Facebook is a great way to stay connected to people and has plenty of benefits, but that’s not why we’re here, we’re here to block access to Facebook. Why? Well, there are many reasons to block the site, companies often block the site to prevent employees from accessing it on company time, and parents may want to block Facebook to keep their young children away from some of the more mature content.

Then there are people like me, you like the site but you find Facebook to be an enormous distraction when trying to be productive. Sometimes the easiest way to eliminate the distraction is by forcibly blocking a site along with others that are blackholes of time. I actually have Facebook and a handful of other sites permanently blocked on my work machine, it has kept me free from distractions and I’m sure it helps my productivity. Without further ado, let’s find out five different ways to block Facebook.
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Want to check mountain conditions right from your iPhone? The appropriately titled Snow and Ski Report app by REI offers an easy way to check on snow conditions and ski resorts from anywhere, and it’s free.

Snow and Ski Report gives you snow information for the past 72 hours, total snow depth, the number of trails and lifts that are open, access to the mountains webcams, a five day forecast, and it also follows a resorts Twitter feed so you can get up to date information directly from the operator. You can easily add multiple resorts to follow and have push notifications tell you when any of them get new snow.

The app is a free download available through the iTunes App Store, click here to grab it.

If your winter free time revolves around snow conditions and what’s going on at your local mountain, this app is for you. For the price of free, you just can’t beat it.

Knowing your Mac’s IP address is important for setting up a network or sharing files, here’s two different ways to find your IP address in Mac OS X; an easy way through the GUI and a more technical approach with the command line. These methods will be the same whether you are connected via ethernet or wireless.

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The download of iOS 4.2.1 GM just became available to developers, but the jailbreak community has moved quick and determined that existing versions of redsn0w can indeed jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 GM. The downside is that the existing version of Cydia crashes on a jailbroken iOS 4.2.1, meaning you’d have to install apps through SSH. Unless you’re determined to be on the cutting edge of iOS and jailbreak releases, it’s probably best to avoid trying to jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 for now and wait for a new version of Cydia to be released.

If you are looking to jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 use redsn0w 0.9.6b4 instead.

The process to jailbreak iOS 4.2.1 GM with redsn0w 0.9.6b2 has been confirmed by RedmondPie to work on an iPhone 4, and while it’s a little screwy it does work. You will need iTunes 10.1 before getting started, here are the directions:

• Download redsn0w 0.9.6b2 for either Mac and Windows
• Download iOS 4.2.1 GM and iOS 4.1 IPSW (here are iOS 4.1 IPSW downloads if you need them)
• Update/restore to iOS 4.2.1 GM firmware using the IPSW
• Launch redsn0w 0.9.6 and direct it to the iOS 4.1 IPSW file
• Select that you want to Install Cydia, and click Next
• Turn off your iPhone and make sure it is plugged into your computer
• Follow the directions to place your device into DFU mode so that redsn0w can install the jailbreak
• When finished, the device will auto-reboot and it will be jailbroken on iOS 4.2.1 GM

While it’s exciting that the latest update has already been jailbroken, the lack of a functioning Cydia app makes it impractical for most iPhone and iPod touch users.

If you are using the final version of iOS 4.2.1, a better solution would be to download redsn0w 0.9.6b4, but it provides a tethered jailbreak for most devices.

A picture has surfaced that claims to be a White Verizon iPhone 4. The image is particularly interesting because it shows no SIM card slot on the side of the iPhone, which would be inline with a CDMA iPhone. There is also a solid frame with no antenna separation like existing iPhone 4 models, which would suggest there is a redesigned antenna in the device.

Apple has said the white iPhone 4 release date will be sometime in Spring of 2011, and rumors suggest that the iPhone will come to Verizon around the same time. If those two pieces of information remain true, then Apple probably does have CDMA iPhone’s being tested in the wild, and it might look similar to the device pictured.
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Here’s a great setup that includes the best of all worlds: an iMac, iPad, iPod Touch, MacBook Pro, with a Windows 7 VM on the left and a Linux machine on the right. It looks like there’s a Magic Trackpad in there too. Great setup, and thanks for the submission John!

If you’re looking to upgrade your MacBook Pro hard drive, Amazon is offering the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB SSD Hybrid Drive for $114.99 with free shipping, this is a discount of 22% from the MSRP.

