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Bought a Mac after June 10? Get a free upgrade to Mountain Lion

Those of you who picked up a Mac on or after June 11 can soon pounce on a free upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Courtesy of Apple's OS X Mountain Lion Up-to-Date Program, consumers who bought a Mac from Apple or from an Apple authorized reseller between June 11 and the date when Mountain Lion debuts will have 30 days to request their free upgrade. The program allows qualifying buyers to download Mountain Lion for free directly from the Mac App Store.

As detailed by MacRumors, customers have to launch the Up-to-Date Program page, where an online form asks them … Read more

The 404 1,094: Where we've made it to Livestream (podcast)

Thanks to all the live listeners for bearing with our first day broadcasting video on Livestream. Be sure to check us out every weekday at 12 p.m ET/9 a.m. PT on the Livestream homepage.

Leaked from today's 404 show:

- Jeff gives a spoiler-free review of "The Dark Knight Rises."

- 46 Things You Probably Don't Know About the Batman films.

- eHarmony has some tips to bail you out of a horrible online date.

- How bars use music to get you drunk faster.… Read more

Apple halts Mountain Lion Up-to-Date Program after brief launch

This morning Apple's Up-to-Date program for OS X Mountain Lion appeared to be activated for a short while, allowing a number of people to submit applications for their free copies of Apple's new OS; however, this appears to have been an error on Apple's part and the Up-to-Date Program has been taken offline.

For people who have purchased a new Mac on or after June 11, Apple is offering a free upgrade to OS X 10.8, which is due out any day now. When the OS is released, users can go to the Up-to-Date Web pageRead more

Prevent Excel from reformatting two numbers to a date and month

Topping my list of Microsoft Excel pet peeves is the program's automatic conversion of two numbers on either side of a hyphen into the date and month the numbers correspond to, such as "1-1" becoming "01-Jan."

The change occurs even when you choose any of the options available when you select Paste Special. I have looked high and low for a way to disable this setting in Excel, to no avail.

You can make the change for an entire worksheet by clicking the small box above 1 and to the left of A in the … Read more

Stay on top of earthquakes with eQuake Alert

Earthquakes can seem like isolated, uncommon events, but the truth is, multiple earthquakes occur around the world every day. If you want to keep track of this fascinating -- and sometimes terrifying -- natural phenomenon, try eQuake Alert. This Firefox extension can instantly alert you to earthquakes occurring anywhere in the world.

eQuake Alert installed easily and was ready for action after we restarted Firefox. The extension is highly configurable; you can select the frequency with which eQuake Alert checks for new earthquakes, whether to display a status bar message with the location and magnitude of each quake, and how … Read more

Wanted: A single Facebook millionaire

I was talking with a former colleague a few months ago, explaining how unsure I felt about everything since my move to San Francisco -- from where to drop off my dry cleaning to navigating the dating scene. Both make me queasy.

"Oh, but you're in the best spot," my source crooned. "Think about all the companies that are going to IPO soon. You just have to know where to be. " Go find a guy. A soon-to-be rich guy.

Quelle horreurs! With my two Ivy league graduate degrees and a solid decade of working at … Read more

Hey, want to online date an inmate?

Americans like to love, but also like to incarcerate.

Indeed, despite only enjoying 5 percent of the world's human beings, the United States seems to be home to almost a quarter of all the world's prisoners.

Who could not have imagined, then, that some hardy, enterprising soul would see in this population a market gap?

Please greet, therefore, Meet-An-Inmate.com. Actually, this site claims to have been "serving inmates since 1998," yet the service had somehow passed me by until today's Daily Mail brought its full glory to my attention.

Meet-An-Inmate allows you to peruse … Read more

Adjust your file dates with File Date Changer

Anyone who works with digital images or other files that tend to get organized by date knows that sometimes things can run amok; why are last month's vacation photos showing up with images from 2001? Whether the dates have been changed by some technological error or you have some other reason to adjust the Created, Modified, and Accessed dates of a file, File Date Changer makes this task a snap.

File Date Changer does exactly what the name implies, and nothing more; if you need to edit a file's metadata, this program isn't going to do it. … Read more

The 404 1,027: Where every Friday should be this good (podcast)

Our special guest today is CNETer Zach W., but longtime 404 listeners may recognize him as the voice behind Tina Schwartz, our weekly visitor on Tuna Tuesdays. He joins us today as our ad-hoc social correspondent with a firsthand account of Grouper, a newish startup that uses Facebook to set up a group blind date between two groups of friends: three guys and three girls.

Zach takes us through the sign-up process, the criteria that he chooses for his wingmen, and the actual experience of going online to meet someone offline. If you've ever been curious about what goes on during an online date, definitely check out today's episode of The 404.… Read more

How Skout attracted millions with its flirty ways

In the quickly evolving world of apps, Skout is a virtually an old standby at this point.

Having launched in 2007 and then re-tooled to its current iteration two years later, Skout is a mobile social network built on the premise that people would want to meet and flirt with people close to them. Skout uses the phone's ability to locate itself to determine nearby people (to ensure privacy, the service doesn't provide the exact location of a person, only getting as specific as half a mile away).

The app is free, but Skout generates revenue through the … Read more