Team Fortress 2 is now completely free to download and to play online. No strings attached. That’s right, one of the most popular and highly rated online multiplayer games of all time is now being given away for free.

This could very well be the best free online game for the Mac platform. If you haven’t played Team Fortress 2 before but you like multiplayer action games, there’s no excuse not to now. Since both Windows & Mac OS X versions are available and can play together, you can get your PC friends to tag along too.

Download Steam & Team Fortress 2 Now

Most newish Intel Macs can run the game, the Steam system requirements match TF2’s minimum requirements closely: Mac OS X 10.5.8 or 10.6.3, 1GB RAM or more, NVIDIA GeForce 8 or higher, ATI X1600 or higher, or Intel HD 3000 or higher, Mouse, Keyboard, Internet Connection. As usual the newer your Mac, the better the game will run.

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Fire up Software Update, Mac OS X 10.6.8 has been released. The update prepares your Mac for installing Mac OS X Lion when it is released next month and includes other bug and security fixes.

Direct Download Links for Mac OS X 10.6.8
If you don’t want to go the Software Update route, here are the direct download links:

• Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update
• Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo
• Mac OS X 10.6.8 Server Update

Release notes are as follows:

The 10.6.8 update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, including fixes that:

Enhance the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion

Resolve an issue that may cause Preview to unexpectedly quit

Improve support for IPv6

Improve VPN reliability

Identify and remove known variants of Mac Defender

We’ll update if anything else is worth mentioning.

Update: Native TRIM SSD support is also included in 10.6.8 update, making this an essential update for all Mac users using solid state storage.

Steve Jobs famously said “if you see a stylus, they blew it” with regard to touch screens, but don’t tell that to Wacom. They just released a nice sketching and note taking app for the iPad called Bamboo Paper. The app is intended for use with a stylus (shh, don’t tell Steve Jobs) and looks to improve the quick sketch experience on the iPad.

It has all the standard features you’d want, with different paper types, ink color options, sharing functionality, but maybe most important is that MacWorld says it has one of the “fastest rendering engines for drawing” on the iPad. That’s a big relief if you’ve been annoyed with the rendering lag that exists on some of the other drawing apps out there for the iOS platform.

Get Bamboo Paper on the iOS App Store, it’s free until June 30 but afterwards it costs $2.

If you want to go against Mr Jobs grain and grab a stylus, here are a few to choose from since they all appear to work the same:

• BoxWave iPad Stylus – $15
• Targus Stylus for iPad – $12
• Acase Stylus for iPad – $10
• Bamboo Stylus – $29.95

I can’t give any specific recommendations because I’ve never used a Stylus for the iPad or iPhone, but anything is probably better than that silly sausage that became strangely popular last year in Korea due to their chilly winters.

The upbeat promo video demonstrates the features and speed of the app, and also shows Wacoms Bamboo Stylus product too:
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If you’ve always liked the idea of hiding your iPad in a discreet case, why not build your own out of an old book? This is a great idea and it’s pretty simple, you don’t need much to get it done either:

• Old book that is a bit larger than the iPad
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Wood glue or similar
• Exacto knife, box cutter, and/or Dremel tool
• Patience

The Instructables guide has the following advice for choosing a good book for this project:

Take your iPad to a second-hand book shop or thrift store and find a book that is the right size. I found the best size was when you set the iPad on the pages of the book, there is about 20mm (3/4″) to 25mm (1″) all around it. Too small is a problem because the paper won’t be strong enough to hold the iPad in and too big is fine, if you like carrying alot of size and weight you don’t need. The perfect thickness is when the pages of the closed book are the same or slightly thicker than the iPad. I also chose a book with lots of photos because the pages were thicker which meant stronger and less to cut.

Basically you just open the book, outline and measure the iPad, and start cutting. If you’re OCD, the Dremel tool is used to make clean lines around in the inside of the book, but it’s not a requirement. After the pages are cut out to accomodate the iPad snuggly, glue the pages and back cover together (but not the front cover!), wait for it to dry, and you’re done. Instructables suggests you don’t glue the pages together so you can slip the power adapter through and charge the iPad while it’s in the book, but I think the protection offered by having the pages bound together is worth the trade off. The only thing I’ve noticed that the guides are missing is a little thumb notch so you could easily pull the iPad out of the book.

Instructables: Recycle an Old Book into a Stealth iPad Case

You could use the same guide to create a discrete case for the iPhone, an iPod, MacBook Air 11″ or any other laptop too, although building one for the 17″ MacBook Pro may pose a physical challenge. This is much cheaper than buying something like the BookBook iPad case, although admittedly unless you get a fancy leather book it probably won’t turn out quite so classy.

If done properly, it looks just like a standard book when closed:
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If you have a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro, you can check the battery cycle count. This lets you see how many charge and drain cycles have been used on the battery, and gives you an idea of overall battery health.

This functionality exists in all versions of macOS and Mac OS X, and we’ll walk you through how you can check the cycle count using built-in system management functions.

