My MacBook is officially old. The 3 years of Apple Care warranty expired last month and now my laptop is expected to fend for it’s self.

I don’t always treat my stuff with the utmost of care. I use them for what they are, things; and If chucking my things around is what I want to do then that’s what I’m going to do. To commemorate this 3 year anniversary I’m going to list all the times Apple Care has saved my ass:

1. LCD back light starts to flicker. Fixed in 2 days. No questions asked.
2. Charger catches on fire. Send me a new one the next day.
3. Cracks near my keyboard start to appear. Took it in just in-case they could do something about it. They did. Got a new keyboard and track pad. Woot.
4. Battery occasionally cut out. New one the next day.
5. Back light stopped working and cracks in the plastic around the LCD. Fixed in 2 days.

Was paying for Apple Care worth it? Totally.

Google recently launched a public DNS system for everyone to use. This caught my interest because my current ISP’s DNS redirects me to a ’search’ page that 9 times out of 10 shows irrelevant content. I’m sure it’s there just to make money off the sponsored results.

If you have read this far and have no idea what a DNS is, then maybe a bit of explaining is in order. DNS stands for Domain Name System. In a nutshell, every time you type a website’s address into your browser (like google.com) your browser uses a DNS to find out exactly where that address goes to. Without a DNS, you would go nowhere.

What makes this Google DNS so awesome is that users no longer have to rely on the ISP to direct them to websites. Oftentimes my internet provider’s DNS is slow and serves up annoying ads when an address cant be found. Not anymore with Google DNS. (Things are noticeably quicker after using the service as well)

Enough talk already, I’ll show you how to set up Google DNS in Apple OSX:

Step 1: Open up “System Preferences”

Step 2: Inside System Preferences, select “Network”

Step 3: Select your network device. In my case I am using Airport, but others may be using Ethernet.

Step 4: Once you have selected your network device, click the “Advanced” button in the lower right of the window.

Step 5: Click on the DNS tab.

Step 6: Click the + under the DNS box and type: 8.8.8.8

Step 7: Repeat step 6, but type 8.8.4.4 instead.

Step 8: Press the OK button and hit Apply. You’re done.

Hope this speed us your internet browsing as much as it sped up mine.

P.S. Merry Christmas.

As mentioned a few posts ago, I had been finishing up on a Warcraft Update festive header plug-in for the site. As of this morning, all systems are go. Head over to http://warcraftupdate.net to check it out in all it’s glory.

I have decided to hold back on adding festive headers to the facebook app for now. I wanted to work out any kinks it has on the main site before moving it across to other platforms.

This is a baby hedgehog. It is cuter than kittens.