The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB is 2.5″ and will fit in the Mac Mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. The hard drive comes highly recommended for it’s very fast performance, which is achieved through a unique hybrid model that offers an onboard SSD drive that seamlessly caches frequently accessed data from the spinning 7200 RPM drive. The result is performance that is close to that of an SSD drive, but you gain significantly more disk space and pay a fraction of the price of a standard SSD drive. For comparison, most Mac portables ship stock with a 5400 RPM drive.

I have been eyeing these drives, I recently upgraded my MacBook Pro to 8GB of RAM and found it to be a very worthwhile performance upgrade. I imagine pairing 8GB of RAM with one of these Momentus XT hybrids might make the ultimate MacBook Pro upgrade combo for the price, and both would only be around $250. This is a steal considering Apple charges $400 to upgrade the MacBook Pro RAM to 8GB and another $50-$100 to upgrade to a 500GB 7200 RPM drive.

If you’re interested, head over to Amazon to get the $114.99 price with free shipping.

One of the big Apple news stories of the past two days is that two US retailers, TJ Maxx and Marshalls, are selling the base iPad 16GB model for a somewhat shocking $399, a full $100 off the retail price. The question everyone is now asking is how are they getting away with such low prices, here’s my thoughts on the matter:

• Free Advertising – the $399 iPad has sent shockwaves through the tech world and it might be the gadget deal of the 2010 holiday shopping season. How often do you hear about TJ Maxx or Marshalls otherwise? The result of the huge price cut is that TJ Maxx and Marshalls are getting enormous amounts of free advertising and promotion, and suddenly the two stores are the hot destinations for anyone who wants an iPad this holiday season.
• iPad for $399 as a Loss Leader – margins on electronics are slim in comparison to clothing and household goods, if TJ Maxx and Marshalls lose roughly $50 on each iPad sold but they can get people into their stores and buying other goods with better margins, they’ll likely more than make up the difference. The big-ticket item loss leader is a pretty standard model for retailers on Black Friday, the iPad just happens to be extra popular and worthy of more press.
• Companies Aren’t Stupid – you can bet that TJ Maxx and Marshalls did a lot of math before setting the $399 price, they aren’t going to sell something that isn’t ultimately beneficial to their bottom line.

Word is that neither store is an authorized Apple reseller, and they probably obtained the iPads through another channel. I’d bet that Apple isn’t thrilled with the drastically reduced pricing, but I’m sure both of these retailers phones are ringing off the hook right now with people trying to track down the cheap iPad.

Regardless of the price, the iPad is expected to be one of the most popular electronic gifts this holiday season, and it appeared high on a recent study of childrens Christmas wish-lists for 2010, just below the iPhone 4 and iPod touch. If the iPad is on your shopping list, you might want to call your local TJ Maxx or Marshalls before they sell out.

Microsoft has released Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, an app that allows any Windows Phone device to sync with a Mac, allowing for copying of movies, music, pictures, podcasts and the other data you’d like to sync to a Windows Phone from OS X. The app is technically in beta but it seems to work reasonably well as Microsoft continues to update it.

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If only the Mac OS X Dashboard weather widget could tell us the weather in distant galaxies far, far away from famous science fiction movies… wouldn’t that be nice? If you enjoy Star Wars, you’ll probably enjoy these images from Cristian Kit Paul, a graphic designer who also must be a Mac user and Star Wars fan. If you’re not a Star Wars fan, well, you’ll just think we’re huge geeks.

Each image is accompanied by a humorous weather report, here’s a particularly amusing one for Alderaan:

Nice and sunny in Aldera today, on beautiful Alderaan. Some showers are expected tomorrow. Unfortunately there seems to be a glitch about Tuesday’s high temperature and no readings from Wednesday on for some reason—we apologize for the technical difficulty. On the bright side, we have a new artificial moon called The Death Star and it’s crescent is clearly visible and awesome. Enjoy.

Tuesday on Alderaan looks like it’s going to be a rough day…

You can see the rest of the weather forecasts and read the other full weather reports from Cristian Kit Paul’s blog.
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You may have noticed that some Mac models display 3.75GB of RAM in the Activity Monitor when they have 4GB of RAM installed, but why is this? The answer is simple: your Mac has a GPU that uses shared memory. This means that your graphics card borrows some of the systems memory and uses it exclusively for graphics processing, this kind of GPU with memory sharing is common on the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook, MacBook Air, and the 13″ MacBook Pro model.

