People complain that AirPort can't connect with America Online Inc., but Paul Lorah of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, found an easy workaround. Simply get an ordinary dial-up PPP account with an ISP in your area, and connect your AirPort via this account. Set up AOL to connect through your ISP using TCP/IP instead of dialing an AOL access phone number. Offset the cost of the ISP account by signing up for AOL's Bring Your Own Access plan (AOL keyword BYOA), which costs only US$9.95, $12 a month less than the regular plan. Using TCP/IP and BYOA also lets you get to AOL through a DSL or cable modem connected to an AirPort base station or your computer.
No password is unbreakable, but alphanumeric passwords are more secure than the passwords many people use, which tend to be composed of letters only. Jim Butler of San Diego compiled three different methods for creating easy-to-remember alphanumeric passwords. With what he calls the look-alike method, you use numbers in place of the letters they resemble, replacing the letter o with the number 0, i with 1, z with 2, s with 5, G with 6, and g with 9. For example, worlds becomes w0r1d5.
Some Web pages take ages to print from Netscape Communication Corp.'s Communicator 4.7 and earlier, and they may not print at all if you surf to another page before the dialog box that reports the progress of printing or print spooling has appeared. Gabriel Dorado of Cordoba, Spain, found a way to print much more quickly. Immediately after clicking the Print button in the Print dialog box, take Netscape offline by clicking the small plug icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. On some Web sites, Netscape may display an alert complaining about being offline, but you can simply click OK and ignore it. After printing or print spooling finishes, click the plug icon to go back online.
Do you like iDisk Internet storage, available at Apple Computer Inc.'s new iTools Web site (http://itools.mac.com), enough to want iDisk automatically mounted at start-up? Russell Hearn of Broad Brook, Connecticut, discovered that you can set this up through Mac OS 9's Chooser. First open the Chooser window and click the AppleShare icon, and then click the Server IP Address button. In the dialog box that appears, enter idisk.mac.com and click Connect. In the resulting AppleShare dialog box, enter your iTools member name and password, and then click Connect. The next dialog box lists your iDisk volume. If you select the check box next to that volume's name before clicking OK, your Mac will mount iDisk whenever you start up. (If you have the Multiple User Accounts option turned on in the Multiple Users control panel, every time someone logs onto your Mac, it will try to connect to your iDisk volume. But users won't be able to mount iDisk unless they know your iTools password.)
Need to install software from a floppy to a Mac that lacks a floppy drive? Tired of inserting a CD to play a game or consult an encyclopedia? You can solve these problems with disk-image files. For example, when Stephen Taylor of Castro Valley, California, got a new G4 at work, he wanted to install QuarkXPress on it. His version of the software came on CD but required an installation floppy; of course, the G4 has no floppy drive. No problem: he inserted the installation floppy into an older Mac and made a disk image using the Disk Copy utility that comes with the Mac OS. (The latest version of Disk Copy is available from Apple Computer Inc.'s Software Library, http://asu.info.apple.com.) He then copied the disk-image file to the G4 via the local network. After mounting the disk-image file as a disk on the G4-again using Disk Copy-he was able to proceed with the installation.
When your mouse gets as balky as a donkey, you know it's time to clean the gunk out of it. Albert Wittlesey of Altadena, California, suggests cleaning the rollers with a 3- or 4-inch piece of ordinary transparent tape, cut in half lengthwise (because that's how wide the rollers are). First, open up your mouse and remove the roller ball. Poke one end of the tape into the mouse and press it against a roller with one finger while pulling the other end of the tape up with the other hand. The tape contacts the whole surface of the roller, picking up gunk and lint. You can also clean the mouse pad by pressing tape all over it, removing unimaginable substances that cause the mouse to slide rather than roll.