Do you have piles of old Mac stuff you don’t use? Andy Ihnatko explains how to create your own version of his Prize Wonderland Auction to raise money for your favorite charity, cause, or user group. Also in this issue, Matt Neuburg unpacks Insider Software’s Smasher to access old font suitcases. In other news, Apple updates its .Mac service and releases Security Update 2005-008, Microsoft releases Office 2004 Service Pack 2, and the Opera Web browser goes free.
Office 2004 SP2 Enhances Entourage, Fixes Bugs -- Microsoft has released Office for Mac 2004 Service Pack 2 (SP2), which fixes bugs in all the Office programs and provides notable enhancements to Entourage, the email, calendaring, and contact management part of the software suite
Opera Now Free -- Perhaps acknowledging the difficulty of selling a Web browser in today's Internet, Opera has freed its Web browser. While you can still choose to pay for Opera 8.5, which also features chat, contact, email, and other related features, that fee now covers support, not the software.
Opera is offering one year of 24-hour-turnaround email support for $29; otherwise, the browser is free
Adam Engst Speaking at MUG ONE on 04-Oct-05 -- For folks in upstate New York, I'll be speaking at the MUG ONE Macintosh user group meeting in Oneonta, NY on Tuesday, 04-Oct-05 at 7:30 PM at SUNY Oneonta
One of the stresses associated with running your own Internet servers is, frankly, knowing if they're running. Most people host public servers elsewhere, to take advantage of the massive bandwidth, secure facilities, earthquake-proof racks, and tech support of companies like digital.forest
Apple has released Security Update 2005-008, which is available either as a standalone installer or via Mac OS X's Software Update feature. The update applies to both Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther and Mac OS X 10.4.2 Tiger, with sizes ranging from 4 to 7.4 MB.
Fixes in this update include changes to ImageIO, LibSystem, Apple Mail, QuickDraw, Ruby, SecurityAgent, securityd, and Safari (Mac OS X 10.3.9 only)
Ever since Apple switched its free iTools Web-based service to the subscription-based .Mac, many users have asked themselves: is .Mac worth $100 a year? Last week, the company attempted to sweeten the deal by improving .Mac's storage and bandwidth capacities, introducing new .Mac groups, releasing the Backup 3 backup software, and adding French and German localization to the existing English and Japanese versions.
Storage Catches up to 2003 Levels -- $100 now gets you 1 GB of storage, up from 250 MB; you can allocate how much of that space is used by email and iDisk
What's the most important feature of Mac OS 7, 8, and 9 that was destroyed and never restored or replaced when Mac OS X came along? Okay, I'm sure you miss being able to collapse windows into their title bars, or to resize them without waiting for the computer to catch up
I should mention right at the top that this piece begins with desperate self-pity but ends with an opportunity for you to acquire fabulous merchandise for pennies on the dollar and raise money for hurricane relief at the same time
Joe Kissell Speaking at NCMUG's MCE 2005 -- Best-selling Take Control author Joe Kissell will be speaking at NCMUG's Macintosh Computer Expo 2005 on 01-Oct-05, so if you have some free time and are in the vicinity of Santa Rosa, California, I encourage you to drop in to see him at 10:00 AM
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Backup 3.0 Observations -- Readers look at what's new in Backup 3.0, and evaluate whether it's mature enough to replace more expensive applications such as Retrospect