Perhaps I hadn't been reading as widely as usual over the last week or so, but I missed out on the 'Apple proprietary screw' hoax - or if you prefer, 'experiment' - until those behind it came clean.

You can get the details in the perpetrators' own words, but in a nutshell someone created a 3D rendering of a screw with a fanciful head, put a screen grab on Imgur, then linked to it from Reddit with the text "A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws".

As rumours about Apple tend to do, the image and the idea of the company planning to use a proprietary screw got picked up by blogs and other online publications. That coverage apparently stressed the vagueness of the rumour, but the hoaxers/experimenters point out that around 90% of commenters accepted it as truth, and the others said it was a fake.

The point being made is that rumours can gain a life of their own, and that "we" have a tendency to believe what we want to believe, or believe sources we've come to trust (whether they've actually earned that trust or not). And yes, I freely admit that in my 'day job' I report on rumours from time to time.

A telling point is that while the initial reporting was sceptical, few commenters doubted the veracity of the image, and the bulk of social media comments accepted it as the truth.

But I think we should ask why Apple was the subject of the hoax/experiment.

Firstly, there is a big audience for rumours about what the company is planning. That's largely because Apple's policy is to say nothing until it is ready to reveal the new product. Sure, those of us that have been around the block a few times know about the Osborne Effect. (For the rest of you, Osborne was one of the early portable computer companies, and got into strife when sales of its current product slumped following its announcement of a new and superior model.) But Apple takes it to extremes. I initially doubted any journalists would have bothered to ask Apple if there was any truth to the assertion because they know "Apple does not comment on unannounced products." It turned out that Cult Of Mac did ask for a comment, though there's no indication that one was forthcoming.

Secondly, that hungry audience seems to contain as many Apple bashers as Apple fans. I still marvel at the way some of the the first comments on articles over at MacFixIt often come from individuals who apparently don't use Macs and are just there to cast aspersions. For example, an item about problems caused by the installation of an outdated version of Adobe's PDFD viewer plug-in on Mountain Lion was met by "the problems are a plenty with this OS. No wonder the unreleased Windows 8 beta has a LOT more users..." Almost all of that commenter's remarks are negative, though they're not all aimed at Apple.

Thirdly, there was a recognition that Apple would be prepared to do something 'bad' or at least 'non-standard' in an attempt to keep users out of their computers and mobile devices. That applies to the pro-Apple crowd and to the haters, but for different reasons. There was a time when Apple made a big deal of how easy it was to replace the hard drive or even upgrade the CPU of the latest Mac. OK, hardly anyone upgrades CPUs any more - by the time you really need to do that almost everything else on the motherboard/logic board also needs replacing to suit the new processor - but you only need moderate skills to change a drive as long as you can easily get inside the case. Which you can't if you own a current Mac, unless it is a Mac Pro.

Once upon a time, the Mac OS X installer came on a DVD which you could use as a startup disk if necessary. That changed with Lion, which introduced the Recovery partition and - on newer (ie, mid-2010 onwards) hardware - Internet Recovery.

But if the internal hard drive gets seriously fouled up, it may not be possible to start up from the Recovery partition. And whether you start up using Recovery or Internet Recovery, reinstalling OS X requires either feature to download the Lion or Mountain Lion installer, which is a time-consuming and bandwidth-heavy process.

So there's a lot to be said for creating a bootable drive that contains the installer. It's not difficult to do manually, but since computers are intended to make life easier, why not let your Mac do the work?

Guillaume Gète's Lion DiskMaker takes care of the job with minimal interaction, and caters for USB (8GB and up, but you shouldn't need to pay more than $6-$8 for a branded thumbdrive), FireWire, SD card and DVD storage, though DVD is not recommended due to its poor performance as a startup device.

Despite its name, this donationware utility works with Lion or Mountain Lion.

One issue is that you do need a copy of the relevant OS X installer. If you didn't make a copy before it deleted itself, you'll need to download it again from the Mac App Store. At least you can pick a convenient time to do so, such as during your ISP's off-peak hours and during a month when an extra 4GB download isn't going to blow your quota. If your Mac came with Lion or Mountain Lion preinstalled, Gète provides a link to instructions for capturing the required disk image file.

Another is that if you're using the free CleanMyDrive utility to remove Mac-specific detritus at the time external storage devices are ejected (especially convenient when moving files between Mac and Windows via sneakernet), be sure to turn the function off for the drive that you're going to use as the boot disk. If you don't, Lion DiskMaker will interpret the short delay as a failure to unmount the device, which brings the process to an abrupt halt.

