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Speed Freak - prioritize your active processes

Speed FreakAre you a tweaker? Do you like eking every last little bit of performance that you can out of your computer? If so, and you're on a Mac, Speed Freak is going to appeal to you.

Speed Freak won't make your Mac faster, but what it will do is reprioritize your running processes to ensure that the frontmost program (the one you're actively using) gets more than its fair share of processor time. It's been our experience that some utilities like this go overboard and end up causing more problems than they solve. While being totally configurable, Speed Freak uses very reasonable settings out of the box.

To test it, we tried watching a YouTube video in Firefox while performing some very processor-intensive tasks in the background. Without Speed Freak, the video was choppy and stalled a few times. With it, it was smooth sailing.

Speed Freak is a free download.

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Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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