While the fun little activity of guessing about Apple's upcoming hardware is a fave party game in the domain of the Mac-specific rumors sites, it's relatively rare that you see the more generic news outlets joining in. When it happens, it generally either means that the rumor is very close to the truth-- close enough that it's so widely-reported that even, say, CNET picks up on it-- or waaaay off base. So when InfoWorld starts talking about the specs for Apple's soon-to-be-released "Lombard" PowerBook, it's worth sitting up and taking notice, because it's either going to include some "hard" news or some particularly entertaining misinformation.

According to the InfoWorld article, Apple was showing off a Lombard "behind closed doors" at the NAB conference last week. There's nothing too surprising there. But reportedly the Lombard they were showing is a super-thin laptop, "at least as thin as Sony's 0.9-inch Vaio portable," which we'd never heard to be part of the expected spec list. Furthermore, this Lombard will also feature a G4 starting at 400 MHz. Considering that Lombard is expected to be released pretty soon, we doubt that a G4 would really be the starting chip. And we also highly doubt that Lombard would be only "three-and-one-half-pounds." And don't even start with us about the "detachable LCD that can be replaced with goggles for so-called heads-up display." Cool, yes, but something that Apple will actually ship in the near future? Not a chance.

Our guess? The so-called "Lombard" described in the article was actually not a Lombard at all, but an Apple prototype for the "executive PowerBook" that Steve Jobs hinted about recently. Think about supermodels for a second; it's hard for a super-thin laptop to be super-curvy, and Lombard was code-named after San Francisco's Lombard Street, the curviest street in the world. O'Grady's PowerPage appears to agree with our assessment, but Mac OS Rumors claims that, yes, Apple is indeed planning to release Lombard as a super-thin unit. Mysterious indeed. Could a last-minute decision to stick Lombard into a super-thin enclosure be why it still hasn't been released? (Even crash diets take time.) Seems like we've been waiting for this thing forever...

The Mac games world drifts ever deeper into the Twilight Zone. It used to be that one of the universal constants was the unflagging Mac hatred of id software's head honcho John Carmack. (Carmack, for those of you who don't follow such things, is the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the games development milieu; he's the one who brought the world Doom and Quake.) Just as light happily never exceeds the speed of 186,282 miles per second, Carmack swore blindly that Quake 3: Arena (the next iteration in the popular kill-your-friends series, which, this time, is multi-player only) would never be ported to the Mac OS, whose admittedly sketchy memory management scheme he considered beneath contempt. In the past several months, however, Strange Things™ have been happening; the iMac revitalized the Macintosh as a viable consumer platform, Apple made games development a big priority, and the weirdness culminated at Macworld Expo in San Francisco last January when Apple announced that it had licensed the popular OpenGL set of 3D APIs from Silicon Graphics-- and trotted out OpenGL poster boy John Carmack to announce the planned simultaneous release of Quake 3: Arena for Windows and Macintosh. (Carmack has stated that he likes OpenGL more than he dislikes the Mac OS.) And then the bottom dropped out of the universe as Carmack gave the world the first public glimpse of Q3A gameplay-- and it was running on a Mac.

As if that weren't bizarre enough, so far it seems that the promise of a Q3A simultaneous release is holding true. Q3Test, the first public release of the game's infrastructure meant to test the multiplayer network code under actual "battle" conditions, has been anxiously awaited for the last few months, and for a while the complete and utter lack of the mention of a Mac version had some people worried. Not long ago, though, id confirmed that there would be a Mac version of Q3Test released, and the world rejoiced. What we didn't expect was to see Mac Q3Test released before the Windows version. It's true; the Mac version surfaced on Sunday, while the Windows version is still nowhere to be seen. There's a test of the server for Win32, but no client. Spooky enough for you?

We don't know what kind of alien mind-controlling parasite Steve Jobs managed to implant at the base of Carmack's skull, but we're happy as clams that the little bugger is doing its job so darn well. Q3Test is here, it's real, and it's sitting on our hard drive unplayed. Frankly, the unprecedented time-sucking factor of Q3Test is already legendary, and we already need a 36-hour day just to get all the "productive" stuff done, so we're more than a little wary of getting hooked on a new obsession right now. But maybe we'll just fire it up for a quick little peek tonight. Uh huh. At which point we strongly suspect that Carmack's own species of mind-controlling alien will probably be taking over our lives.

Remember all that hoo-ha a couple of months ago about Apple trying to put the hurt on a seventeen-year-old Canadian kid over the registration of the appleimac.com domain name? Well, it's finally been resolved; Abdul Traya, who had been holding out for a donation of thirty iMacs to his school in exchange for turning the domain name over to Apple, has folded his hand and agreed to let Apple have what they want. His payment? A "pocketful of legal fees and a token payment," according to a Reuters article.

All in all, we think this Traya kid came out of the whole thing just dandy. After all, the publicity that the dispute kicked up gave him some half-million web visits just in the first week following the story's break. His home web-hosting business got a ton of attention. All in all, the press probably would never have even picked up on the story in the first place if he hadn't have been a teenager; a thirty-six-year-old doing the same thing would have been dismissed as a cybersquatter infringing blatantly on Apple's trademarks. Instead Traya gets his legal fees paid for and some cash to blow on penny whistles and moon pies. So we're happy that everyone else is happy.

The last time we checked, www.appleimac.com still pointed to a particularly surrealistic page titled "Welcome to my page about my dog!!" which includes a photo of an adorably confused-looking pup named "Goody" taken in 1996. Any day now we expect that it'll start pointing to Apple's main page, which we consider just, if not just slightly a shame. Sure, we think Apple had every right to go after the domain name in the interests of protecting its trademarks, but somehow we doubt they're going to do anything with it as truly bizarre as point it at a snapshot of a confused dog. Of course, if they do, then they're even cooler than we thought...