The latest MacHeist bundle has been revealed and it’s quite a good one this year. For those not aware, the MacHeist bundles are a collection of various Mac apps sold together in one package for a lower price than buying all the individual programs separately. As more people buy the bundle, more apps are added to the bundle. They also donate 25% of every sale to charity.

Update: Speech is over. New versions of iLife and iWork (sites not updated currently), updated 17″ MacBook Pro and the news that the iTunes music store is going completely DRM free by the end of this quarter, as well as variable pricing on songs (no more $0.99 only, now the song price will range from $0.69 to $1.29 a song). Apple’s got a big keynote speech today in San Francisco where they’ll be announcing new software/hardware to the world.

Kevin writes:I have a iBook G4 — 1.33 GHz — 512 MB RAM. It’s running really slow. Do you have any “quick fixes”? I was looking on the internet and saw that “anacron” was suggested. Do you guys have any suggestions. I don’t really want to buy a new mac (yet) so any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks.There’s two areas you can look at when trying to speed up a computer: hardware or software.

Vanessa asks: I really need to get some back up Hard Drive. I’ve heard I need at least 3 HDDs. is that what I use? Also what brand or memory space do you think is required?On a mac the best back up is a external firewire HD and then setting up time machine. Time machine is Leopard’s built in backup solution and you will need to have Mac OS 10.5 installed to use it.

MacZot.com is a site that features daily deals related to Mac software. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great little tutorial/manual for switching from Windows to a Mac: macZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most innovative learning tool ever created for “switchers.

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to watch the latest episode of 30 Rock but didn’t know where to turn because your VCR (VCR? What’s that?) is broken and you haven’t been able to figure out the whole downloading tv shows off iTunes or anywhere else on the internet (*cough*). You’ve heard of this website called Hulu but anytime you go there it gives you this message:It should be noted there can be issues with uninstalling Hotspot Shield (detailed a bit on Apple’s support forum and removing the ads it uses from Safari).

For those of you that have a white macbook and have had it for any length of time will notice the discoloration of the palm rests. What once was a bright clean white macbook as turned to a rather ugly looking colour. This can be an issue when you are showing off your amazing Macbook to your PC using friends. If you are like me you tried to use a variety of cleaners, windex, etc to clean it, all of which did nothing to solve the problem.

If you like to twitter (What is twitter?) on occasion and would like to be notified whenever there’s a new post up on About This Mac, hit up this link and click follow.We probably won’t use it for much more than just new content notifications, at least for now. So if you’re already subscribed to the RSS feed then you’re probably good to go.

Happy Birthday to the Mouse.The computer mouse turns 40 via Macworld.

If you are like many people online you are probably using Mozilla’s Firefox as your web browser of choice. If you aren’t using Firefox then this post won’t directly related to you. However if you are… read on.Do you save passwords to frequently visited websites in Firefox with this dialogue drop down menu?If so, do you utilize the Firefox master password, which can be set here:I would greatly advise using a master password.

If you’ve seen Star Wars, you’ve no doubt wished that you could move an object just by thinking about it. Well, mankind is a step closer to this reality. 60 minutes recently broadcast a story about Brain Control Interface (BCI), and I’m still reeling from it, just thinking about the impending fallout from this technology. Amazing, inspiring, breath-taking… I challenge you to watch this and not be surprised!

I love showing my friends YouTube videos when they come to my place, but I hate shaking that mouse to keep the screen from dimming. Sometimes in protest I turn the screen/power saving off, but then I forget to turn them back on. Headache!!!So I finally got sick of this and installed a slick little program called Caffeine. It’s a menu bar app that keeps your computer awake.

Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capabilities to their gmail service. To enable the service, just visit this site and download and install the plugin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s downloaded before you can install it — but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you accidently leave Firefox open.Then, it’s just a matter of waiting for one of your contacts to have installed it themselves so you can try it out!

Jennifer asks:This ol’ laptop (Dell) of mine is slowly dying (CMOS battery, CD drive is dead, other wonky stuff). So, of course, I’m pondering getting a MacBook before I head back to Africa in February since I’ll be gone for four months. I guess my biggest question is MacBook vs. MacBook Pro (I like the glowy keyboard in Pro) … but for a basic/average user, do I need what the Pro version has to offer and is it worth the extra cost?

I really like Firefox 3 and have always used it as my default web browser on both the Mac and PC platform. However, the way that Firefox handles PDF files is some what of an annoyance. If you are like me you too will find it rather odd then that when in Firefox and you click on a web link to a PDF file it will automatically download the file and then open the PDF up in Apple’s default Preview.

Portable Document Format, or .pdf, is my favourite filetype to send to others when I want to show them a document, and I care about formatting, filesize and compatibility. Your Mac comes with Preview, and Windows users can download a multitude of .pdf readers like Foxit Reader and Acrobat to read .pdf’s.

Jared asks:I have been using Pages for a lot of my desktop publishing needs while on my Mac, however, I still need people in the PC world to view my documents. I have been using the Export function quite a lot and noticed that it does not have a shortcut key next to it. What is its shortcut key? This is a great question and actually a problem that I have encountered when using other programs.

Mikul asks:Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been running really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not running anything. Also, the battery has been lasting for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?One thing you can check is the activity monitor (if you use spotlight and search for Activity Monitor).

Melissa asks:Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Publisher version for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newsletter that’s done in publisher, for now anyway, but I have my mac)Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to convert a Microsoft Publisher file to something that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fingers at Microsoft for releasing a program that is so proprietary that nothing else supports it (our vote!

Customization of your Mac is one of the best ways to bring your personality to your Mac. And what better place for us to start talking about customization than with the About This Mac screen. Now some of you might not even know where to find this screen. So to begin click on the Apple logo in the top left, and the first item you will see is About This MacThis is what you will see before you do any customizing.