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ATPM 12.07
July 2006

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SmartBoard USB5000

Enjoyed your article on the SmartBoard. I have one and was vexed by the F12 key and its apparent inability to open the CD drawer, but upon talking with DataDesk they brought to my attention that the time the F12 was held down governed that. If you hold it down for a second, the drawer opens.

—Dave

Worms 3D

I love this game but absolutely hate the controls. It is the single most annoying problem that has kept me from playing this game. I have e-mailed the company begging for some sort of upgrade to allow custom control configurations, but their response was simply that most people have no problem with the controls. Maybe a group effort would convince them otherwise. I really want to enjoy this game, but can’t due to the controls. I hope someone at Feral gets this message and helps me enjoy the game once again!

—Gary Katz

TVMini HD

I bought one of these and was really disappointed that the mini antenna included doesn’t really work. You actually need to plug the device into your home roof antenna to get reception on all channels.

Unfortunately, because of this, it doesn’t allow you to be mobile if you use it with your laptop. So, if you already have a TV at home, there’s no point in getting one of these for your laptop or desktop.

—Jason Hartner

Axio Hardsleeve

If you orient the notebook with the latch facing the hinge of the hardsleeve, you wouldn’t have the latch problem you described.

—Scott Jones

You are, indeed, correct, however that would not be a workable solution for people who leave the laptop in the Hardsleeve while using the computer.

—Lee Bennett

New ATPM Reader and Spoofed Mail

Just discovered your site today and read your current issue cover to cover. Can’t imagine how it managed to stay “hidden” from me for all the years (nine) that I have been a Mac user.

What I would like to see in your online publication is an article on spoofed e-mail addresses, how this happens and what people can do (if anything) about it or to prevent it. I thought that Apple had security measures to prevent this from happening—there is one article on their support site about this—but I seem to be proof that it isn’t so. This problem has just surfaced this week. I have already given up one e-mail address (not a .Mac though) because of this problem, and I don’t particularly want to migrate to another. Any advice on this subject would be most welcome.

Keep going with a great online publication. I am planning to subscribe after I hit the “send” button on this e-mail!

—Kim

Due to the way Internet e-mail works, the only way to prevent people from sending messages with your return address is to not let them know what your address is. So, it might help to use a separate address “in public” on the Web and when companies require it, reserving your main address for personal correspondence. You could file the messages for the public address separately and dump it if it starts collecting too much spam. However, I think the best solution is use a spam filter to get rid of the spoofed messages, along with the rest of your spam. My day job is developing SpamSieve, and that’s the filter I’d recommend.

—Michael Tsai

Cover

Hello Mirko! I love your ATPM cover for this month! Its delicate hues and soft “high-tech” look remind me at once of the “hall of mirrors” with its seemingly infinite perspective, and a favorite of faux-high-tech mid-eighties looks in interior design in the US; and your treatment also evokes for me the delicate “Shagreen,” egg-shell/lacquer and “Coromandel” screens of the 1920s and 1930s designed by famous artists and designers such as Pierre Dinand etc. And the colors are just exquisite.

Thank you for such a lovely, retro/modern composition. It’s one of my favorite covers!

—Catherine von Dennefeld

iDisk Ennui

Well-written! I am a recent “switcher” and I subscribed to .Mac in spite of some hesitation over its rather stiff price. I sought to experience the fully-integrated Mac world that my new machine that .Mac promised to offer. As my first Mac arrived with a sick logic board and daily kernel crashes, Backup turned out to be a very useful utility for my many OS re-installs. I still find it a nice, automatic feature, doing daily what I would normally neglect to do. After my experience, the only reason I might recommend .Mac is to users who want to have one vendor for everything, and who find the poor potent for-pay Yahoo services too confusing. I do not know if I will continue my subscription at this time.

—Mike Reith

• • •

Thank you for a lovely commentary. (I even read the part about .Mac!)

I am a London-born Merseysider who has lived in California for many years. The ground is moving beneath my feet as this country seems to be changing for the worse—or I am just getting old.

To read of you sitting in your garden, listening to the distant bells, was too piquant for words. I am a semi-retired pastor and use .Mac and iWeb for a church Web site. I could not have created a site except for the ease-of-use of .Mac and iWeb.

The church pays for .Mac, and I save a little by buying our subscription from Amazon. I sincerely doubt I would buy .Mac for my own use. I do think the URLs on .Mac are clumsy and long, and people tell me the site loads slowly.

Thank you again for a most pleasant article. Please keep it up.

—Roy Gee

Thank you for your fine comments. They were well received.

I can assure you I really was sitting in the garden listening to the bell ringers and the bees humming. It was a quintessentially English experience—as was the wine, but that is another thing altogether.

Today, I got an iCard from a Danish friend with links to iWeb photos of her rapidly growing family. She is just sharing her life with her contacts around the world, and it made me realize that there is a great value in the facilities offered by .Mac if one chooses to use them. Maybe I’ve been a little too cynical about .Mac.

I’m just off back to my garden to watch tiny pipistrelle bats flit across the pond and fly between my wife and I as we talk. They fly so close and so fast it is magic.

Or maybe it’s the glass of wine I will be drinking… :-)

—Mark Tennent

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