If you use both Macs and IBM clones, you've probably wondered if you could buy a tape drive or CD-ROM drive or a removable cartridge drive or WORM drive or whatever that could be used both for your Macs and for your IBMs

A month or so back, I suddenly noticed on the nets all sorts of reports from PowerBook 170 owners whose screens had just broken. In every case, the person was complaining on the nets because the screen replacement is expensive, and Apple claimed that the user had abused the screen

With the help of several users, Akif Eyler tracked down and eradicated a bug with styles in Easy View 2.32 that had escaped detection throughout the beta test process

Cable Table Label -- Alert reader Phil Reese wins the copy editing award for the week, noticing a serious typographical error in our chart listing the "standard" configuration for a Macintosh hardware handshaking cable

CAPITAL Punishment -- The 17-May-93 issue of InformationWeek reported on news stories from China about a computer hacker being executed for defrauding the Agricultural Bank of China of about $200,000

Color-less Classic -- A friend at Apple notes that Color Classic users can move the contrast slider bar in the Screen Control Panel all the way to the left, making the screen go pitch black

Apple's most actively publicized secret at the moment is Newton, the code name for the company's upcoming handheld personal organizer, and for the collection of new and adapted technologies making up this project

Apple USA today announced a new "On the Spot" rebate program that promises hundreds of dollars in instant point-of-purchase rebates to customers buying certain Macintosh models and peripherals in the United States, but appears to have put itself, and many dealers, "on the spot" in the process. At first glance, this rebate offer isn't all that different from previous offers

Being obsessed with the flexible storage and retrieval of information, I use an outliner all the time - Symmetry Software's Acta. Being an academic, I use Acta mostly to hold my notes on books that I read, and to prepare and update notes for lectures I intend to give. You know what an outliner is: it holds text in a form that looks like - well, an outline

Sigh. It turns out that the Post Office added another ZIP code to our area shortly before we moved. Of course, no one told us about this, and we didn't notice right away

Retrospect A/UX, which is almost identical to Retrospect 2.0 but includes full support for both Unix and Macintosh file systems, was announced recently by Dantz Development

The highlight of the annual Computer Bowl occurred when Bill Gates, who was a judge, posed the following question to the contestants: "What contest, held via Usenet, is dedicated to examples of weird, obscure, bizarre, and really bad programming?" After a moment of silence, Jean-Louis Gassee (ex-honcho at Apple) hit his buzzer and answered "Windows." Mr

Modem Follies -- A number of people wrote in about Mark Anbinder's article in TidBITS #176 concerning a strange line noise problem. It seems that this problem was big news in Australia some time back, as Ian MacColl reported, and some of the theories there included some phones drawing too much power from the line, a capacitor charging to maintain stored numbers, or the affected phones reporting to their superiors at Telecom Australia Headquarters (a popular choice, since the problem was cyclical). Ed Segall proposed an alternate theory based on a problem he had and solved

MacIntercomm and MacIntercomm Lite, originally developed by Mercury Computing, have been acquired by New World Computing (NWC). MacIntercomm is best known for its ability to transfer files at full speed in the background no matter what the foreground process

QuickTime 1.6 bugs are popping up all over. Jon Pugh reported on Info-Mac that he isolated a conflict between QuickTime 1.6 and Now Toolbox 4.0.1p that caused problems when resolving an alias that mounts a network volume