB cables, complete with fake Apple logos and UL icons.

But the knock-off logos weren't enough of a disguise. The items stood out as counterfeits, Frank Falcon, CBP spokesman said. They were packaged for retail sale in cardboard blister packs that were sub-standard compared to Apple's trademark white packaging.

Falcon said a manufacturer in China is responsible for the shipment. He noted that while it is “difficult to deal with a manufacturer in another country,” the bust will “bring more scrutiny” to future shipments from the company.

This is a large bust for such products. As one can imagine, over $600,000 in cables and adaptors means there was “quite a bit of stuff” seized, Falcon said.

Apple products are frequently counterfeited, and even Apple's retail stores are sometimes knocked off.

Former Apple employee Don Melton is sharing a unique look behind the scenes of the Safari development team. Melton was the team leader on both the Safari and WebKit products that are now used by millions of users on both iOS, the Mac, and Windows.

Previously, Melton explained how the Safari name came about, but today he shares the tale of Safari's User Agent string and the strategies his team used to keep the project under wraps.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

When a Web browser fetches a page from a Web server, the browser identifies itself to that server with a user agent string — basically its name, version, platform, etc. The browser also gives the server an IP address so the server knows where to return the page. This exchange not only makes the Web work, it also allows the server to tell who is using what browser and where they’re using it.

You can see where this is going, right? But wait, there’s more…

Back around 1990, some forward-thinking IT person secured for Apple an entire Class A network of IP addresses. That’s right, Apple has 16,777,216 static IP addresses. And because all of these addresses belong together — in what’s now called a “/8 block” — every one of them starts with the same number. In Apple’s case, the number is 17.

IP address 17.149.160.49? That’s Apple. 17.1.2.3? Yes, Apple. 17.18.19.20? Also, Apple. 17.253.254.255? Apple, dammit!

I was so screwed.

Melton's blog has the rest of the details about how his team kept things quiet before the big reveal.