For "a magical QuickTime VR tour of the North Pole," try . [Celeste Dolan Mookherjee, MacWay, 12/5/95.]

Santa Claus is expecting 100K email messages via his site this holiday season. You can also write to , or to for a response in Spanish. (French will be available soon.) If you have questions about the service, write to . [MacWay, 11/28/95.]

Flying home for the holidays? Airlines now check photo ID for all passengers, to catch people traveling on someone else's ticket. (For security reasons, but also to add millions in revenue. If caught, you either buy a new ticket at full price or you don't fly.) Tickets have always been non-transferrable -- and you may lose insurance coverage if flying under someone else's name -- but resale has been common. [Ted Reed, SJM, 10/14/95, 1D.]

Seattle FilmWorks will develop your film for downloading over the net. . [Alan Gatlin, Network News, 12/2/95.] (They offer Mac or Windows viewing/cropping/export software, a roll of color film, and a mailer "good for free scanning with a paid film developing order," for $7.95. No mention of the development cost. I think you get prints plus your 24-bit pictures on a floppy. Seattle Filmworks, Eliott Bay at Peir 89, P.O. Box 34056, Seattle, WA 98124-9771.)

If your digital photos aren't quite right, the new PhotoDeluxe 1.0 from Adobe will soon give you most of the power of Photoshop without its steep learning curve. [Jennifer Tanaka, Newsweek, 12/4/95, p. 10.] A competitor is Chagall, from Technosystems USA. It costs only $299 and runs in just 750KB of RAM. It even supports Photoshop plug-ins. 800/417-0108, or 502/351-0108. [TidBITS, 8/21/95.] (But how do I print a photo ID? :-)

For other gift ideas, visit . [Internet TourBus, SEML, 11/19/95.]

And for a really unique gift, give the weekly Communique to someone you love!

-- Ken