A computer is generally deemed slow when things take ages to load. Click an icon to launch an app and the computer groans trying to open it. Quit the app and it churns away closing it off. Even scrolling through web pages in your browser feels like being stuck in maple syrup and trying to wade out before you drown a sweet gooey death. ...

I've published many articles here on MacTalk about the topic of getting mobile access in the USA, but constantly need to update them. Terms and conditions change, new players enter the market and even the telcos themselves change their minds frequently, about what they will and won't allow in their own stores. It's a total pain in the arse. Just recently however, getting a US SIM card that'll work on your iPhone, with decent speeds, is not as hard as it used to be. ...

Apple doesn't have a booth or stand at CES, but companies that make accessories for Apple stuff sure do. I've been keeping an eye on a few CES blogs and keeping track of the potentially useful stuff for us Apple fans coming out of the expo floor. ...

If the words NZBmatrix and Newzbin sound familiar to you, you'll know why this article was written. These two sites were shut down recently and it's made me assess if it's worth trying to go legit with my TV show and movie consumption. It used to be easy, once you set up sabnzbd, sickbeard and couchpotato, just sit back and watch the TV shows and movies roll in, but it's a little bit more difficult now. The underground is reassembling and will probably get back to the way it was eventually, but still, are things better now, maybe even to the point where I don't need to bother with Usenet or BitTorrent (ugh) for getting TV shows and movies? ...

Until a friend told me about the Swivl in a casual discussion about what he's found interesting lately, I had never heard of it, so naturally, I tried to get one to review! ...

It's 2012 and more and more of us are generating and hoarding more and more data. Some of you crazies store terabytes upon terabytes of TV shows and movies downloaded off the Internet, on the off chance you'll watch them more than once (hint: you won't). Even if your storage requirements aren't copyright infringement related, the demand for more disk space is off the charts. Despite hard drives topping out at 4TB these days, that just isn't enough to store everything we need. Enter the world of network attached storage (aka, NAS) - little boxes designed to house multiple hard disks and make that aggregate storage avaialble to all the users on your network.

What's generally referred to as a NAS, is a small appliance like computer - something in a cube shape with a network port, space to shove SATA hard disks into and running a variant of Linux, modified for the task of accessing your files across the network. There are also various operating systems, dedicated to turning a spare computer, or a computer built for the specific purpose of storing files, into a NAS - FreeNAS, Unraid, OpenMediaVault and NexentaStor, just to name a few.

To use a NAS, all you do is configure it appropriately (sometimes easier said than done), and on your Mac, it will appear in the Finder sidebar, under "Shared", like so:



Enter in a username and password (or if you've configured your NAS not to have such things, you don't need this step) and that's it. That little box full of hard drives is now available to all the computers or devices on your network, just as if it was plugged in directly.

If you want, you can even run other services on your NAS, like say, a Bittorrent client, a personal web server, or a remote backup application - remember, a NAS is just a computer running Linux (most of the time), so what it can do is only limited by the amount of CPU power, RAM and what the particular operating system running on it has enabled.

For this review, I've managed to get my hands on a wide range of 4-bay NAS units availble in Australia (listed below with average street pricing via staticICE). I'll be going through each NAS individually, covering what I did like and what I didn't like about each one, then providing an overall comparison of benchmarks, both synthetic and real-world, ...

People *hate* buying me Christmas gifts. I'm that a who buys whatever he likes throughout the year and uses Christmas as an excuse to gorge on ham and Appletiser, rather than presents. These are some of the things I got myself throughout the year that I love, so if you have to buy a gift for a picky nerd - check if he or she hasn't already got this stuff and if they don't, buy it for them!

Ardunio Experimenter's Kit

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First up, a disclaimer: I'm not a big calendar user. I don't live and die by my scheduling, but for many people, the calendar on their iPhone is the most important thing on there. The basic calendar app included with iOS is okay, but if you're a hardcore calendar user, then you should really take a look at Fantastical, which is great on the Mac and is now on iOS! ...

I've done a bit of number crunching on the 13" RMBP and figured, it kinda sucks compared to the 13" MacBook Air and I'm not sure why you would bother buying one unless you're really in love with that retina display.

For starters, the pricing on each machine is pretty close, with the RRP from Apple direct for the RMBP is $2199 and the MBA, $1925. Because the MacBook Air is a BTO, there's ...