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.

Transmission has a built-in IP blocklist for what are determined to be “bad peers” and it should be enabled if you use Transmission with any sort of regularity. The blocklist helps to insure a better experience with torrents and also helps to protect your privacy.

How to enable the IP Blocklist for downloading torrents in Transmission

• Launch Transmission
• Go to Transmission Preferences
• Click on ‘Peers’
• Check the box next to “Blocklist” and again check the box next to “Automatically update weekly”
• If the blocklist doesn’t automatically update, you should click on the “Update” button as well

What exactly connotes a bad peer remains open for interpretation, but generally people who are excessive leechers, those who intentionally seed corrupt or falsely represented files, and even some P2P monitoring services are considered ‘bad peers’ to most IP block lists.

Update: Apparently this applies to older versions of Transmission, recent updates of the application require an external IP block list to be added on its own.

If you need to record screen activity on a Mac, you don’t need to download any additional software because the functionality is built directly into Mac OS X with the QuickTime app. Yes, the same QuickTime video player app that lets you watch videos also lets you record the screen of the Mac, and it’s remarkably simple to use. This is a great solution for most use cases since it’s free and bundled right into all versions of OS X.

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Apple’s big iTunes announcement today was The Beatles joining the iTunes family, this was one of the predictions offered yesterday, later to be solidified by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Apple has crafted a heavy promotional campaign for the announcement, including a Beatles-centric section of the Apple website. Reaction around the web has been a mixture of excitement and boredom, it looks like the majority of people let down by the announcement were hoping for iOS 4.2 to be released instead. Todays announcement did trigger a price war of sorts, as Amazon responded by cutting the price of The Beatles Stereo Box Set 50% to $129.99, which gives you physical CD’s rather than digital content.

Apparently part of the deal to get the Beatles catalogue was to have a large advertising push, which might explain the huge hype around the announcement. As part of the marketing campaign, Apple has crafted several Beatles & iTunes commercials, here’s one of them featuring the popular song “Here Comes The Sun”
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I use TextEdit often for simple text editing and note taking, but you can also use TextEdit as an outliner and avoid downloading another application. Yes seriously, the TextEdit that comes on all versions of Mac OS X can function quite well as a basic outline app.

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You can fast forward or quickly rewind any video playing in QuickTime Player in Mac OS X (or Windows if you go that direction) by using a trackpad or magic mouse.

This is really easy to use but it’s best followed along and tried out yourself than just reading a tutorial, so launch QuickTime Player with a movie of some length so that you can test this out yourself. The QuickTime app is located in the /Applications/ folder of OS X, older versions may be stored as QuickTime Player in the Utilities folder too.

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Resetting your PRAM (or NVRAM) is a common troubleshooting technique when a Mac is misbehaving. We’ll cover how to reset PRAM on any Mac, as well as providing some additional information about PRAM and what it is to better help you understand when and why you’d want to reset it.

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