Rob LeFebvre - page 31

One of the selling points of a Mac these days is the ability to run Windows software on it, via virtualization or Apple’s own Boot Camp. Running Windows lets you play PC games that haven’t been ported to the Mac, or stay completely compatible with your documents from a PC-centric workplace.

Virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare Fusion (two of the best apps to run Windows software on your Mac without partitioning your hard drive for Boot Camp) isn’t free, though these applications do allow you to try before you buy. Windows 8.1, the current version of Microsoft’s operating system, will run you about $120 for a plain-jane version.

You can run the next-gen OS from Microsoft (Windows 10) on your Mac using virtualization for free, however. We took a quick run at doing just that, as originally sussed out by the fantastic folks over at iMore.

Nearly 900 insanely complex shots full of live-action and computer-generated imagery were created for Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier by the geniuses at Industrial Light and Magic, the effects house created by George Lucas back in the original Star Wars days.

The movie is an action-fest full of fighting, exploding, and comic-book reality all rolled into an engaging tale of patriotism, loyalty, and the possible corruption of big government. To create the magical movie illusions that help you suspend your disbelief in superheroes, the crew of more than 300 at ILM did a ton of painstaking work.

Here’s a short reel representing only a small sample of the full work done by the effects house – it’s amazing how complicated and layered everything is in a movie like this. Check it out.

What’s cuter than a boxer puppy named Indiana Bones fighting the forces of evil (cats)? Not much, for sure.

Directors Zach King and Jadon Gauthier have created a five-minute “remake” of Indiana Jones, and it’s completely adorable. Take a look below.

We all make compromises daily when it comes to online security. Everybody wants to be safe and secure when making purchases online, but practically none of us do everything necessary to keep our data secure.

“People, myself included, are basically lazy,” web developer Joe Tortuga told Cult of Mac, “and ease of use is inversely related to security. If it’s too difficult, then people just won’t do it.”

With all the recent hacks into private as well as corporate data — like the credit card grab from Home Depot and the hack into Sony’s files, there’s no better time to learn some of the things we all can do to protect ourselves. We spoke to some online security experts to get their advice.

If your idea of high comedy is waggling your hind parts at people with a smarmy smirk, Jib Jab’s new funny video is right up your, well, alley.

“2014, You Are History” is a celebrity character-filled musical video in which the biggest names of the year sing a parody song set to the melody of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Watch the video below and remind yourself of this silly year, including ice bucket challenges, hacked celebrity nudes and Kim Kardashian’s shiny hindquarters.

Kids everywhere are looking to Santa to bring them the hottest tech toys around, including iPhones, iPads, Nintendo 3DSes and Sony PlayStations, but these types of gifts can certainly strain a lowly elf’s meager paycheck.

If you’re looking for engaging and interesting gifts that won’t burst Santa’s money sack, take a look at the list we’ve put together for you below. It’s full of fun stuff that won’t leave you unable to afford a plate of cookies for that big red jolly fellow.

It’s easy to list off classic songs of the season, isn’t it? Even now, the hit holiday tunes we all know by heart rush up the music charts every year, gracing radio and streaming options for the happiest season of them all.

Of course Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)” — written in 1944 by Mel Torme — is currently No. 5 on the Billboard charts, while “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee (1958) tops even that chestnut at No. 3 of the top hot holiday songs as well.

But what about all those other holiday songs that never had a chance to be on a chart anywhere, except perhaps the chord charts these bands use to play live gigs? How will the odd songs, the weird ones — the tunes that just “think different” — ever get heard?

That’s why we’re here, with a bunch of weird tunes you just have to hear. Happy holidays!

There’s nothing better than a snowball fight, unless its a snowball fight you can watch from the comfort of your couch and Macbook Pro.

Even better is a snowball (or two!) in the face of a bunch of adorable hipsters from Exit 10, a design studio in Baltimore that put together this ultra-slow-mo snowball massacre for you to enjoy.

As we watch the hordes of moviegoers heading out to see the final film in The Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, we can’t help but rejoice a little that this endless epic journey is about to end.

In this parody trailer for the previous installment, The Desolation of Smaug, you can “Rejoin Middle Earth’s other, shorter, less interesting fellowship as they continue their slow journey to Scrooge McDuck’s vault,” as the gravelly-voiced narration actor says in the hilarious trailer.

Check it out below.

It’s hard to believe that the holidays are already upon us, with Christmas arriving next week and Hanukkah already in full swing.

Our very own Leander Kahney weighs in this week with a fantastic gift guide for all those crazy Apple users in your world. This clever gift guide will help you find that special stuff your fanatic probably doesn’t have.

That, plus a fairly tasty gift guide for the cooks in your family or friend group from resident foodie Lewis Wallace, a quick and easy How To on reformatting your Mac’s hard drive from video and graphics whiz Stephen Smith, and some news on the recent spotlight aimed at Apple’s continued problems with Asian labor conditions.

Be sure to see below for these engaging stories and more. And Happy Holidays!

Can you truly find yourself in a video game? Canadian filmmaker and professor Ramona Pringle thinks so. After her mother got sick and she broke up with her New York boyfriend, she spent a year playing World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

During that time, she found many pearls of wisdom, which she’s condensed into 10 “avatar secrets,” which inform her app-based documentary film of the same name.

Video games are an unlikely place to find wisdom, yet, within them, we can find camaraderie, experience the sting of defeat, and help each other become our best selves. Rather than simple time-wasters, social video games like World of Warcraft and Second Life mirror the human condition.

While Pringle doesn’t log in to WoW much these days, the game had an undeniable impact. “This project very much changed my life, my career and my perspective,” she said during a telephone call with Cult of Mac.

