Earthquakes cause vibrations. Certain Mac and PC notebook computers come with vibration detectors used to shutdown their hard drives should the computers fall. So why not, asks a seismologist, use the accelerometers on the computers as a distributed network for detecting earthquakes?.

You can help out by visiting the Quake Catcher Network's home page. Right now it only works on Macs, but a version for HP laptops is coming soon.

Matt Asay discusses the seemingly incongruous rise of the proprietary Mac in open source community. He makes a lot of good points, including the ability to quickly evoke terminal and run Unix apps while at the same time maintaining an attractive desktop interface, but I think this statement sums up why many have switched:

At a certain point, I just want something that works well.

According to the Morning Call, Apple is going to be opening an official Apple Store in the new upscale addition to the Lehigh Valley Mall. This means we'll no longer have to trek to Bridgewater, N.J. for our Mac and iPod goodness.

Years ago, Macs and Windows machines had a hard time reading the same floppy discs; now you can run Windows on a Mac, from within Mac OS X itself! This tutorial on Lifehacker explains how to make application windows within Windows XP run seemlessly inside OS X.

Tired of those cliched old fish swimming across your monitor? Then check out the Space Wars 3D Screen Saver for Mac OS X (there's one for Windows as well). The demo screensaver features a battle between squadrons of small fighters, but like the aforementioned virtual fish tank, those who register the screensaver can download additional ships. The overall effect is reminicent of a cross between the old Wing Commander games and Babylon 5, with lots of quick turns and explosions.