To find out a Mac's serial number, don't bother hunting for the tag on the machine's enclosure, as it's right there in the "About This Mac" dialog box. But what about looking up this information without being logged in?

Macs have always been a favorite with musicians and audio engineers, and at this year's Musikmesse Frankfurt, the world's biggest trade show for musical instruments, studio technology, and accessories, you could literally see them everywhere.

At the "PWN 2 OWN" contest during last month's CanSecWest, which claims to be the "world's most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security," a MacBook Air was the first of three laptops to be "pwned," i.e., to be broken into. The other machines were running Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, and only the latter managed to withstand all attacks until the contest's end. Is it time for Mac users to finally start panicing about malware on OS X?

With a sweet $18 billion of cash in the bank, it was just a matter of time until Apple would consider a major acquisition. Who would have thought that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit would be their object of desire.

Like many Mac afficionados, I have to resort to using Windows for some of the work I do, and while working on a Windows machine, I rely on the familiar QuickTime and iTunes combo to add some music to my work day. The installer for this software includes a special stand-alone utility which helps keep the software up-to-date. Much like the Software Update utility on the Mac. The most recent update from last week, though, presented a fresh copy of Apple's Safari webbrowser even if the software was not installed yet. And the discussion on the 'Net on whether this behavior is acceptable, or not, is now in full swing.

As much as I love working in a home-office setup, there's one thing I sorely miss: a little quiet corner to retreat to for a quick break from work. Who would have thought that I would find this in the form of a screen saver called Serene Saver 2 HD?

Have you ever kept track of how often you hit Command-S on an average day? However you use your Mac, whatever kind of apps you are using: chances are that hitting that comforting key combination every few minutes has become a subconscious habit for you. For me, it's so bad, I sometimes hit Command-S while filling out a web form, wondering where the heck that Save As… dialog box came from. The question is: Why? Why do we do this? Why isn't there a better way? Oh, wait, there is!

Apple has done a not-so-great job in documenting how to properly delete files from a Time Machine backup: Time Machine's online help doesn't explain how to do this, yet the solution is mentioned shortly on Time Machine's product page on the Apple website (it's under "Back up only what you need"). No wonder that, even though this topic has been addressed on several websites already, people keep asking how this works. Here's the answer to that question -- yet again.

Using templates is a major time-saver for those of us who need to create the same, or at least highly similar documents over and over again. But what do you do if a specific application does not support templates? As long as you're handling text files, there's a solution that works universally across your Mac.

Haven't been to Macworld Expo in January, or did not invest in a Conference pass? No problem: a wide selection of presentations from the Users Conference, MacIT Conference, and Specialty Programs tracks from this year's Macworld Expo San Francisco are now available online at Macworld Encore.