As widely reported today, Apple is suing Mac-rumors web site ThinkSecret.com specifically mentioning published articles on the headless iMac and the iWork office suite.

Aside from adding tremendous street cred to ThinkSecret and the likelihood that these rumors are true (heck, even Reuters ran a story on the headless Mac), it seems odd that Apple would get so ramped up about products which will be publicly announced soon. As a big Mac fan, new product rumor mongering is a favorite pastime, and it seems draconian to be coming down on TS. Curious to see what happens next…

The patent office is a fascinating resource, I have discovered, after readying an interesting post on Waxy.org.

Andy Baio points out a patent application by Apple Computer for the backend software used to publish music to the iTunes Music Store. Cool stuff.

Even more interestingly, he points out that you can keep up with your favorite companies approved and pending patents, like so.

So, here are all approved patents and pending applications for Apple Computer. Some other interesting company searches: Google’s pending and approved, TiVo’s pending and approved, and Yahoo’s pending and approved.

And this blog, FreshPatents.com, has RSS feeds by industry on new patent requests/grants. Cool!

Apple is expected to announce a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret (via eHomeUpgrade). The machine will be a slim form factor to go beneath or beside a monitor, and include a custom version of iLife. This one will target likley PC-switchers who would already have a monitor they might use with their shiny new Mac.

Yes, it’s true. I’d say it’s looking a lot like Christmas, excpet for my religious affiliation. I have just received a brand-spanking new G5 dual-2.5gHz liquid cooled PowerMac at work. Oh, baby! I spent much of the last day of work before heading out on vacation getting this bad boy set up. It’s just amazing. First off, the Setup Assistant was able to seamlessly transfer my home directory and most of my applications from my old 1Ghz TiPB drive with little or no work on my part. It took a while – over 2 hours – but when it finished, the new machine rebooted and looked just like the old one. Same desktop, same dock configuration – everything. Except of course the incessant slowdowns whenever I tried to do much of anything. Gone are the days of the spinning beach ball in iPhoto. My current library has about 2,000 6MB+ photos. Even touching the thumbnail slider was enough to trigger a beach-ball wait of 15+ seconds. Scrolling was the same – each page took at least 10 seconds. Now, I can scroll from top to bottom of my collection in a blink of the eye.

The new G5 arrived only a day after I received a new Seagate 100GB 2.5″ 5400 RPM internal drive for my aging Titanium Powerbook. The enclosure I ordered was dead out of the box, causing some concern until I could confirm that it was not the new drive, and I have managed to migrate the old data onto the new one, and installing was easy-peasy.

Put simply, I am a very happy man.