Undoubtedly many reviewers have heralded the epic and factual qualities of Cliff Stoll's book "The Cuckoo's Egg." Indeed, his account of how he first discovered and then dealt with an anonymous intruder in the computer system that he managed is a potent read, and I found it difficult to lay down the book to attend to everyday chores

People looking to purchase low-cost Macintosh printers now have better options than ever before. Today, Apple introduced the StyleWriter, a 360 dpi inkjet printer and the LaserWriter LS, a QuickDraw laser printer

Just after we finish a special issue comparing the major compression programs (thanks, Ken!), the industry burps and spits out another few entrants. The compression market started with Pack-It, then StuffIt, and then StuffIt Deluxe and Compact Pro and DiskDoubler and Diamond, and now up pop the shareware AutoSqueeze, the DoubleUp board from Sigma Designs, the Gold Card from Pinnacle Micro, and SuperDisk! from Alysis Software. You've heard about the main programs and the DoubleUp board already, so I'll restrict myself to the new stuff

Some people try to make their printers capable of handling every sort of paper size and type, including envelopes. But those envelopes have always been the catch (literally, if you feed them through a finicky laser printer)

Apple has won round one of the lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft (and HP, to be technically correct). In a decision last week, Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S

Finally. Despair almost crept over me when I heard that Radius had not introduced a color version of its Pivot monitor at Macworld in San Francisco. After all, I try to include rumors that eventually come true

[Editor's Note: Many thanks to Harry Skelton for sending us this article. It's not the sort of thing I have the expertise to write about personally, yet I suspect that a number of people will be interested

I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to view some of the extended ASCII characters on PC-clones, but they are pretty funny. You find little smiley-faces, all the suits in a deck of cards, and lots of other fun characters

Last week we talked a bit about the good things Microsoft did with Excel 3.0 and whenever you think of Excel, Word inevitably surfaces as well. Little has come out of Microsoft about what Word 5.0 will look like or what new features will be included, but we can make some educated guesses about likely changes, and a recent discussion on Usenet indicated the places Word currently has trouble

Now Utilities 2.03 Now Software, Inc. 520 SW Harrison, Suite 435 Portland, OR 97201 503/274-2800 503/274-0670 (fax) CPBaker on America Online Rating: 8 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- Now Utilities combines a number of former shareware and freeware INITs, cdevs, and applications into a single coherent package of system enhancing utilities

The latest software to show up at TidBITS for review is Now Software's upgrade to the Now Utilities. This set of INITs and cdevs is unique in that it is comprised primarily of previously shareware and public domain programs, which have been cleaned up and given consistent interfaces. I talked to a couple of the authors whose programs moved from shareware to commercial in the Now Utilities

The installation went smoothly - simply a matter of copying the appropriate files to the system folder. That's when the fun began, in part because the manual never talks about disabling shareware versions of the various utilities, a number of which I used

The next cdev was AlarmsClock. I use Remember?, so I didn't think I would use this one much. Then, when I looked up where SuperClock normally lives, SuperClock and AlarmsClock were alternating ticks, flashing back and forth

This program is obviously a take-off on Mike O'Conner's freeware Layout, not that that's a problem. The latest version I have of Layout is 1.9, and it suffers from not working on a Finder that is active under MultiFinder

Next up was DeskPicture. I had looked forward this because all I've found that randomizes the desktop picture is a shareware program, Backdrop, and Backdrop doesn't work quite right on the SE/30