Apple's late-January booking of a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco has ignited yet another round of furious Apple tablet speculation. With all the theories, assumptions, and stories kicking around, it's easy to feel completely lost on the subject. To help you wrap your head around the buzz, Gizmodo has compiled a summary of all the Apple tablet rumors to date... or you could just wait until Apple's announcement to see what happens.

The Harvard Business Review has named Steve Jobs the top-performing CEO in the world. The article ranks almost 2,000 company leaders from around the world by analyzing each company's performance over the CEO's full tenure. Jobs, since returning to Apple in 1997, has increased the company’s market value by $150 billion and overseen an industry-adjusted return of 3,188 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a recent federal appeals court decision to fine Microsoft $290 million and ban the company from selling copies of Word 2007 after 11 January 2010. The plaintiff, a Canadian software company named i4i Inc., sued Microsoft in 2007 for infringing on a patent for technology that improves the handling of XML code. Microsoft, while looking further into its legal options, has plans to remove the contested code from future copies of Word 2007 and the forthcoming Office 2010 - though the company notes it does not expect shipments of the program to be disrupted.

Our friends at MacTech Magazine are kicking off their 25th anniversary celebration by soliciting the Mac community's best Mac-related stories, to be printed in upcoming issues of MacTech over the next year. The first issue of MacTech came out in December 1984, after which it was published as MacTutor for the next 7 years, before eventually reverting back to the MacTech name.

New York Times columnist David Pogue is holding Verizon Wireless's toes to the fire regarding the carrier's dubious pricing schemes. The profit centers in question include doubling early cancellation fees for smartphones and charging users $2 a pop for hitting those hard-to-miss arrow buttons on the keypad. Despite the involvement of the FCC, which formally asked Verizon for answers, Verizon continues to deny culpability. In other words, the grass isn't always greener in other cellular carrier pastures.

In recent years, Google has sent holiday gifts to large AdWords purchasers and AdSense publishers, but this year is instead donating $20 million to a variety of charities. Kudos to Google for putting its money where its "Don't be evil" mouth is, and for not adding to the world's ever-increasing layer of cheap plastic crud.

Do photos that look great in Photoshop Elements appear dull and lifeless on the Web? Joe Kissell investigates the problem (at the behest of a well-known Parisian food writer) and finds a solution or two.

Scrambling to come up with last-minute presents for those lingering on your gift list? If you and your recipient are Facebook users, consider an iTunes Store gift card. You can now purchase virtual iTunes gift cards through Facebook, without needing iTunes at all. To purchase one, you must become a fan of iTunes on Facebook, then click the iTunes Gifts tab to follow customization and purchase instructions. The certificates come in $5 (which isn't available normally via iTunes itself), $10, $15, and $25 values.

The Mac may have resisted multi-button mice for years, but now every Mac user should know how to give their mouse the middle finger (so to speak).

Hopefully you've finished all your holiday shopping - at least if you were planning on ordering a 27-inch iMac. In a statement to CNET, an Apple spokesperson has apologized for a two-week shipping delay on all 27-inch iMacs. While Apple isn't giving a specific cause for the delay, other than implying the 27-inch's wild success has made filling orders difficult, it would seem likely that the delay is related to the recent reports of broken displays (see "New iMac Screens Cracking and Flickering," 10 December 2009). The 21-inch iMac is still shipping within 24 hours.

TidBITS editor Glenn Fleishman spent weeks driving aimlessly for Macworld, where his overall look at GPS navigation for the iPhone appears, along with reviews of nine apps and the TomTom car kit.

Chuck Joiner interviews a slew of electronic book authors about electronic book readers, like the Kindle and Nook. Chuck talks to Michael Cohen, Glenn Fleishman, Joe Kissell, Kirk McElhearn, and Matt Neuburg, all Take Control authors who have strong opinions about print books, too.

Look at the TidBITS Watchlist widget in the upper right of our Web site to see how we've tweaked the way we present software updates to be individual items on our Web site while maintaining a collection of them in each email issue of TidBITS.

We're taking the last two weeks of the year off, so look for the next email issue of TidBITS on 4 January 2010. But we'll continue posting new articles to our Web site, and TidBITS Talk will also continue apace.

As the 5 GHz band becomes increasingly used for Wi-Fi and cordless phones, some readers are finding interference in previously wide-open spectrum spaces. A few tips may help you reclaim space in that spectrum.