It’s official – video game company Valve announced today that its Steam gaming service is coming to the Mac, along with a native version of gaming engine Source that will bring with it popular titles such as the Half Life series, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Most important is the fact that Valve is not using emulation to make this all happen, as some suspected it would. Emulation would see the original versions of the games being played on the Mac in a spoofed Windows environment. Instead the developer has created a native version of its gaming engine – built for OS X. (more…)

Note: I have updated this guide for Snow Leopard. If you use OS X 10.6+ then make sure to follow step 3.

The following is a guide for setting up a Huawei cellular USB modem on a Mac. It will work with any cellular network, any APN and does not require any third-party connection software. Just your Mac, OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard (10.5+ or 10.6+), and a Huawei modem with an active SIM card for the network you are connecting to.
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Microsoft’s Fall Dashboard update to the Xbox 360 added DivX and Xvid codec support for media playback on the console, reestablishing the 360 as the leader of the next-generation console pack in terms of features and making the Xbox 360 a compelling media centre device. Not only is the 360 a rocking gaming platform with superior online features, but is also a media powerhouse capable of playing just about any music, photography or video file you throw at it.

This functionality is made even radder by the fact that the 360 supports external storage devices or can be used as a media extender for any computer running Windows Media Center. You can even share media stored on a Mac in iTunes using connector software called Connect 360.

Of all the options available storing media on an external hard drive seems most logical to me, but this is easier said than done given the Xbox 360′s limited support for filesystems.
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I’ve been using the latest version of Apple’s OS X operating system, Leopard, for around three days now and I am quite sure that this is the best operating system I have ever used. It is beautiful to look at, packed with awesome new functionality and actually runs faster on my aging G4 Powerbook than its predecessor, Tiger did.

But Apple has also built some humor into the new operating system. The Finder application in Leopard is just amazing. It has been updated with a new sidebar that makes browsing around your computer and attached resources really easy, as well as the ability to flip through your files with Cover Flow – a visual navigation tool that you really have to see to appreciate. If you aren’t sure of the contents of a file, in Cover Flow mode you can actually see its contents in an icon, or hold down space in any view and a window will jump up displaying the contents of the file.
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