If you need more storage capacity, these two top-rated Western Digital drives on sale from Amazon are great deals, they both have giant capacities of 3TB and 2TB respectively.

• 3 TB Western Digital WD Elements USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $119.99
• 2 TB Western Digital WD Elements USB 2.0 External Hard Drive for $79.99

Free shipping is included from Amazon as usual.

These drives make for perfect Time Capsule expansions or Time Machine backups for any Mac, but are also great places to store your external media, iTunes library, and external iOS backups for anyone with constrained disk space like SSD users and MacBook Air owners.

Do you hate the way iCal looks in Mac OS X Lion? The leather interface of iCal looks like it’s right out of an iPad has definitely caused a split with users, people either love the way it looks or hate it with a passion. For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume you’re not a fan of the leather UI,

Replacing iCal’s Leather User Interface with Aluminum

To ditch the leather, you are going to replace the leather image files with aluminum versions:

• Download the iCal aluminum replacement files by clicking here and unzip them, place this directory in an easy to access location like your desktop
• Navigate to /Applications/ and find iCal
• Important: Make a copy of iCal by selecting the app and hitting Command+D to create “iCal Copy.app” – this is important because it allows you to revert the changes
• Right-click on the original iCal.app and select “Show Package Contents”
• Open “Contents” and then open “Resources”
• Drag all of the previously downloaded iCal aluminum UI replacement files into iCal’s “Resources” folder, replacing the contents (click ‘Apply to All’ and then select “Replace”)
• Launch iCal and enjoy your aluminum interface

I have tested this and it works flawlessly. Just remember to backup the original iCal app (it’s only 42mb) in case you ever want to change back to good old cowhide. Keep in mind that future iCal updates will probably overwrite your changes too.
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iOS 5 beta 4 was just released but the iPhone Dev Team works fast, already jailbreaking the latest beta. This continues to be a tethered jailbreak for all hardware, which includes the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen, and iPad 1. iPad 2 remains unsupported.

The jailbreak works like any other past version of redsn0w, and you’ll need to update to the iOS 5 beta IPSW through iTunes and not OTA.

Download Redsn0w 0.9.8b4

There are Mac OS X and Windows versions available:

• Download now (Mac)
• Download now (Windows)

Much like the other recent redsn0w releases, these iOS 5 beta jailbreaks are intended for use by Cydia developers and are not considered stable enough for wider use yet.

On the left is a MacBook Pro 15″ Core 2 Duo with an SSD, the center rotated Dell 22″ screen, and on the right is a Core i7 iMac 27″ decked out with 12GB of RAM. Maybe it’s could just Exposé but it looks like the menubar is still sideways on that vertically oriented Dell, doesn’t it? Nice Mac setup, regardless!

via Flickr

Apple has released iOS 5 beta 4 and is available for developers to download through the iOS Dev Center. The build comes in as 9A5274d and like the iOS 5 betas supports iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, and iPod touch 3rd and 4th gen.

Developers can grab the release on Dev Center, alongside iTunes 10.5 beta 4, and XCode 4.2 beta 4. As usual, the new iTunes beta is required to update to iOS 5 beta 4.

iOS 5 includes a ton of new and exciting features for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users, but won’t be released for public usage until Fall of this year.

Update: iOS 5 beta 4 can be received as an OTA (Over The Air) update from devices that are currently running iOS 5 beta 3. To access the OTA update, tap on Settings > General > Software Update

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion hides the ~/Library directory by default. This is easy to reverse and show Library all the time with a terminal command:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

But for most users that simply isn’t necessary because they won’t be accessing the Library directory enough to make it worthwhile.

For quick and temporary access to your ~/Library/ directory that still retains it’s default hidden nature, try one of the following three tips:

Use “Go To Folder” and Open ~/Library/ Directly

All you need to do is hit Command+Shift+G from the Mac desktop (or Finder > Go > Go to Folder) and type in ~/Library to temporarily access the Library directory in the Finder. When you are done, close this window and it will no longer be visible.

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Updating to Mac OS X Lion for the vast majority of users is a painless experience and everything works great. But for others there can be trouble, there are various user reports in our comments and around the web on Apple’s Support forums and elsewhere, that suggest that wireless networking in OS X Lion is a bit more sensitive than Snow Leopard. This could be an issue that only occurs on some wireless cards, or some routers, or some combination of the two, but nonetheless we’ve found a few workarounds and fixes to resolve this annoyance.