In fact, even if you upgrade your RAM you will continue to have the shared memory amount missing from the available RAM within Activity Monitor, as a result if you had an 8GB upgrade it would show 7.75GB of RAM. This is not an indicator of anything being wrong or of having bad RAM, it’s perfectly normal. The only problem with a GPU borrowing RAM is that you may run out of available system memory faster, but you can easily check to see if your Mac needs a RAM upgrade and whether or not you’d benefit from adding additional memory.

I’ve had multiple people ask me this question, so if you were curious too, now you know.

Update: iOS 4.2 download is now available to all. You can also use iOS 4.2.1 direct download links and avoid the iTunes update process.

iOS 4.2 hasn’t even been released to the public yet, but now iOS 4.2.1 GM is available for developers to download. The latest iOS 4.2.1 build is 8C148 and has versions for all supported hardware including iPhone 4, iPad, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations of iPod touch.

The public release date for iOS 4.2 was November 22, and the 4.2 update came in the form of iOS 4.2.1 which resolved some minor problems with the 4.2 GM build.

Everyone can now download iOS 4.2.1 through iTunes or by using these iOS 4.2.1 direct download links.

Want to time stamp a conversation or a message in the iChat messaging client? You can do that quickly with a keystroke on the iChat app in Mac OS X.

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You can block all the Facebook ads and reskin the site into a more simplistic interface (similar to Twitter really) by installing a third party browser extension called Facebook Neue. Along with blocking the sites ads, it moves the UI into a two column layout, hides a few of the sidebar options, removes application links and language settings, and even rounds image avatars, creating a more simplified and less busy interface for the popular social networking site.

The Facebook Neue extension is available for Safari 5 and Chrome, you can download it here.

You might want to check out the Facebook desktop notifier too, it brings Facebook messages and activity to your Mac desktop through Growl notifications.

LittleIpsum is a handy app that will automatically generate latin text (the famous lorem ipsum dolar) directly from the Mac OS X menubar. It’ll generate full latin sentences, words, and paragraphs, and will even wrap the latin text in HTML tags, which is an extra handy feature for web developers.

LittleIpsum is a free download, you can get it here.

Generating random latin text is one of those things that developers and designers often need to do. Typically we just go to the web for this service, but it’s great to see it can now be done directly in Mac OS X which is sure to save some time.

Some users report variations of a “Network Connection Timed Out” error when trying to update their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a newer version of iOS or even when attempting to connect to the iTunes Store. Errors include but are not limited to:

• “There is a problem downloading the software”
• “Network Connection Timed Out”
• “iTunes could not connect to the Store. An unknown error occurred (-3259). Make sure your network connection is active and try again.”
• “There was an error downloading your music (-3259)”
• “Cannot connect to iTunes Store”
• iTunes Error 9808
• Variations of iTunes Error -3259

These are usually pretty simple errors to fix and we have several methods below.

Before going any further to troubleshoot this error message, make sure the following is true:

• You are connected to the internet
• You have the latest version of iTunes. That applies to both Mac and Windows

If you’re still having problems, here are some troubleshooting tips to fix and resolve various iTunes and iOS software update connection errors:
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Last week I posted a deal to get an 8GB RAM upgrade kit, the price was too good to resist and I went ahead and bought the upgrade myself. Here’s my review and impressions on upgrading a Mac to 8GB of RAM. If you have ADHD and don’t want to read everything below, here’s the Readers Digest version: buy an 8GB upgrade, it rocks.

The RAM I got was the Kingston Apple 8GB Upgrade Kit, it works on most new Macs, all the new MacBook Pro’s, Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook. I imagine all those machines would see the same performance increase as I did. Anyway, I put the 8GB upgrade in my base model unibody 2010 MacBook Pro 13″ with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, which otherwise comes standard with 4GB of RAM.

Installation is so easy it’s barely worth mentioning, upgrading RAM in the MacBook Pro is a matter of undoing a few screws on the bottom of the Mac, lifting off the aluminum case, removing the old RAM, and popping in the new memory. From start to finish it takes maybe 10 minutes at most.

So now I’ll try to answer some common questions about having a Mac with 8GB of RAM:
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Mac users can now pre-order the Grand Theft Auto Triology from Amazon, the trilogy includes the wildly popular original Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The series has been somewhat controversial due to it’s mature content, which is also why it has an “M” rating.

Amazon offers free shipping for the November 22 release date, and includes a price guarantee meaning if the price drops before shipping you will be refunded the difference.

Gaming on the Mac is undergoing a bit of a renaissance with some pretty major titles coming to the Mac platform in time for the holiday shopping season, and the release of the GTA trilogy is just another example of the renewed interest in the platform.