We said in TidBITS-146 that Hewlett-Packard had come up with a Portable DeskJet, but no corresponding Portable DeskWriter, a seemingly-obvious move given the popularity of the PowerBooks

So you bought a Power Book, perhaps one of those cute 100s? It's different from your desktop Mac, isn't it? I recommend that you read its manual - it was the first Apple manual I've read in years, but I was curious

Now Utilities (hereinafter, NU) is a collection of system extensions, most of which started as shareware or freeware on the nets, where faithful fans could not imagine life without them

Font Clone Pirates -- Carter Scholz writes, "I'd like to add something to Mark Nutter's review of SoftKey's KeyFonts package in TidBITS-146. Mark writes, "...the fonts aren't the genuine fonts from the original designer

atob/btoa Translator -- Numerous people informed us that StuffIt Deluxe and StuffIt Lite 3.0 come with a defunker for the atob/btoa format (along with many others) that we mentioned last week

CPU and the new PowerBooks -- Conrad Halling wrote to tell us of problems with Connectix's CPU utility and the new PowerBooks. If you have one of those machines and CPU, send in your registration card, because Connectix has a free upgrade for registered users of those machines

[We think so highly of the idea of a free, electronic, workshop given over the Internet that we couldn't resist including this announcement. We'll be curious to see how well it works, being one of the first courses provided worldwide over the Internet, breaking down numerous physical, geographic, temporal, and financial barriers

Looking for a useful word processor weighing in at 287K on the hard disk and consuming 490K of RAM? Take a hard look at WriteNow 3.0 from T/Maker. Looking for a word processor that sorts, computes, charts, slices and dices? Look elsewhere

Thanks to wonders of that modern monstrosity known as "global marketing" we can easily second-guess Apple's intentions and judge its image solely by creative reading between the lines

Mark H. Anbinder writes, "Many users will be disappointed to learn that the offer of a free 7.1 update to those who bought System 7 since the beginning of September applies only to those who bought a System 7 Upgrade Kit package

After Dark 2.0w for the new Macs -- John Baxter passed on this helpful news about After Dark. Apparently After Dark 2.0v is compatible with System 7.1 but incompatible with the machines released on October 19th - the Performa 600, IIvx, IIvi, PowerBook 160 and 180, and the PowerBook Duo 210 and 240

Hazy reports surfaced last week that MODE32 was not compatible with System 7.1. Happily, Connectix informs us that the incompatibility exists only in limited circumstances, and most users won't have trouble. MODE32 is the nifty utility, developed by Connectix and licensed by Apple for distribution to all Mac users, that "cleans up" Macs with older, dirty ROMs, allowing these Macs (the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) to use 32-bit mode, and thus allowing them to address more than 8 MB of RAM or more than 13 MB of virtual memory. According to Connectix CEO Roy McDonald, MODE32 is compatible with System 7.1 unless the Mac is in 32-bit mode AND using virtual memory

I think we've finally figured out how tech support for Performas will work when the System file becomes corrupted. Apple's John Cook told us, "Every Performa comes with a bootable Utilities disk

As I wandered the rows of Wordsworths bookstore in Harvard Square this summer during the week of the Boston Macworld Expo, I was astonished at the number of computer books

You thought I had finished writing about the Internet after my articles about CompuServe and America Online, but the Internet grows at the mind-boggling rate of 10% to 20% per month, and we've come across a number of Internet services that users of the commercial services will find useful through the email gateways. FTPMail -- People on AppleLink and America Online suffer with file size limitations of 30K and 27K respectively