Are you fed-up with the little critter being too darned slow? Does it take an age to get from the left to the right of your wide-screen monitor? You need MouseZoom. Read more

What has one and a half million hits a year, four thousand visits each day from three thousand unique visitors, daily posts of over five hundred and has twelve thousand members with a monthly bandwidth of about 200 Gb? Is it a shopping site, betting shop or porn merchant perhaps? No, it’s a forum dedicated to the new Honda Civic. Read more

Running antivirus software on a Mac is like buying life insurance. You can can pay a fortune for something you’ll never actually benefit from personally. Luckily there are free antivirus solutions and recently a new one has appeared for Intel Macs. Read more

Those of us lucky enough to get a new Mac from time to time (hum hum) will be thanking Apple for Time Machine. It takes all the hassle out of setting up a new Mac, a task that used to take days to install, register, configure and upgrade all the applications. As our recent experience found, Time Machine archives are a rich ground for ardent tinkerers who never RTFM. And if they do they don’t believe all they read. Read more

In the week following the latest Mac System upgrade to 10.5.3, the next upgrade to 10.5.4 is already under test and rumours populate the Net of the next biggie, Mac OS X 10.6 also currently known as Snow Leopard. The biggest surprise is that 10.6 will drop support for PowerPC processors and for Carbon – both yet unsubstantiated – so it can move to pure 64 bit addressing. Read more

When the temperature outside starts with a 3 you know you have problems. A single digit, Fahrenheit, or preceded by a minus (as is often the case in Montreal and other under-developed parts of the world) means it is what is technically known as bloody freezing. A single digit after the 3, as in the southern half of the UK this weekend, the correct term is bloody hot. Unless you are measuring in the Rømer scale in which case you will be dead. Read more

Brits living abroad usually pine for something from home, often a specific consumable such as Marmite, pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch, Earl Grey tea or a favourite marmalade. Aussies will kill for the last jar of Vegemite, a pale imitation of the real McCoy, even if the canny Kiwi’s have better taste and export an antipodean Marmite to Australia in a bid to re-educate their palates. Read more

We never realised how useful an ftp server could be until we had one each, back when ISPs issued users with a block of IP addresses so that every computer on line had its own unique address. That was in the days of System 8 and 9 when Mac’s Users and Groups permissions settings were a lot easier to control and seemingly more robust against foreign intrusion. A simple piece of software was all it took to get ftp up and running. It was easy to understand and gave us each the flexibility to offer a space for files to be sent that were too large to email. Or to make work available for clients and service bureaux to download. We had two ftp servers running, one each, and used them extensively. Read more

A long, long time ago, when Mac users ran System 6/7/8/9, windows were things you looked through. Apart from version 3 (and lately Vista) which for some weird reason was installed on generic computers, with the reasoning they were the equivalent of IBM’s Mac’s and Sun’s fancy GUI operating systems. Read more

Anyone who has flown into Gatwick airport at the end of their holiday, then stood on the platform waiting for the train home will know what it means. A prime example of what Britain does best. Read more