As video surveillance goes, Netgear’s VueZone system is about as easy and user-friendly as it gets. But does VueZone sacrifice power and performance for ease-of-use? We tested the two-camera system, which cam with two motion-detecting cameras, four magnetic mounts and the master gateway for $290. It also came with a one-month trial subscription to the Premier service subscription; the no-frills Basic service, which allows you to montitor up to two cameras remotely from your computer, is free.

Terminal app can be daunting at first, but it’s really the best way to hack into your Mac’s configurations and preferences to customize things to work for you rather than against you. With the right Terminal commands, you can tweak the Finder, mess with the user interface, build a more private and secure Mac, and even enable features that aren’t officially supported on older Macs.

Here are a few of the better ones.

Apple’s Siri personal assistant has been in development for 10 years.

Apple doesn’t let app developers use the word “beta” for iPhone apps.

And the company spends millions on — and make billions from — the advertising of their “beta” product specifically.

Given these facts, is it disingenuous, unfair, inconsistent, hypocritical and inaccurate for Apple to continue calling Siri “beta”?

Want to harness the power and flexibility of Apple’s Mountain Lion Server? Whether you are setting it up for a school, home network or business, with this Cult of Mac Deals offer you will learn the most effective way to use everything Apple’s Mountain Lion server has to offer.

For only $39 you can take home more than 9 hours of actionable content and over 110 lectures of informative instruction.

This week’s must-have apps roundup kicks off with Mailbox, the best third-party mail client that’s available on iOS. If you haven’t already downloaded your copy and joined the queue, do it as soon as you can. Mailbox is accompanied by AudioBox, a new player for all of your cloud-based music; the latest game from Kairosoft, and more.

Speech to text dictation is getting better by leaps and bounds, and Apple’s Siri on iOS is one of the best implementations of the technology. While you may have known that you could punctuate your dictation by just speaking it aloud (comma) you may not know that there are some more commands that you can use to further refine your dictation performance, allowing you to write stuff just by speaking it, and no one will know the difference.

Here are some of the better ones.

Michael T. Jones has a helluva fun job. He’s the Chief Technology Ambassador for Google, and as such, he not only gets to work for one of the coolest companies in the world, he also gets to cruise around the world and tell people why Google is so darn awesome.

When it comes to Apple, you would think that Michael Jones would have some really mean things to say. In a recent interview with ABC News in Australia, Michael Jones actually praised Apple and said that customers can trust Apple with their private data. But then he added that using Apple Maps might kill you.

Even if the only traveling you do is from your home to your office, and even if that “office” is actually just your bedroom, then you will probably find the PlugBug wicked useful. But if you ever leave your home country’s own shores, then you might consider the PlugBug World, a globally-aware charger for your MacBook and iDevices.

Don’t use a computer any more? Hate “pirating” TV shows and movies? Wish that your country had something as awesome as Netflix so you could pay and stream everything to your iPad mini? Read on, because you can do just that, and it is dead easy – all you need is a credit card and maybe a half hour to get things set up.

We’ve been hoping for a quick and painful death to Flash for a while now. It’s been slowly coming, but we’re getting closer to the day of no longer needing the crash crazy, disease injecting plugin.

Flash is still everywhere though even if you don’t want it to be, and it’s still causing problems. Adobe announced yesterday that they’re releasing an emergency patch for Patch player to fix vulnerabilities that are being exploited to install malware on Apple’s Macintosh platform.

We have a lot to do – and having some form of trusted task management app in place is key in getting the most out of you time. This Cult of Mac Deals offer is ideal for those looking to take their to-do list prowess to the next level.

Firetask combines the advantages of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD)® with proven classical task management concepts so you can dominate your agenda efficiently and effectively. The principles that have helped entrepreneurs and startups thrive are all entrenched within this intuitive application. It’s essentially setting your tasks on a tee so you can hit them harder and with more focus than ever. And you’re going to get this app for just $30 for a limited time thanks to Cult of Mac Deals.

Apple makes some really great software and hardware. We love it. But sometimes there are certain little things you want out of your computer that Apple can’t or won’t provide. That’s why we have jailbreaking and modding.

We love it when someone takes an Apple product and morphs it into something completely different. There have been a lot of Apple hardware mods that have crossed our desks over the last few years. Some have been simple, while others have required over a hundred hours of work. Here are the five greatest Apple hardware mods we’ve ever seen.