The word “app” has always described Apple’s executable programs, but it wasn’t until the App Store appeared in 2008 that the term really took hold as a way to describe the little programs that help make our smartphones not just smart, but also useful and totally fun.

At this point, “There’s an app for that” has become a phrase you’ll hear pretty much everywhere.

We’ve taken a look at our favorite new apps, some of which have been featured on Cult of Mac previously, and chosen the year’s best. Now get downloading!

Grab your diamond pickaxe and get ready to delve once more into massively successful indie-hit Minecraft, only this time, it’ll be within an episodic, story-based game from Telltale Games, purveyor of such fine episodic video game content as The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Game of Thrones.

Titled Minecraft: Story mode, the game will launch on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Xbox and PlayStation in 2015 and will release episodically, with new characters and typical Minecraft themes, which we assume will be “mining,” and “crafting,” two major components of the in-game world.

Apple just posted a video on its YouTube channel to explain how they made the most recent TV ad for the holidays, “The Song.”

In the ad, a young woman uses GarageBand to sing a duet with her grandmother’s recording from the past. It’s a touching video that strikes a sentimental chord for many of us with grandparents who came of age back in the 1940s, as well as audio geeks who might remember the technology back then to create records: the audio booth.

Check out the video below for the full story from Apple, including the cool fact that they made an actual record using one of these old audio booths, The Voice-o-graph, for the young woman to sing along with.

This deep sea snail is covered in spikes, has purple blood and lives in the most extreme ocean environments. So of course the scientists that discovered it had to name it after their favorite punk rocker, Joe Strummer of The Clash.

In a study cleverly named “Molecular taxonomy and naming of five cryptic species of Alviniconcha snails (Gastropoda: Abyssochrysoidea) from hydrothermal vents,” researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute detail five new species of snails, one of which gained the scientific name A. strummeri to honor The Clash frontman.

You’ve collected all the coins, you’ve beaten all the enemies, and you’ve finally gotten to the right castle and saved the princess.

Now, in order to avoid a nasty time paradox, you’ll have to do it all again. In reverse.

Spoiler Alert, from developer MegaFuzz and publisher tinyBuild Games, is the first platforming game you’ll play backwards, un-collecting every coin and un-killing every monster to make it back to the beginning. This is the first time the game is on iOS, as well.

Check out the trailer below for a quick taste of gameplay.

If there’s one thing we humans like to do, it’s make music. Seriously, we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times, so it’s no big surprise that we’d find many ways to bring music to our latest tool: the iPhone and iPad.

While there are a ton of different ways to play or make music on your iOS device of choice, here are nine rather weird ones, plus some fantastic videos to hear and see just how its done.

Star Trek Captains Picard and Kirk could talk to any alien, no matter how different it was from humanity, thanks to the universal translator, a magical sci-fi device that explained away why strange civilizations in far-away solar systems all spoke English.

That future just got a little less far-fetched, thanks to Skype Translator, a new preview service that uses technology from Microsoft Research to translate two different languages back and forth in real time.

This is heady stuff, as school kids in Seattle and Mexico City seem to instantly recognize when they chat back and forth in English and Spanish via the Skype service in the video below.

We’ll admit it: we were all squeeing like fanboys when we saw the official trailer for the upcoming sequel, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

We may have watched it quite a bit more than once, but the YouTubers below have taken their fandom to another level, with some really well crafted remixes of the official short film.

Check out trailers below starring the cast of (and scenes directly from) the original trilogy, the trailer as Wes Anderson would do it, and a bizarre rendering of it all with pets in place of human actors. Oh, and there’s also the obligatory Lego version, as well, so be sure to scroll all the way down.

This week, we’ve got an amazing bunch of content for you, all cleverly bundled together into one fantastic high-quality digital magazine. It’s like all the best Cult of Mac stuff you might have missed crammed into a delicious metaphorical pastry that’s just brimming with sweet goodness.

Check it out below, and enjoy!

Though he’s toyed with escape games for years, Turkish developer Maruf Nebil didn’t get hooked on the genre until 100 Floors hit the App Store in 2012. When The Room Two upped the ante with gorgeous 3-D environments a year later, Nebil set himself a devilish task: To create an unbeatable game that was also undeniably beautiful.

“I decided to make my game the hardest of all of them,” the 25-year-old developer said, with perhaps an evil laugh. “It’s like all 100 floors in a single room.”

While some games in this genre are about as fun and fulfilling as one of those “spot the hidden object” puzzles from a Highlights magazine, others prove truly challenging.

Some might say this type of game is purely for masochists, but others get lost in the obtuse challenge of finding hidden objects and solving maddening puzzles, all while trapped within a virtual room.

In a delightful little video from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and philanthropist talks about the favorite books he’s read this year. It’s an eclectic collection: Thomas Piketty’s volume on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century shares equal space with fiction novel The Rosie Effect as well as a book from the late 1970s, Business Adventures, by John Brooks. It’s a rare insight into the mind of one of our biggest business and cultural leaders of the last several decades.

Check out the video below for the whole list, and a charmingly presented stop-motion Lego film starring Bill Gates himself.

I love the idea of being able to answer a phone call on my Mac, or even on my iPad. The convergence of this communication technology seems like it has great potential.

In reality, though, I end up getting three rings for every call, each slightly time-shifted from the rest, as I sit in my office/living room with my iPhone, iPad and Mac. You’d think that such an intelligent system would know that I had all three devices in one room, and only ring through to one specified device. Until Apple figures that out, maybe in an iOS update or OS X 10.11, there’s only one thing you can do: Disable the heck out of it.

Here’s how.