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Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of all the updates for many Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. While utilities can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our main focus in this column is to bring you those that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems.… Read more

There are a number of video formats that are used for compressing and distributing videos these days. While most use common and open standards such as H.264 that are readily viewable, others may be more obscure and will require you to install a codec to view videos encoded in them.… Read more

Pandora's largely undisputed reign on Palm WebOS-based phones may be over.

On Thursday, Slacker Radio released a version (.0.9.4) of its streaming radio app to the App Catalog in the U.S. and Canada. As with Slacker Radio for other mobile platforms, the free app gives you the run of more than 100 curated stations, or it lets you go into discovery mode a la Pandora and ilk by creating "custom" stations based on songs or artists you like.

Artist bios with photos are on Slacker's Palm menu, as are the buttons to rate … Read more

There are a variety of toolbar utilities and enhancements that are available for Firefox, Safari, and other Web browsers. Most of these are implemented as plug-ins for the browsers that can easily be disabled, but some developers make these additions rather difficult to detect and uninstall. Apparently, a number of people have been frustrated by a plug-in that was developed in this way, which changes Safari's default search engine to "Fast Browser Search," with no obvious way to change this back.… Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature from MacFixIt where our editors answer questions e-mailed to us by our readers. We have been getting regular contacts and questions from our readers, and hope to share our correspondences so everyone may benefit and contribute to them. This week we have questions about e-mail attachments not being recognized, troubles with OnyX, iPhoto e-mail attachments changing font size, and concerns about the latest iMac firmware updates.… Read more

Having started as a music player, Apple's iTunes application has historically organized content in your account's Music folder. With the introduction of iTunes 9, Apple applied slight changes to the default organization of files that iTunes manages, which may or may not show up for you, depending on how you use iTunes.… Read more

Apple recently updated a number of knowledgebase articles, which address problems people have been having with their iPhones, iPods, and Mac hardware and software. The issues include problems with iDVD encoding settings, iMac restores using incorrect system software, and problems installing OS X to external drives.… Read more

In order to implement full support for the NTFS file system, you will need to install third-party software. While Apple allows you to read NTFS drives on Macs, the ability to both write to these drives and format drives for NTFS are not included in OS X. NTFS-3G is one popular option for managing NTFS partitions in OS X; however, if you have had it installed you may run into an issue where Disk Utility will give you an error when you try to format a drive to NTFS.… Read more

The recent iTunes update has addressed a number of issues some people have had with iPods, playlist syncing, and the capability to remember passwords. While for most users the update should work without problems, some people have experienced issues with iTunes updates in the past and there is no guarantee that new problems will not occur.… Read more