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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.

The Wall Street Journal notes that several retailers including Best Buy and Toys "R" Us have complained to attorneys general in a handful of states about advertising practices of Walmart. Generally, the complaints stem from comparison ads by Walmart in which competitors assert that Walmart is using inaccurate pricing or non-equivalent items to claim that it offers the lowest pricing.


But Best Buy also alleges that Walmart was deceptive with its iPhone 5 holiday sale in which it dropped pricing to $127, although the article quotes $150 pricing.

Best Buy said it lost about $65,000 in profit the day Wal-Mart's promotion first ran on Facebook, because it was compelled to match Wal-Mart's advertised $150 price, even though it concluded that Wal-Mart didn't actually have a sufficient number of iPhones available.

Walmart claims that it did have sufficient stock of the iPhone 5, quoting 98% availability at its stores carrying the device. Walmart had noted as the sale launched that it was working closely with Apple on the promotion and was securing significant numbers of iPhones, but that the sale was first-come, first-served with no rain checks offered at stores where the device was out of stock.

Best Buy had already been selling the iPhone 5 for $149.99 when Walmart announced its own sale, but it is unclear if Best Buy used the $73 difference from regular price or $23 difference from Best Buy's sale price in calculating its profit loss. Assuming the latter, Best Buy would have price matched on approximately 2800 iPhone 5 sales in one day.

BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield is predicting that Apple will debut its long-rumored Pandora-like iRadio service to compliment iTunes at some point in 2013. Previously, there were reports that Apple and the major music labels weren't close in negotiations, but Greenfield says they're still negotiating on song catalogs.

"Consumer behavior (is) increasingly shifting toward access to a music catalog from ownership of specific songs. We expect iRadio to be incorporated into the iTunes iOS app with personalized radio functionality akin to Pandora, integrated with iTunes to purchase music and other music related content such as concert information/tickets/merchandise via Live Nation (LYV) and Ticketmaster."

Back in October, Bloomberg reported that Apple and music labels had re-entered intense negotiations and iRadio was set to debut in early 2013. CNET then reported in December that the sides were far apart because Apple's terms left them "cold."

Apple SVP of Internet Services and Software is considered Apple's "master negotiator" for content deals, so any potential negotiations with music labels would likely go through him. Greenfield also predicts that Apple's long-rumored Apple TV wouldn't debut in 2013 because of content restrictions.