Some of these tips are borrowed from our Mac wireless problems troubleshooting guide, which is an excellent resource with many more solutions and fixes if the following tips don’t work for you.

Basic WiFi Troubleshooting

First try out these tips, they’re basic but work in some cases:

• Turn wireless on & off - the first thing you should try, this alone fixes many cases of dropping wireless connections
• Reboot the Mac – this is the classic Windows troubleshooting tip, but if you haven’t rebooted since the first Lion boot, this can clear up some troubles too
• Reset the Router – just unplug the router for about 15 seconds and reconnect the power supply to cycle most routers, assuming it’s an issue with the router and how Lion is corresponding with it, this will fix the problem

More Advanced WiFi Troubleshooting Tips

Still dropping? The next set of tips pertain to the Network preferences, accessed through System Preferences > “Network”

Set a manual IP address with DHCP – if all else fails, use “DHCP with manual IP address” in Network > Advanced > TCP/IP settings. Pick an IP that is in range of the router, but out of range of conflict. For whatever reason, this has worked for years to resolve Mac OS X wireless problems with some routers
• Move Wi-Fi to the top of the Service Order list – This is an old tip that simply prioritizes WiFi as the primary method that your Mac should connect to the internet, and it seems to help maintain connections
• Move the primary router to the top of “Preferred Networks” list – this is accessed from the “Advanced” menu in Network settings. There is some speculation that if you are in range of multiple routers, the connection will juggle between the two causing WiFi to drop. Drag your primary router to the top of this list.
• Delete existing WiFi connections and re-add them – this is done by clicking on the ‘minus’ icon in the Network settings lower left corner, then just click on “+” and add a new WI-Fi connection
• Add an extra DNS entry – it’s not clear why this works, but many users report success with just adding an additional DNS address to the list. 8.8.8.8 is Google’s public DNS and is reliable
• Add a New Network Location – from the Network control panel, do the following:

• Pull down the ‘Location’ menu and navigate down to ‘Edit Locations’
• Click the + sign to add a new network Location
• Give it a name, click OK
• Select the “Network Name” (wireless router) and click Apply

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I love Mac OS X Lion like the rest of us, but I found this Joy of Tech comic strip hilarious, it touches on everything from natural scrolling, the lack of PPC support, new scrollbars, downloading from the App Store, and more.

On a more serious note, if you plan on upgrading to Lion soon, don’t miss our recommended upgrade steps walkthrough.

Maximizer is a free utility that brings Full Screen app mode to all Cocoa apps running in Mac OS X Lion 10.7, even if they don’t technically support the feature yet.

Lion is needed, as is the following to get this working:

• Download SIMBL – SIMBL stands for “SIMple Bundle Loader” and basically allows app and OS modifications to be made in the form of plugins, which is exactly what Maximizer is
• Get Maximizer from chpwm.com – Uncompress the zip file and drop the .bundle in ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

You will then need to relaunch any open apps for the plugin to load, but be aware that Full Screen won’t work in some apps as anticipated, if at all.

Is this necessary? That depends on who much you like Full Screen. Quite a few apps don’t support true full screen yet, ranging from Firefox and Chrome to even apps that ship with Lion like the App Store, TextEdit, Address Book, iWeb, Disk Utility, iChat, and many more. Admittedly, some of these apps don’t make much sense to be full screen, but some would be good and just haven’t been optimized for Lion yet. This should hold you over until then.

The 2011 Mac Mini is blowing away early benchmarks, in some cases doubling their predecessors and even outperforming the impressive MacBook Air 2011 benchmarks. Not bad for a tiny Mac are they? Unsurprisingly, the Mac Mini Core i7 model is the most impressive, with a whopping 9573 GeekBench score, but the Core i5 is no slouch at 6395.

The above chart compares the new 2011 Mini GeekBench scores vs 2010, 2009, and even the 2005 mini, courtesy of MacMiniColo, but these are not rogue results, as a quick search on GeekBench‘s website shows us several more 2011 Mac Mini killing it in the benchmarks:

With the 2011 Mac Mini performing so well, it looks like the hardest decision many prospective buyers will have to make is exactly which model they want to fly with, but the Quad-Core i7 Server model is a certified screamer. We’ll update as we get more benchmark results and hopefully we can see some real-world tests soon too.