I hope that you enjoyed this Christmas’s Mac Riddles, episode 131. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Recent events on the points of the compass keep you up to date.

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News

Recent events (news) on the points of the compass (N, E, W, S) keep you up to date (what the app does).

2: Working in the small hours, changing colours might help you sleep.

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Night Shift

Working in the small hours (what a night shift does), changing colours (it shifts colours to reds rather than blues) might help you sleep (some claim this is the benefit of the macOS feature).

3: I’m in nasty and bananas but not in potty, a warehouse joined to your interconnected systems.

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NAS

I’m in nasty and bananas but not in potty (the letters NAS), a warehouse (storage) joined to your interconnected systems (attached to your network, hence Network Attached Storage).

4: The force of falling fruit was gone from your palm in less than five years.

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Newton

The force (SI unit Newtons) of falling fruit (Isaac Newton’s famous apple) was gone from your palm in less than five years (Apple’s Newton PDAs, also known as palmtops, were available from August 1993 to February 1998).

5: Details of what Vulcan forged to trap the adulterous couple were replaced by an open directory.

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NetInfo

Details (info) of what Vulcan forged to trap the adulterous couple (a net, to trap Venus and Mars when they were caught in bed together, Venus being Vulcan’s wife) were replaced by an open directory (NetInfo was replaced by Open Directory in Mac OS X 10.5).

You may have noticed that all the answers start with the letter N.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.