Although the school year may not yet have ended for many students, Apple has announced today their Back To School Specials for students and educators alike.

This year, Apple has up’d the incentive as they are now offering new buyers either an 8gb iPod nano or an 8gb iPod Touch for anyone purchasing a qualifying Mac.

Now, you may ask why anyone may want an iPod nano if they could get an iPod Touch, but it looks like Apple is counting on enough people purchasing iPhones that the iPod Nano may be more of an incentive for students.

But, if you’ve been waiting to purchase both a Mac and an iPod… its really hard to pass up on this offer.

iCal is a wonderful calendar application that allows you to create and manage multiple calendars at a time. One of its strongest features is its capabilities to both share calendars over the internet and subscribe to calendars in a similar fashion.

The latter feature also allows you to add Holidays to our calendars. To do this, navigate in Safari or the web browser of your choice to http://www.google.com/calendar/.

Create an account if needed and enter into the Search field ‘US Holidays’ or any group of national holidays that apply to you and click the Search Public Calendars button.

Now, add one of the calendars. Once the calendar has appeared under “My Calendars” and on your Google Calendars, click on the drop down arrow next to the calendar and select Calendar Settings.

Find the iCal button on the Calendar Address row and click it to find a link that iCal knows how to handle. Clicking the link will launch iCal and ask you which Calendar you’d like to include it in.

I personally created a new Holidays calendar but it should work seamlessly with any of the calendars you’ve already added. Congrats! Your newly added Holidays should now appear in iCal.

While browsing around the apple site today I stumbled across their Get a Mac FAQ section. Now I was familiar with Apple’s answers to most the questions I was suprised by the following:

Do I need virus software for a Mac?

Apparently, the official answer from Apple is NO! I bet this makes Norton feel great. While I myself have never run any anti-virus software on my Mac I always assumed that others did. Since I’ve never had any virus type symptoms and I know the UNIX base for OS X I always felt comfortable that my system would stay “healthy”..

Let us know in the comments if you use any Anti-Virus software on your Mac… and if so, why? If not, why have you never felt the need to do so?

More and more often content distributors are choosing to stream content over the internet instead of allowing users to download the files locally to their machine. This allows the distributors a bit more control over their content.

Unfortunately, it makes it difficult for you to grab that one portion of a song that you want to include in your podcast, or the funny audio clip that would fit perfectly into your class presentation. I know I’ve often wondered how I could still get a decent quality recording of the streaming audio shared on the internet.

Thankfully, the developers over at rogueamoeba.com developed Audio Hijack Pro. Audio Hijack Pro is a share ware application that allows you to record any sound that comes through your system. It allows you to pick specific applications to record sound from like Safari and create recordings in mp3, acc, and aiff format.

Using Audio Hijack Pro

While Audio Hijack Pro is not free ($32 for the complete version) it does allow anyone to run a fully functional demo that only adds noise to recordings over 10 minutes. So essentially, its free until you start making really long recordings.

To start recording streaming audio:

1. Open Audio Hijack Pro, click Quick Record
2. You can select an input device, System Audio will record anything coming through your sound card, while selecting Application and then the specific app you’re trying to record from will limit the recording to just sounds coming from the selected application.

3. Click Hijack and then Record


4. Start the streaming audio

From here your system will record the streaming audio and save it to the location you selected. As long as your audio recording is under 10 minutes you should receive decent quality recordings that you can use as you feel fit.

Apple has released an update to OS X Leopard putting it to version 10.5.3.

If you haven’t already downloaded and installed the update you can by clicking the apple and then Software Update…

Updates were made to Automator, iCal, iChat, and other portions of OS X.

For details about everything included in the 10.5.3 update head over to the Apple Support page with complete details on changes made to the OS.