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Soon users may not need to jailbreak in order to get custom widgets on the iPhone with iOS 5. At least, that’s what a recent patent granted to Apple suggests.

Multiple references of widgets, custom widgets, and user created widgets using a “widget creator module” are reference in the patent listing on the US Patent Office site (emphasis mine):

The GPS module 135 determines the location of the device and provides this information for use in various applications (e.g., to telephone 138 for use in location-based dialing, to camera 143 and/or blogger 142 as picture/video metadata, and to applications that provide location-based services such as weather widgets, local yellow page widgets, and map/navigation widgets).

The applications 136 may include the following modules (or sets of instructions), or a subset or superset thereof: … widget modules 149, which may include weather widget 149-1, stocks widget 149-2, calculator widget 149-3, alarm clock widget 149-4, dictionary widget 149-5, and other widgets obtained by the user, as well as user-created widgets149-6; widget creator module 150 for making user-created widgets…

This diagram from the patent displays widget references as well, including the Stocks and Weather widgets which are already included in iOS 5 beta (seen in the screen shot at the top of this post):
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If you use GitHub for version control or just to share and manage code, you ought to grab the brand new GitHub client for Mac OS X. It’s a great looking app that lets you find and manage repositories, check commit history and changes, sync and view branches, create and merge branches, compare and rollback commits, and everything else you’d expect from a version control client and the social code sharing site.

You can download GitHub for free or read more about it on the github blog.

The latest developer preview of Mac OS X Lion includes a nice looking new login screen that features an Apple logo placed over the ubiquitous Lion linen. If just plain linen wasn’t enough for you, now you can have the Apple logo version as your wallpaper too.

Click the image above or here for the giant full sized version

The image was converted from a PDF file, making the ginormous 3995×2500 resolution a little funky, but if you use any mortal sized screen it should look great.

Here is what it looks like on Lion’s login screen:
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The next iPhone will be released in September, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Citing several sources with apparent knowledge of Apple’s plans, here’s what Bloomberg seems to confirm about iPhone 5:

• A5 CPU, same as iPad 2
• 8 megapixel camera, up from the current 5mp
• iPhone 5 will “closely resemble the iPhone 4”
• iPhone 5 pushed back in order to ship with iOS 5

Apple has publicly announced the iOS 5 release date is set sometime this Fall. If Bloomberg is correct, then the release of iOS 5 and iPhone 5 will coincide with one another. This year, the Fall equinox falls on the Friday of September 23rd, which would leave a full business week afterwards for some dates to align, although Apple seems to have affinity for Tuesday and Wednesdays for product releases.

iPad 3?
Tossed into the report is also a brief mention of a “new iPad” that has a more responsive and higher resolution screen, coming in at 1/3 higher resolution than the current iPad 2 display. There is no timeline given, but presumably iPad 3 would be due out in 2012.

Most of Bloombergs report reiterates past iPhone 5 rumors, and there is a clear pattern forming of major news outlets reporting the same information about the next-gen iPhone. This does indicate some reliability, as we have seen the same reiteration of rumored hardware and specs leading up to the release of iPad 2, Verizon iPhone, iPhone 4, and even the MacBook Air.

You can plug any USB hard drive into a Time Capsule and expand the available disk space of the Time Capsule that way. This is then accessible as usual as a Network Attached Storage device for your Mac backups or whatever, and you can then even directly backup wirelessly to that external drive connected to the Time capsule using Time Machine.

Apparently this feature has existed since the dawn of Time Capsule, but I just inadvertently discovered this. This is great because it allows you to expand your Time Capsule storage yourself if you run out of space, but also because you can buy the cheaper model and then just attach a huge external drive to create a massive capacity NAS device.

You may have seen that Apple announced two new versions of the Time Capsule, they come in 2TB for $299 and 3TB for $499. Spending another $200 just to get another 1TB of storage seems a bit expensive, and that’s exactly where I found the tip on 9to5mac. In a post where they say the new 3TB Time Capsule price tag is “crazypants” they suggest you buy the 2TB model and then use your own 3TB drive for a total of 5TB of storage. This is great idea, and suddenly the Time Capsule became a lot more appealing to me, because this means less money for more storage.

If you feel like doing this, both the Seagate 3TB USB external hard drive and Western Digital 3TB USB external drive are $149 with free shipping from Amazon. Stack that on your brand spanking new Time Capsule 2TB, and you’ve got yourself some serious wireless storage capacity.

Firefox 5 is hot off the digital presses for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and Android. The new version is said to include over 1000 improvements and performance enhancements, with better HTML5, support for CSS animations, better tab handling, bug fixes, and more, but there’s nothing visibly different from 4.0 when you first launch the app.

If you already use Firefox 4, you can update to 5 directly through the “About” menu and apply the update, otherwise head on over to Mozilla.com to download the latest version.

Updated 2/21/2012: Here are quick instructions on how to perform a clean Mac OS X Lion installation. Read beyond these steps for some background on the initial confusion surrounding OS X Lion clean install practices.

