More then likely either you or someone you know owns one. They are Muti-Media powerhouses. Great user interfaces and access to the internet make all of them ideal candidates for one thing. Media Streaming. That is, streaming your HD movies, tunes, and pics over your home network to your PS3,Wii, or 360. It may sound daunting, but these 3 little apps make it a breeze!

First up, Sony’s Playstation 3.

MediaLink. Your PlayStation 3 has been craving the media on your Mac. Finally, complete Macintosh and Playstation 3 integration is upon us. MediaLink can stream Music,Video, and Photos to your Mac. It does so by taking advantage of the UPnP technology of your router.

Enjoying your media through the PlayStation 3 has never been this easy, on any platform — and the Mac isn’t just any platform. Its our favorite platform, so we’ve taken great care to create a seamless solution. MediaLink can stream and copy the following formats to your PS3: MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV-MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4-H.264, DIVX, XVID-AVI, WMV, ASF-JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP-RAW, PDF, PS, EPS, TGA.
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My laptop comes with me everywhere I go. I wake up in the morning, toss my laptop in my bag and head out. Often I don’t get back home for another 5-6 hours. This means I need my battery to last me all day. I do take the charger with, but I often never have time to stop and plug in. Here are five simple tips I follow to make sure my battery lasts me all day.

1. WiFi – Don’t get me wrong, I love being connected but it’s not necessary 100% of the time. I like to blog on the go, but when I write I make sure to switch the WiFi off until I am ready to publish my post.
2. Screen Brightness – I will admit that a nice bright screen is very fancy, but at times, its just not all that practical. You can skip this if you have the automatically adjust screen brightness checked in system preferences. If you don’t have that checked, you can easily forget that you have your screen blasting as bright as it will go.
3. Keyboard Brightness – Handy as it may be, it’s just another drain on your battery. Keep it off unless you need it.

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Back in July of ’08 I wrote about a neat little app called Snapplr. Snapplr is a replacement for OS X’s built in screen shot tool. Snapplr brings  many additional features as well as ease of use to screen shots. The highlight of Snapplr is the ability to instantly share whatever you may be capturing. With Snapplr you can:

• Publish you screen shot instantly on the web thanks to Snapplr’s instant image hosting. After the selecting the live option for your shot, Snapplr instantly adds the corresponding URL to your clipboard so you can instantly share it friends.
• Import your clips instantly into your email! Snapplr supports the ability to share screen shots through integration with OS X’s Mail app.
• Save directly to your clipboard. Snapplr also makes it easy to import screen shots into design and graphic apps via copy and paste.
• Last but not least is the ability to share your clips live. Snapplr offers a unique service that streams your selected area live on the web!

Snapplr resides in the menu bar when not in use, configurable hot keys bring up the snapplr window that allows you to set options before snapping your picture. The lightweight, unobtrusive style of snapplr makes it fun and simple to use.

Head on over to Snapplr.com to learn more and download the free trial!

Apple’s own Front Row is a pretty solid media center, as long as you are just looking to watch/listen to your media. It is simple and it does its job well. However, some people like a few more feature when it comes to a media center, especially those who are using there computer solely as a media center. Enter Plex.

On the outside, Plex may look just like any other media center, but inside you will find it is packed with useful and ingenious features.

For starters Plex has the ability to automatically fetch and apply Metadata from IMDB and TVDB to your media. This feature paired with Plex’s file manager makes organizing your media powerful and convenient. Support for RSS feeds and Shoutcast streams also make Plex stand out from other media center options.
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Apple just can’t help itself. If something can be better, they make it better. Earlier this morning Apple quietly upgraded the older style white MacBook.

What Changed?

The biggest and most noticeable upgrade would be the move from Intel’s GMA X3100 GPU to NVIDIA’s new 9400M. That in and of itself is a great bump. But they didn’t stop there. The next move they made was upgrading the FSB from 800MHz to 1066MHz. They also upgraded the bluetooth module from 2.0 to 2.1. and bumped the standard memory from 1GB to 2GB.

Thanks to Apple, your 1000 bones will take you a lot further now.

Not to long ago I attempted to install Linux Mint 5.0 on my MacBook Pro. It went okay but things like the display driver and wireless just didn’t work right. Fast Forward to the release of Mint 6.0. Slick, the one word that sums up this new release. Automated driver retrieval and installation makes everything much much easier. The WiFi and ATI Control Center installed without a hitch. Combine all of this with Apple’s built in boot camp feature and you have the easiest and fastest dual boot system.

Here are the pics:

A list of the 20 most useful Apple websites to help you get more out of your Mac.

Applications:

1. macapper.com
2. versiontracker.com
3. macupdate.com
4. Apple.com/downloads
5. opensourcemac.org

Forums/Support:

1. discussions.apple.com
2. forum.insanelymac.com
3. forums.macosxhints.com
4. macfixitforums.com
5. mac-forums.com

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Your iPhone/iPod touch is designed to be an on the go gadget. You take it with you to work, school, and everywhere else you go. You use it stay connected and to get things done when you are on the go. So when you pull it out expecting to get some quick work done, only to find out that the battery is dead, you better have a backup plan. A backup plan in this case is a battery backup designed for your iPhone/iPod Touch.

1. Mophie’s Juice Pack – Coming in at $99.95,  it’s the king of battery backups. It offers an extra 6 hours of talk time and an extra 8 hours of video playback.  If the price is a little bit rich for your blood, try using code juice09 at checkout to get an extra %5 off.
2. Kensington’s Mini Battery Pack – Listed at $49.99,  it’s half the price of our previous option. Even at half the price it still offers some pretty good results. 3 hours of extra talk time and 6 hours of additional video playback. The Mini Battery Pack, like its name implies is also much smaller then the Juice Pack.
3. Macally Powerlink – Priced at $49.99 the Macally Powerlink is in essence, a digital multi-tool. Not only can it provide emergency power to your iPhone/iPod, but it also functions as a 2GB flash drive and sync cable.

To me it seems like the Kensington is the best deal and I’m sure if you were to shop arround abit you may even be able to snag a better deal. The Macally Powerlink is a nifty little gadget as well, while its battery power is minimal, it can still be very useful.

Today the Google Mac team announced the introduction of a new App called the Quick Search Box. While it is only a developer preview, it seems like it may be a promising app for those constantly on the search for web information.

From Google-”This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.”

I know I’m gonna give it a try and it may actually be nice, not having to launch FF every time I wanna Google something. This will save me a good 3 seconds every time I search. That’s about 30 seconds a day or about 182 minutes a year! In all seriousness, A truly useful app to add to your dock.

You can download it here: Google code site

RoadMovie 1.5 for OS X is a full featured video conversion app. Developed by Bitfield, RoadMovie 1.5 is a leopard only app that focuses on useful features and efficient and powerful encoding. RoadMovie includes built-in presets for Apple TV, Cellphone, iPhone, iPod, PSP, PS3, Nintendo Wii and Web. Not only does it re-encode movies, but it can also support batch encoding, Meta-data insertion, subtitle insertion, and chapter insertion. RoadMovie has many other neat features such as the built in ability to upload movies directly to .Mac, WebDav, Amazon S3 or YouTube.

RoadMovie is easily worth the $20 pricetag, especially if you are looking to transfer those dvd rips and downloads to a format that your iPod/iPhone and PS3 can playback.

If you are looking for some more in depth info or are interested in trying RoadMovie 1.5, Head over to Bitfield’s website.