The Software Update addicts must be giggling themselves into a stupor right now, what with Mac OS X 10.2.6 now available from out of the blue. Grab it and go to town for improved printing with OpenType fonts, better compatibility with Maya and Unreal Tournament 2003, support for the Sony Ericsson T610 phone, and a fix for an Asian language scripts bug. (For what it's worth, MacFixit recommends downloading and applying the Combo Updater even if you're already running 10.2.5; whether or not you actually want to do that probably depends largely on whether you've got the bandwidth to download an extra 80 MB of stuff.)

"Hold the phone, there, Jim-Bob," you reply, "didn't 10.2.5 just come out, like, twelve minutes ago?" Why, yes indeedy-do it did, folks-- but there's one more thing that 10.2.6 does that we neglected to mention before: it "addresses an issue for Mac OS X 10.2.5 in which a kernel panic message may appear if certain USB hubs or devices are connected." In other words, it fixes whatever 10.2.5 broke that made Mac OS X crash more often than a narcoleptic with ADD watching C-SPAN.

We can't say for certain whether we happen to own any of the "certain" problematic USB devices that trigger the crashes, but we can tell you that soon after updating to 10.2.5, we got to see our first ever Jaguar kernel panic since 10.2 originally shipped last August. And we gotta say, it brought back memories! Being forced to restart without having installed a system software update first? Having to press a button on the Mac to do it? Losing work in unsaved documents? Sitting around waiting through an unusually lengthy restart process? Why, the wave of nostalgia that washed over us was almost enough to make us boot back into Mac OS 9 and run a slew of late-nineties Microsoft products just to watch the System Errors stack up. Ah, the good old days...

Now, a switch back to Mac OS 9 at this point would seriously impair our productivity (which, as you're all well aware, ain't all that great to begin with), so we won't be doing that, but just the same, we're a little hesitant to install 10.2.6 and give up the heady thrill of random potential kernel panics. But who knows; maybe we'll get lucky and 10.2.7 will ship later this afternoon to "address an issue for Mac OS X 10.2.6 in which a kernel panic message may occur when the user looks at the screen funny."