Over the weekend, I decided to give my 13″ unibody Macbook an upgrade. This is my third Macbook – fourth if you count the hacked Dell Mini 10v that has Snow Leopard installed on it. I’ve done memory upgrades before so I decided to upgrade from 2GB to 4GB but this time, I also decided to upgrade my hard drive from 160GB to 500GB.

For the hard drive, I chose a Western Digital. While most internal hard drives are 3.5″, Macbooks require 2.5″, so keep that in mind.

For the memory, I chose Crucial. It doesn’t make sense to me to buy Apple RAM when it costs twice as much for no significant reason. While the official memory limit for Macbooks is 4GB, you can buy one 4gb stick and keep an old 2GB stick for a total of 6GB, and your computer will recognize that.

There are excellent guides on the Internet on how to upgrade the hard drive and memory, such as this one.

Next step was to finally do away with Google Chrome. I’m a big fan of Google but lately, they’ve been pushing out too many projects without committing 100% to each one (Google Voice, Google Wave, etc). Chrome for Mac is another one those projects that belongs in that pile. There are too many crashes because of the Flash plugin, security permissions sometimes goes haywire, and it takes up an incredible amount of memory.

I’ve been hesitant to go back to Firefox because, as frustrating as Chrome can be, it’s quite elegant. To fix that problem, I decided to install themes for Firefox that make it look just like Google Chrome. Currently, I’m using Chromifox Extreme.

These are really just low level upgrades, nothing compared to what was needed for the Dell Mini (or my dented iPhone), but every little bit counts!

For the last couple of years, I’ve mostly ditched TV and have used Hulu or live Internet streams, instead (I’m a tech geek). Hulu is amazing – you can watch many of your favorite cable shows online in high quality, usually the day right after the show airs on TV.

Since Hulu is a joint venture of ABC, NBC, and Fox, they’ve blocked overseas IP addresses from accessing Hulu. Of course, to expats, that’s simply unacceptable. People who have been able to get around this issue have used proxy servers, which can get complicated sometimes, so a Reddit submitter (thanks to 200iso and MarshallX) found a way to watch Hulu overseas without using a proxy server. My (somewhat) abbreviated directions are below:

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The highly anticipated iPhone 4 will be in stores this Thursday. As everyone knows, it comes with video calling and shoots video in 720p. Since the phone I’m using is my old iPhone 2G (unlocked & jailbroken with T-Mobile, take that AT&T), I’m in the market for a new phone, but I’m also in the market for a top notch camera.

If you’re going to be traveling, it’s practically a must for you to take something that will let you capture those once in a lifetime moments. I used my Flip Mino in Rome and it worked wonderfully (minus the fact that it doesn’t take pictures). But what if I can combine everything into one gadget?

DSLRs start at approximately $800 and lenses cost a significant amount of money. But they offer extremely high quality, ranging from 720p to 1080 and 60 frames per second and the necessary vibration reduction features. They’re also quite bulky and scream “STEAL ME” in certain countries. The iPhone 4 starts at $600 (no contract) and takes video in 720p but 30 frames per second but has nowhere near the features that a DSLR provides.

If you could combine all the tools that you need into one gadget, even if it means a reduction in quality, why would you choose not to?

Short video shot with an iPhone 4