Happy October everyone! And welcome, to another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about Google Docs becoming more student friendly, new Mac Mini’s possibly on the way, and a Gmail user getting kicked out of their account (temporarily), for no good reason. Take a look, after the jump.

This week I have three stories for you. Let’s get started.

1: From : The Official Google Blog
Back to school with Google Docs
Monday, September, 28, 2009

Google Docs has always been one of my favorite tools for working in groups at school, and now it just got even better. This year’s Google summer interns have developed a slew of features to Google Docs aimed directly at students, such as a new equation editor, subscript, and superscript support, built in translation and more. This means taking notes collaborative and sharing them is even easier, and you never have to be tied to just one computer. You also don’t need expensive software like Microsoft office 2007 or MathLab. And if you just want to write out a simple chemical formula or algebra problem, you can just use the subscript and superscript tool. My favorite new feature is the much improved survey tool, when you can now have automatic logic, and show questions that are relevant based on answers to previous questions. Take a full look at all the new features over the Google Blog post. Remember,

2: From : Engadget
iMac, Mac mini supplies growing thin, refresh expected soon
Tuesday, September, 29, 2009

The Apple rumor mill is starting up again, and for once it’s not about the “Apple Tablet”. Nope, it’s about the good old Mac Mini and iMac. Apple has told supplies of iMacs and Mac minis are “constrained” and that future orders will go unfulfilled. What does this mean for you and me? Most likely, it might be hard to get a iMac or Mac Mini for a while, but soon there should be a refresh of the line, meaning new hardware with better features for the same price or even less. So keep your eyes peeled on the Apple Store, and if it goes down, you know what’s happening.

3: From : Gizmodo
Judge Orders Mail Account Shut Down Because of Idiotic Bank Mistake
Monday, September, 28, 2009

If you were to get a piece of email not intended for you, what would you do? Just delete it? Reply to the sender that it’s the wrong address? What if you weren’t given a option, and your entire email account was just deactivated, even though you did nothing wrong? Well, that did happen to someone this week. A Rocky Mountain Bank employee accidentally send 1,300 social security numbers and other personal info to the wrong Gmail address. When they realized the mistake, they sent an email asked for the message to be deleted, but when they didn’t received confirmation, the bank asked Google to intervene. Google promptly said “No, go get a court order” and pointed them to the Gmail privacy policy. Well, the bank did get a court order, but it was a bit overkill. Gmail was ordered to deactivate the entre account. Google and the bank later worked things out, and Google was just able to delete the message and reactivate the account. I’m glad that Google stuck by their morals and pointed the bank to the privacy policy and protected the user, especially because they didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, and the judge is dumb, and really went overkill on the course of action to be taken. The Gmail account should have never been suspended in the first place. Let’s get up to speed with how dependent people are on email, and how the user could have been extremely negatively impacted.

That’s it for this week, see you next time, right here at The iLife.

–Keith Hobin