It was a dark and stormy night that Thursday the 13th of October, and the pavement had broken out into an oily sheen of sweat. And then, to use the Reagan/Bush passive voice cop-out, mistakes were made, resulting in an automobile accident involving Tonya and our Honda Civic

Internet Video -- One of the things I'm doing in the next few weeks is working on a video about the Internet, and the producer is looking for images to use in it

HDT and Stacker could be a dangerous combination if you use a "Stacked" disk (a disk compressed with Stacker from Stac Electronics) that's been formatted with FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit on a computer running Apple's SCSI Manager 4.3

LaserWriter 8.2 was recently released by Apple, and they recommend using it instead of any previous 8.x driver. Fixes and changes mentioned include: improved printing of PICTs containing rotated objects, improved Chooser setup routine, and a change in the default output device - the 8.2 driver always defaults back to the printer as the print job destination

QuickDraw GX -- In preparing the three part series about QuickDraw GX (starting in TidBITS-243), I found the Peirce Guide to QuickDraw GX Printing quite helpful

Pythaeus writes, "One of our System Engineers just got back from Apple training and said Apple was showing a Mac that I've come to call the MacGinsu

The Macintosh Client/Server Database Development Summary, Revision 1.1, by Liam Breck, has just been released. It summarizes client-builder tools, data access layers, and database servers applicable to Macintosh (and cross-platform) client/server database development

Workgroup Server 95 owners have a little longer to obtain a performance-enhancing software upgrade. Last January, Apple introduced AppleShare Pro server software version 1.1 and A/UX 3.1

The official release of version 2.5.1 of the AOL software is now available on the Internet right (as well as on AOL itself, undoubtedly) at: ftp://ftp.aol.com/mac/Install_America_Online_ v2.5.1.bin Despite what the accompanying ReadMe says, the AOL 2.5.1 client software does not, in fact, require an Internet connection, but supports both regular modem connections and MacTCP-based Internet connections. New features include the capability to connect over the Internet, and the client software looks and works just the same

Director of Technical Services, Baka Industries Inc. Apple has announced the release of two software updates to address problems PowerBook owners have experienced with their modems

Apple has introduced a number of software updates to fix problems or improve performance on a variety of Macintosh hardware. The 040 VM Update 1.0 eliminates the tendency of certain 68040 Macs (Quadra/LC/Performa 630 series and LC/Performa 570 series machines) to hang when the 68040 processor caches and virtual memory are both active. The 630 SCSI Update 1.0 patches the SCSI Manager to improve large file transfers on the Quadra/LC/Performa 630 series machines' SCSI bus. Express modem users on the Quadra/LC/Performa 630 series should install the EM Sound Update 1.0 to add sound support to the modem; sounds generated on the phone line such as dial tone and modem carrier tones can be heard through the Mac's speaker. Mount IDE Drive 1.0 can be used to access the internal IDE hard drive on a PowerBook 150 or 630-series computer when the Mac has been booted from a device other than the internal drive. Color Classic owners ca

Mario Marinelli tells us that, in what may be a first, the Italian city of Bologna now provides free Internet access to all its citizens. http://www.infn.it/pub/CNAF/Bologna.html CINECA, a semi-public organization owned in part by the City of Bologna, has leased a 128K high speed link to the Internet and provides Internet access in several ways, including basic Unix shell accounts, a BBS (probably SoftArc's FirstClass) that will provide news and email, and also, for a fee of $20 per month, SLIP or PPP accounts for more advanced users who want their own Internet nodes

Last week's business article (TidBITS-248) drew several questions and lots of great mail. This article responds to some of the issue raised. Quantities -- Last week I stated with undue confidence that there were about four times as many Power Macs in existence as Pentium-based systems

The second edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh ($29.95, ISBN 1-56830-111-1) should be readily available now. You can still order direct from Hayden with a 20 percent discount, just send email to for the information