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Hey There This is my first Surf Report, and over the next months I want to make it as good and as useful as it can be. To that end, I need your help, readers. How, you ask? Well, first, recent estimates have shown that if I surf full time, 24 hours a day I can't cover more than 0.001% of the websites in a year. Yes, that's just the sites, and it doesn't count looking at what happens to be behind the front page. Worse: I'd get further behind all the time - sites are created faster than I can keep up. Guess what. I ain't even gonna try. So it's more or less guaranteed that I'll miss stuff. Actually, it's more or less guaranteed that I'll miss most stuff. That's why I need you to email me to let me know about the most egregious of my omissions. I'd also be happy for you to email me with sites that aren't necessarily to do with anything I've said, but which you think would be of interest to readers. I note too that this column under past authors hasn't necessarily restricted itself to strictly Mac-related topics. I plan on continuing this tradition, with roughly half of the column devoted to topics you might be interested in because you're a Mac buff, and the other half about sites that are interesting, cool, innovative, or whatever. So help me with that, and send me URLs of you favorites. I'll credit you if you like, but if you want to keep your habits secret, I won't mention your name at all. While I'm at it, don't bother with sites that show violence, because I don't like it and I won't look at anything that has it. Porn ... well, I'm too old for any of that stuff. And if it's a promo, send it to Marc, not to me, and he'll tell you all about our advertising rates. Not that you have to be particularly clever to fool me, mind you.
Let's Get Started OK, with that out of the way, I'll kick off with the Mac sites that I check on a regular basis, some every day. I know many readers will know most of these, but I'd be surprised if many people knew them all. If I'm wrong about that, I'm sure you'll let me know. However, in any case, if you use Internet Explorer 5, and you use the scrapbook feature, just hit the "Add to Scrapbook" button and you'll have a record of all the sites in what may be a convenient form. For Mac news and views, it's hard to beat: www.maccentral.com Lots of duplication and cross references on these, of course. The same is true at many sites, but more so at these. Rather different are: www.tidbits.com Then of course, there are the major magazines; surprisingly often, you can get almost anything that's in the magazine even before the print version appears in the mail or at the newsstands. www.macworld.com
My Confession I buy Mac stuff when I don't need it. But if I figure I'm going to need it, and I see it at a good price, that's when I jump in with my credit card info. Get burned? Well no, not in the most obvious way - I've never had my card charged without the correct merchandise being delivered within a reasonable time. But once or twice, I've bought stuff that I never did get round to using. More often, what happens is that by the time I really need it, it's gone down even further. Like the hard drive I thought was a terrific buy, but by the time I'd filled half of it, double the size was being offered at a lot less - and even then, I had lots of junk that could just as well have been thrown out. But hey, I might have used it up faster. And drives always work faster if they're less than half full. I'm real good at rationalizations. With my habits, I gotta be. But to continue, bargains are not so common in the Mac world as they are on the Wintel side. Often, though, as in so many things Wintel, there's more hype than substance in the information torrents. Generation-old hardware at 30% less than new, but often with 35% less functionality as well. Well, whoopee. But with Macs, although it's a bit limited in the scope of things it tells you about, a good site is:
Shareware and Freeware There are three sites I check regularly. The most senior, Info-Mac isn't being maintained as well as it used to be, probably because there are more alternatives now: http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.eduThe best-known of the commercial sites also promises frequent updates, but seems to leave most of its front page the same for long periods of time: The site I find most useful are Tucows and VersionTracker, which always seem up-to-date. Tucows deals with lots more than Macs, and has mirror sites all around the world for fast access. Because you're asked to choose a mirror before you specify that it's the Mac you're interested in, I can only give a general URL which you'll have to navigate from. VersionTracker is Mac only. www.tucows.com [Editor's Note: MacUpdate is one of my favorites :)] [Columnist's reply: Can't argue with that. You probably don't need to make a daily check of every single one of these sites, though. We hafta admit it: there is a certain amount of repetition]
Troubleshooting OK, first go to the site operated by whatever company's products are giving you trouble. In the case of Apple, just go to the main Apple Site and navigate from there. www.apple.com Apple has an excellent site, of astonishing breadth and depth. You get the official version of everything, of course, which occasionally is somewhat less than the whole truth. And if what you have is a software-hardware conflict, or if you're not sure, Apple might not be what you want. A more general site that's often easier to navigate is MacFixit. Extremely friendly, and very complete. The End Already? Say it Ain't So! Well, I seem to have used up all the words Marc gave me, and I haven't begun my non-Mac stuff yet. Don't forget to tell me about your favorite site, and see if you can spot my deliberate omission. Begin your email: "Hey Stupid: Your article in the August Edition wasn't worth reading. I can't believe you didn't mention..."
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