First, I want to say thank you to all those who responded to yesterday’s post about making a donation to Hawk Wings.

Especially I want to thank the most generous donor, who wants no public recognition. You know who you are! Thanks.

I used some of that money this afternoon to buy an extra gigabyte of RAM for my shiny new MacBook Pro.

Now, the thing really feels supersonic.

I was getting a lot a spinning beach balls of death before. One GB is not enough to run all the apps that I use to blog at once — Photoshop and ecto (both needing Rosetta and sucking lots of memory), NetNewsWire and one web browser, sometimes two (all RAM-hungry apps).

As an added frustration, TextExpander and my other time-saving apps were starved for RAM, stuttering, barely limping along.

Now all that is fixed. My Mac is positively frisky. If your array of apps is anything like mine, I highly recommend investing the extra cash in more memory.

If you missed out on making a donation yesterday but want to, you still can. I am pretty sure that the PayPal button in the sidebar on the front page is open 24/7.

If you want to do a good turn but don’t have any money, head over to X Factor, read about the troubles of Mr Goma (Instant Apple Celebrity) and maybe sign the petition to get him a work permit.

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About a month ago, Hawk Wings received its first donation from a reader.

I have since been trying to persuade him to tell me something about how he uses Mail.app and what he likes and dislikes about it so that I could offer a little profile with the news, but he has proved too shy or too busy to give me anything.

This is all I know: Eelco is a Dutch reader who made a kind donation to Hawk Wings and wants me to “Keep up the great work!”. Thanks, Eelco. I really appreciate your generosity and good wishes.

Of course, Eelco doesn’t have to feel all alone. You could make a donation too, using the PayPal button on the site’s front page in the sidebar to the right of screen.

In fact, if you read Hawk Wings a lot and like the blog’s style and content — a casserole of Mail.app, Address Book, iCal and email in general, spiced with pinches of Gmail and Thunderbird and a productivity jus — and your email life has got better because of it, maybe you should donate.

It would encourage me to continue blogging Hawk Wings, especially now that people are throwing pots of money at me to write about other things.

I should mention too that Hawk Wings received a very kind donation from a scotch-drinking, bearded developer from northern climes some time ago, but he is not a reader; he is one of my teachers.

Also, three developers gave me free registrations for apps that I posted about on Hawk Wings. Which was nice. Thanks.

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Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has taken the unusual step of making a personal appeal in the site’s latest fund-raising round.

If you don’t know what Wikipedia is, you can found out here.

It had some bad news coverage last year. While its foibles are real, they are few. And its virtues far outweigh them.

Now it needs donations. Why would you give? Jimmy Wales explains:

I can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m doing this for the child in Africa who is going to use free textbooks and reference works produced by our community and find a solution to the crushing poverty that surrounds him. But for this child, a web site on the Internet is not enough; we need to find ways to get our work to people in a form they can actually use.

And I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m doing this for my own daughter, who I hope will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary, where control of knowledge is in the hands of people everywhere, with basic works they can adopt, modify, and share freely without asking permission from anyone.

The proprietary control of knowledge is not a sexy topic. But it is a real danger.

Give to Wikipedia. I did. I want my kids to grow up in a world like that too.

It’s even tax-deductible if paid out of federally-taxable income in the United States.

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