The evasion jailbreak took longer than any other iOS jailbreak to come out, but it appears that the wait was worth it for millions of iOS users.

After only four days of being available to the public, nearly 7 million iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch owners have bulldozed through Apple’s walled garden and jailbroken their devices so they can customize each and every facet of their experience.

If you were ever a dork like me, goofing off in Trig class to play Wolfenstein 3D on your graphing calculator, this will be exciting: Texas Instruments has brought their graphing calculator software to the iPad.

The new software mimics the functionality of TI’s TI-Nspire calculator, and it’s Texas Instrument’s first entry into the graphing calculator app world.

After facing a lot of scrutiny for the past few years over working conditions at factories in China, Apple has made a lot of progress on cleaning up their manufacturing partners’ facilities. Pay has been increased. Forced overtime and child labor aren’t as frequent. And we haven’t heard of any massive brawls in a while.

Following Apple’s lead, HP has decided to get its act together in China as well by reducing the number of underage student laborers at its facilities in China.

Hey! Hi there! Grab a chair, pull it closer to the fire. It’s cold outside isn’t it? And you look like you could do with thawing out.

Yes, it’s a lovely fire, isn’t it? Feel free to add some more fuel – anything you like. Your chair, for example. Or your aunt. Or yourself. This fire burns anything. ANYTHING.

Many analysts believe Apple needs to think of new ways to improve its chances of beating Samsung in the ongoing battle for smartphone market share, and according to new research from King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, one approach could be to make the iPhone “more user friendly” to international users who don’t speak English.

Yesterday, there was a bit of a hub-bub about Apple’s enormous $137 billion cash hoard, after David Einhorn, the head of Greenlight Capital, sued Apple over a plan to discard preferred stock and pressed Apple to give a significant chunk of the cash hoard directly to investors. It was such a big deal that Apple felt as if it were forced to respond.

Is there a good reason for Apple to be keeping $137 billion in the bank? Yup, and if you want to know why, all you have to do is look at Dell.

Ad impressions reached a record high during the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data from Opera’s latest State of Mobile Advertising report, with revenue to publishers more than twice that of any previous quarter throughout the year. The figures show that Android continues to increase its share of the market, but it’s got a long way to go before it topples iOS, which boasts a whopping 41.91% share.

Hot out the oven, a new iOS 6.1 jailbreak is ready to set free your iPhone! On our newest CultCast (episode 58), we’ll tell you why you should and shouldn’t jailbreak your precious iDevice, and the story of how a team of geniuses hacked into the brain of iOS to make it possible.

Then, what’s next for Mac Pro; the apps and gear you need to live an iPad-only life; and our favorite apps and tech on an all-new Faves ‘N Raves!

Eager to listen but not sure how? Easy! Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Time to get CULTY YAAA’LLL. Show notes ahead.

Don’t ever say that the people who work in the Apple Store aren’t actually geniuses. Apple Store employees in the Altamonte Mall in Seminole County, Florida managed to sleuth out a couple of identity thieves who were trying to buy iPhones with stolen IDs.

How’d these Sherlocks do it? They were tipped off by several subtle clues on the IDs themselves, including the fact that they were not made of the correct material, and featured a comical number of misspellings that could only be worse if they wrote down the name of the state as “Flrodia.”

A recent hire by Apple might suggest that Apple is interested in finally following the likes of Samsung and LG and release an iPhone with an Organic LED, or OLED, display.

So far this week, we’ve spent time hacking our Macs via the Terminal, the best darn behind-the-scenes app you can find in Mac OS X. We’ve talked about tweaking the Finder, the user interface, security and privacy, and the Dashboard.

Today, let’s look at a few of the newer features of the OS X world, and how to make them work on older, unsupported Macs using some Terminal magic.

EA’s Origin platform has today made its public debut on the Mac, proving gamers with a Steam alternative that currently boasts 48 downloadable titles from EA and third-party developers like Sega and Warner Brothers. Its initial catalog includes Batman: Arkham City, Star Wars, The Sims 3, LEGO Harry Potter, Dragon Age 2 and many more — plus any expansion packs.

Springtomize 2 from Filippo Bigarella is one of the easiest and most effective ways to customize your iOS device after jailbreaking; it’s so good that we recently chose it as one of the best tweaks to install after jailbreaking with evasi0n. And now its even better, thanks to its latest update — which introduces support for the iPhone 5’s larger display, and fixes a whole host of bugs.