This free online weekly--available in Chinese, Dutch, German, French, Japanese, Spanish, and English--feeds Macintosh users bite-size updates on Mac- and Internet-related news and products. It's not very fancy, but it is quick and easy to use. The home page provides a summary of the current issue's contents, with links to individual stories and past issues archived chronologically. Launched in April 1990, TidBITS is among the longest-running Web publications, so there's plenty to paw through here if you're doing some research. The search feature lets you browse or search TidBITS as well as more than 10 other Mac and Internet zines, digests, and lists. - Sandra Stewart
Any reviewer (of books, Web sites, movies, restaurants, or whatever) whose reviews are uniformly positive or uniformly negative has a credibility problem. When the reviewer is employed by a marketing firm and his or her reviews are uniformly positive, all credibility goes right out the window. Bearing that in mind, welcome to Smartbooks, where every book reviewed is about the Internet, and every book about the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. These aren't reviews, they're sales pitches from a marketing firm called FSB Associates. What makes the site worthwhile are the excerpted book chapters available here at no cost. Dig long enough and you'll find a keeper. - Gary Barker
It's not about wearing the right clothes or hanging out in the right places. But it is about getting wired with people from all over the world in the middle of the woods, and it's happening this August 8th, 9th, and 10th. Hacking in Progress (HIP), the sequel to 1993's Hacking at the End of the Universe (HEU), will bring together an international crowd at a campsite near Amere in the Netherlands, hook them up to the Internet, and ask them to contemplate the risks and benefits of new technologies. Audio/video links will be exchanged with New York's concurrent Beyond HOPE hacker convention. Sponsored by the folks who published the now-defunct Hack-Tic, the event promises to be a rustic meeting of the laptops. The entrance fee will go to providing workshops, presentations, lectures, food, showers, and a power supply. And oh, yeah, they're also gonna party. - Emily Soares
Worried your "change of e-mail" notifications didn't reach everyone they should have? Tired of putting up those "this site has moved" pages? Promising to provide "online stability," pobox is a smart idea: You keep your provider and pick up your mail as usual, but your new address, you@pobox.com, doesn't ever have to change again. Every time you change your provider pobox takes care of mail redirection, and you only pay (depending on the number of aliases to your account) a base rate of $15.00 a year. For URL and mailing-list referral, the company that runs pobox also offers fauxbox and listbox. It looks like a good service ... but about the sound of that name.... - Emily Soares
Intended to keep tabs on the transitive world of digital font studios, this site lists font foundries in alphabetical order, highlighting new ones and taking the guesswork out of whether or not someone's still in business. Perhaps you never gave much thought to the font and never knew that entire industries rest on the tender stem of a Garamond "p" or the fresh bulge of a Leucadia "f." Here you can locate historical typeface foundries; track down creators of the Kiddo font; and discover Moscow-based ParaType, the largest library of non-Latin based typefaces in the world. Many of the studios listed offer shareware fonts as well. - Emily Soares
Although this Intel site wants to help you unleash the multimedia capabilities of your PC, a big vicious circle may keep you from getting what you need. The site offers demos and downloadable beta copies of software, as well as links to plug-in and multimedia sites. But those not familiar with these topics might not have a computer/modem powerful enough to handle connectedpc.com--which at 14.4 is very slow going. And if you are up to speed on the multimedia and plug-in scenes, chances are you're already familiar with many of the items here. The site features a lot of good info, but it requires a lot of patience if you're not traveling in the 28.8+ lane. - Dorrit Tulane Walsh
The Webmaster here admits he's "addicted to fonts," and if you suffer from the same disease, you should definitely pay him a visit. Font of the Day, the highlight of the site, offers a different downloadable shareware or freeware font every day. You can adopt a new attitude with the spiky Prick, confuse your readers with the nearly illegible Galaxia, or bat your eyelashes with the adorable PixieFont. Other features include a small selection of previous days' fonts, a FAQ containing full instructions for downloading and unzipping, and a large selection of font links. - Dorrit Tulane Walsh
It might be the plainest and most technologically unsophisticated site you've seen in a long time, but Hobbe's Internet Timeline serves its purpose well. The site provides a timeline of most key happenings--starting back in 1957--that resulted in the creation of the Internet as we know it today. Some of the early listings are filled with jargon most people won't recognize, but as the timeline progresses more familiar terms (such as Mosaic and Telnet) reassuringly start to appear. A few graphs that show Internet growth by year hint at the exponential expansion of Internet use we can expect in the near future. - Dorrit Tulane Walsh
Blake Mills created this online calendar and e-mail-reminder service for himself, and he found it so useful that he's offering it to others free of charge. (It's completely noncommercial and located on the University of Pennsylvania server.) Register and you get your own easily edited calendar, on which you set the events--anything from an important meeting to your parents' anniversary--for which you want to receive e-mail reminders. The site provides security via magic cookie files, so you do have to verify your information periodically, but it's definitely worth a try if you're always a day late and a birthday short. - Dorrit Tulane Walsh
Site of the month!!
In the pre-WWW days of the Internet, when I first got connected, I spent a lot of time scrounging around various FTP sites loading up on free software for my MacPlus. Of course, there weren't any file descriptions back then, so I had to look for software with interesting names--and after a couple of hours of download time, only about one in four programs would be of any use to me. Shareware.com, part of the c - Wayne Cunningham