Some of the loudest complaints I've heard so far about Mountain Lion are from those aggrieved by the abrupt removal of RSS support. This also affects those who are still on Lion but have updated to Safari 6. (I've got as far as downloading Mountain Lion, but deadline pressures mean I haven't installed it yet.)

RSS might be considered 'old technology' by the Facebook/Twitter generation, but it is a very effective way for publishers to draw attention to new articles on their sites, and for readers to follow news from multiple sites. It's also the technology used by iTunes and other podcatcher applications to automatically fetch new podcasts.

Previously, you could subscribe to RSS feeds in Safari (up to version 5 the little orange RSS icon appeared in the address bar when viewing a page to simplify bookmarking a feed) or in Mail.

But that's gone in Mountain Lion's version of Mail and from Safari 6. It's almost as if Apple is trying to steer us away from established open standards towards proprietary platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Either way, you'll need to take action if you want to keep using RSS feeds.

If you don't want to install additional software, one possibility is to use Google Reader or another web-based RSS reader. That's the path I took when I switched to Chrome as my everyday browser (Safari wouldn't work with a certain web application I wad forced to use, I don't like the Firefox UI, and Camino's future seemed uncertain). It works, though it doesn't check feeds as frequently as I'd like, and some people simply prefer to minimise their exposure to Google (but there are other providers of similar services).

If you're prepared to switch browsers, there are RSS reader add-ons for Firefox and Chrome, but I haven't seen one that works as cleanly as Safari used to.

There are several reasonable RSS readers for OS X. Some are available from the Mac App Store, including the free Shrook, but beware of those that are just a front end to Google Reader if you're looking for a true, standalone reader.

My main objection is that RSS feeds are a way of reaching web pages of interest, so having a separate reader either means passing an article's URL back to the browser for display (which is why I disagreed with putting RSS functionality into Mail in the first place), or the reader has to be able to render web pages, duplicating the functionality of the browser - and I almost always have a browser open anyway.

If you do make up for Safari 6's shortcomings by installing Shrook or a similar application - or by adopting Google Reader - that still leaves the issue of Safari's missing RSS button.

One answer is to install Calum Benson's RSS Menu Extension for Safari, which detects the presence of RSS links on a page and will open them in Google Reader or in your Mac's default RSS reader.

It used to be possible to set the default reader in Safari's preferences, but that's gone along with the rest of the RSS support. If your chosen RSS reader doesn't have a way of making itself the default for RSS content (Shrook does: Shrook>Set as Default Feed Reader), you can use RCDefaultApp (aka the Default Apps system preference) to change the setting.

The arrival of Mountain Lion is undoubtedly the big news of the day, but certain commitments forced me to write this piece in advance so I'll return to that topic once I've installed the latest incarnation of OS X - or found specific reasons why I shouldn't rush into it after all.

What I am looking forward to is news of an iWork upgrade that takes advantage of the way iCloud is reportedly baked into Mountain Lion and provides round-trip compatibility with the corresponding iOS apps.

The other big story of the week was Apple's third-quarter results. The iOS family is still showing strong growth, though iPod sales continue to contract. As I've said before, very few people would want an iPhone and an iPod, so I doubt that's a concern for Apple, which still holds the lion's share of the MP3 player market.

Mac shipments managed to increase by just 2% - but that's at a time where overall PC shipments were estimated to have shrunk by 1%. So there may be some schadenfreude involved, but the numbers do give Apple's executive team more reason to concentrate on the iOS at the expense of the Mac.

Go back far enough, and email addresses associated with the use of Apple's online services were of the form username@mac.com. Then MobileMe introduced username@me.com, but 'grandfathered' existing @mac.com addresses.

Now comes the news that users signing up for new Apple IDs or enabling Mail on an iCloud account for the first time will be allocated @icloud.com addresses. Furthermore, iOS 6 beta 3 users are being given matching @icloud addresses, so quite possibly that will extend to all iOS 6 users once it is released.

Presumably Apple will grandfather @mac.com and @me.com addresses. The amount of effort and resources required to do so is minimal, and a large part of the attraction of services such as iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud and Gmail is that you get a permanent address regardless of any changes of ISP, employment or organisational membership.

Yes, there is always the risk that a provider will go out of business, but if that's a worry you register your own domain - something I've been recommending for years.

I can't really understand why some people are so emotionally attached to @mac.com addresses (as opposed to the very practical issues around an address that you've been using for many years) and opposed to the @me.com form. With a gazillion @me.com accounts in play, nobody with half a brain is going to think you narcissistic for using one of them.

So is it really a big deal if new users (and at least some existing ones) get @icloud.com addresses as long as @mac.com and @me.com addresses continue to work? No, I didn't think so, either.