On October 23, we got together in Paris for the first MacMusic Party to celebrate our 5th birthday. Everybody, 200 of us, had a great time: good ambience, constructive discussions fun, old friends met, improbable meetings, professional contacts, silly fun....
This can be organised more often and elsewhere if enough of us wish it. Tell us! And London, New York? (Post in the forums)

Apple today announced a major upgrade to its Titanium PowerBook G4 notebook line with PowerPC G4 processors running at up to 1 GHz, the industry's first slot-loading SuperDrive(TM) for reading and burning both CDs and DVDs, the fastest mobile graphics processor, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, and integrated 802.11 wireless networking-all in a 1-inch thick, 5.4-pound Titanium enclosure with a widescreen 15.2 inch (diagonal) display.

Apple today updated its popular iBook line of portables with faster PowerPC G3 processors running at up to 800 MHz and the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics. Weighing as little as 4.9 pounds, the iBook now starts at only $999 (US), making it more affordable than ever.

Griffin Tech. recently released version 1.5 (OS 9 & X) of Powermate.
Powermate is a multimedia, assignable controller usable with any application. It can be set to any keyboard shortcut and can, for example, be used to initiate recording on the fly or as a very convinient jog.
USB based, Powermate will act like the remote you need when the keyboard is far from hand.

Cycling 74 have released a free runtime engine for 3rd party Pluggo plug-ins. See the Cycling74 download pages for more details. This will allow non-Pluggo owners to use plug-ins that have been developed by 3rd parties. The original Pluggo, with all 74 + Cycling74 plugs, is still a commercial product but hats-off to Cycling 74 for helping to bring the magic of Pluggo to a wider audience. For some free plugs to get you started, check out www.postsomnia.com and www.wildfrontear.co.uk