• Download OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and make a bootable OS X Lion installer from a USB drive
• Boot from the aforementioned Lion installer by holding “Option” at boot and selecting the external boot installer drive
• Choose “Disk Utility” from the Mac OS X Utilities screen
• Select the destination hard drive from the left side and click on the “Erase” tab, set the format as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and click “Erase”
• Exit out of Disk Utility, and back at the Mac OS X Utilities screen, select “Install Mac OS X”
• Select the destination hard drive and install as usual

Choosing a clean install will force the destination drive to lose all existing data. Only do this if you have a backup made and you are comfortable with formatting the Mac hard drive. Carry on for some background on the OS X Lion clean install nonissue.

Update: Lion is now available on App Store to download. Yes, you can still perform a clean install with the final release App Store version.

Mac OS X Lion is around the corner, and mixed in with the excitement is some frustration based on a misunderstanding of the system requirements. The latest bout of frustration comes from a post on MacRumors titled “Lion Clean Install Requires Snow Leopard Disk?” that apparently quotes Steve Jobs responding to a users question regarding a clean install:
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Apple unleashed several major updates to its professional video editing software suite this morning, featuring Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, and Compressor 4. Final Cut Pro X was rebuilt from the ground up and is said to reinvent video editing. Apple’s SVP Phil Schiller expresses his enthusiasm:

“Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro. We have shown it to many of the world’s best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped.”

Many popular Hollywood movies have been edited in prior versions of Final Cut Pro, giving some serious clout to it’s abilities, a few include X-Men: Origins, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, 300, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network, Where the Wild Things Are, Eat Pray Love, and True Grit.

Despite being a complete redesign with hoards of new features, the price of Final Cut Pro X and it’s component apps have actually dropped substantially, and they are all available as downloads through the Mac App Store:

• Final Cut Pro X – $299.99
• Compressor 4 – $49.99
• Motion 5 – $49.99

Each new app release is already at the top of the Mac App Store “Bestsellers” list, indicating both enthusiasm and a significant pent up demand for Apple’s latest video editing package.

System Requirements are a bit stricter this time around, requiring Mac OS X 10.6.7 or newer, an Open-CL capable graphics card or Intel HD Graphics 3000 or later, both must have at least 256MB of VRAM. Your Mac should also have at least 2GB of RAM, but 4GB (or more) is recommended. You can read more about the GPU requirements on Apple support.

Embedded below is a first-look walkthrough of Final Cut Pro X, for those interested.
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Uninstalling applications from Mac OS X is probably the easiest method of removing apps from any operating system, and it’s far easier on a Mac than anything you’ll encounter in the Windows world. Deleting apps is so simple that some new Mac users are left wondering what else they’re supposed to do, I have received several family tech support questions where they are determined to find an “Uninstall Programs” control panel like in Windows – this is not the case on a Mac, where app removal is dead simple.

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Just what you’ve been waiting for. Now you can hide your Facebook usage in plain sight with a crafty app called ExcellBook. That screenshot you see up top is Excellbook in use, it makes Facebook look like some boring old MS Excel spreadsheet, creating just about the best Facebook disguise I’ve ever seen.

Even the app icon looks kind of Microsoft Office-ish, which makes Excellbook a very sneaky cover that certainly hides Facebook well, assuming your company didn’t block Facebook access completely that is.

I tried the app out and it works as advertised, but I couldn’t figure out how to change the default language from Spanish, unless you can figure that out your boss might think you’re suddenly working in another language if they look too close. What’s the motivation here? Other than to kill productivity, TheNextWeb says the app is some kind of publicity stunt for a clothing company, but there’s no hint of that in the app.

You can download ExcellBook for Mac OS X or Windows at the appropriately named BeStupidAtWork.com.

Use it, don’t abuse it, and try not to get fired.

Ever wondered how Mac OS X would work with a large touch screen? Curious how iOS would perform on a bigger screen than the iPad’s 9.7″ display? These videos will show you how both of Apple’s fine OS’s look on a 21″ touch panel. The Mac OS X video is shown above and the iOS video is embedded below.

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Did you know you can instantly access a dictionary, thesaurus, or Wikipedia entry for a word or phrase, from nearly anywhere in Mac OS X? All you need to do is remember a super easy three-finger tap trick.

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The next time you hear someone talking trash about the iPhone or Apple’s future in the mobile world, present this impressive fact: Apple has enough cash that it could buy outright most of it’s hardware competitors in the mobile phone industry.

Yes, as ridiculous as that sounds, Apple could buy most of the industry, that means Apple could pay cash and acquire HTC, Nokia, RIM, LG, Motorola Mobility, and Sony Ericsson, the only remaining competitor in the mobile vendor space would be Samsung, which is worth $53 billion.

This impressive data and graph come from Asymco, who says that it’s entirely feasible that Apple’s $70 billion in cash and liquid assets could soon be worth more than the entire mobile phone industry:

The more remarkable thing is that as market values of phone vendors continue to decline, Apple’s cash will continue to grow dramatically. Indeed, a time may soon come when Apple’s cash will be worth more than the entire phone industry.

I wonder what Apple’s competitors think about that?