German TidBITS Translators Wanted -- The German translation of TidBITS is looking to add a few more people to the volunteer translation team to help spread the load a bit more thinly

Call for TidBITS Translators! The coordinators of our intrepid translation teams tell me that it's time to recruit some new volunteers to help translate TidBITS into Dutch, German, and Japanese

When Apple released the new dual-core Power Mac G5 models, the company noted that a single Power Mac G5 can support eight displays. That can't be true, can it? After being blown away a few months ago when Apple sent Jeff Carlson two 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays for review (see photos at the two Flickr links below), we pictured a bright and no doubt high-temperature wall of the huge screens. If you upgrade the included GeForce 6600 to the $2,500 list price Quadro FX 4500 512 MB PCI Express card (a $1,600 upgrade at the Apple Store), you get two dual-link DVI adapters, which allows two 30-inch displays

The TidBITS staff has been spending a vast amount of time and energy thinking about how we want to recast our collaborative editing system, but we haven't been able to come up with a solution that meets all of our needs and wants

Don't get mad, get encapsulated: Apple's Time Capsule offers networked Time Machine backup support, but provides a stark contradiction, with Apple failing to explain why hard drives attached to an AirPort Extreme (a promised feature for Leopard) can't offer the same feature.

For those who have been waiting for new Mac desktops to land, Apple has one message: eight is great. Last week the company added an 8-core Intel Xeon processor configuration to the Mac Pro

Since the dawn of the Macintosh (really!), a small group of volunteers has been toiling away to provide services to the Macintosh community. Known as the Info-Mac Network, this non-profit organization publishes the Info-Mac Digest, a moderated mailing list of all things Macintosh (currently on hiatus while the group works through some problems with digest scripts after moving to a new server) and the Info-Mac Archive, the oldest (and for many years the largest) archive of freely distributable Macintosh software and information. In recent years, Info-Mac has had a hard time keeping up with the many companies who found they could make money from similar services via advertising - hence the rise of CNET's Download.com, VersionTracker, MacUpdate, Tucows, and others

There are downsides to creating and participating in a strong community - the inevitable sense of sadness and loss when a member passes away. That happened for us last week with the death of Walter Van Lerberghe, one of the key members of the volunteer team that produces the Dutch translation of TidBITS

Would anyone take exception to receiving a sleek new PowerBook, iBook, iMac, or Power Mac G5 this holiday season? Certainly not us, but our readers aimed for more humble and affordable ideas this year, focusing on hard drives, mice, and, the breakaway suggestion this year, laser printers

Readers are busy trying out the new iLife '09 and configuring hard drives, based on this week's TidBITS Talk discussions. Also touched upon are opinions of Apple's best and worst Macs and related products, connecting devices using HDMI and DVI cables, online security following news of infected illegal downloads, and more.

If you've had an Xserve drive fail, you may have considered putting a replacement drive inside its Apple Drive Module to save some money. That may be a false economy, though, as Adam discovers when chasing down exactly what goes into Apple Drive Modules and why they cost so much more than bare retail drives.

The first full-on preview of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard reveals a faster, sleeker cat that's designed to be more compact and efficient, and to take full advantage of the fast multi-core processors in Intel-based Macs.

So you have a collection of LPs and you wish you could listen to them in iTunes or on your iPod? Or you'd just like to preserve the music in digital format so you can listen without a needle touching the vinyl? Here's one user's inexpensive, speedy approach.

Notable software releases this week include VMware Fusion 3.1 Beta, Things 1.3, MainStage 2.1.1, LogMeIn Pro2, Safari 4.0.5, and TextExpander 3.0.