NVMUG eNews Meeting Announcement
REMINDER: Stephen Farber presents iView,
Warren Walker on Digital Cameras.
Hartley Jackson shares Mac Secrets
NVMUG Meeting
12 Noon - 2 PM
Saturday, June 17, 2000
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury
From Midge: - We have some late breaking news about the June meeting. Geof has a graduation of his niece in Newport so he will not be able
to set up the ethernet in June. I spoke to Stephen and Warren and both of them can do a short piece. Stephen on iView which
categorizes things (pictures) and makes thumbnails and generally
helps to organize and Warren said he could do a short piece on
digital cameras.
I was wondering if you could bring the Top 10 items
from David Pogue's book. I really found that helpful. When I
increased memory on my programs my computer didn't crash as often.
I was thinking about the other things we can have meetings about
1. Appleworks 6
2. Digital photography
3. Working on a web site
4. Quicken
5. Setting up the ethernet
Any other suggestions? Photoshop would be fun if any of us know enough about it. Warren and Stephen both know something about it and I guess I'm going to be learning too so maybe I'll be able to add
something to it.
Talk to you later.
In this NVMUG eNews
1. When and How to Do a Clean Install
2. Screen snapshots of menus
3. PowerLogix iMac upgrade
4. The Hidden Cost Of Font Smoothing
5. MP3 Music on the Mac
6. Recycling electrons
1. When and How to Do a Clean Install
In the last eNews I included a copy of Don Mayer’s Kibbles and Bytes article on Mac Startup Issues. In the latest Kibbles and Bytes, Don Mayer has another great article on When and How to Do a Clean Install, but I am not including a copy .
A great resource for technical information on the Mac is Apple's Technical Information Library. Nine times out of ten, the problem that you are having with your Mac is the subject of an article at the TIL. Often when I troubleshoot a customer's problem that is new to me, I will surf over to the library with the customer on the phone and, using Apple's search engine, find an article by Apple engineers that addresses that issue. It's always the first place I look for troubleshooting help.
I ran across a new revision of an article at the TIL that I thought you might find interesting. It discusses when and how to do a "clean" install of your Mac OS. Doing a clean install is frequently the advice that is given for any number of reported problems. Having done a few "clean" installs myself, I understand that it is not a trivial matter, especially if you are using a number of different software packages.
When I do a clean install, I usually go back to my distribution CDs for my important software and reinstall them from CD rather than dragging over extensions and preference files. Many, many times the failure of a particular software program can be traced to a corrupted preference file, and it certainly doesn't do any good to go to the trouble of doing a clean install only to drag over that corrupted preference file!
I didn’t want to copy his article because many of you already get Kibbles and Bytes, so I looked at the TIL and found the article at http://til.info.apple.com/
TITLE Mac OS: When and Why to Perform a Clean Installation
Article ID 30691 Created 2/22/00 Modified 6/9/00
Apple is updating a number of older articles. This is one of them. The results present extremely useful information though not all of it is immediately clear on first reading. I also recommend Article ID 14343, Troubleshooting Macintosh INIT Conflicts.
If you have any trouble finding and downloading these articles, let me know and I will e-mail you a copy.
2. Screen snapshots of menus
I will bring two examples of tutorials from http://www.macinstruct.com/tutorial/
to the meeting Saturday, June 17. One is on How to Troubleshoot Crashes and Freezes by the 17 year old founder and webmaster of Macinstruct. The other is on Sharing Our New Found Knowledge! using screen snapshots by an Architect who is writing a series “The University of HyperCard” a Dynamic Tutorial. Seeing the two may help you decide whether to check out the website.
Related to that , I found this tip on taking screen snapshots showing the drop down menus. At least as far back as Mac OS 8.6, if you click and immediately release the mouse button on a menu name in the menu bar, the menu stays dropped down. At this point, you can use Command-Shift 3 or Command-Shift-4 to take a snapshot of the screen with the menu displayed. (This may not work if you have FinderPop, but temporarily turning off FinderPop (no reboot needed) allows menu capture to work.)
3. PowerLogix iMac upgrade
“Despite Apple's best efforts to keep third-party vendors from manufacturing upgrades for its popular consumer machine,” Newer Technology and PowerLogix announced upgrades for first-generation (233-333 MHz) iMacs. They are supposed to boost speeds to between 400 and 500 MHz using different technologies to get there according to news reported at http://www.macnn.com.
Wasn’t it just yesterday that a 233-333 iMac seemed wicked fast?
4. The Hidden Cost Of Font Smoothing
The Mac Speed Zone was running benchmarks on Apple's new G4's when they noticed an oddity. One of the machines had abnormally low MacBench graphics scores. They double checked to make sure the machine was set up properly and ran the tests again. Same low score.... They eventually isolated Apple's "font smoothing" as the culprit. Font smoothing is an option accessed through the "Appearance" control panel, which anti-aliases on-screen fonts to give them a softer look. Of course, this adds to the workload of the graphics system. They decided to find out exactly what kind of hit the various font smoothing settings cause. Font smoothing affects all on screen fonts at or above the point size you specify in the Appearance control panel. If you set a low point value more text will be affected and, conversely, higher point values will affect less text.
All of our tests were conducted on a G3/266 PowerBook with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, millions of colors. For MacBench, we tested at 12, 14, 18 and 24 points. For our AppleWorks and Photoshop tests we covered only the low and high end of this spectrum. All scores are relative to the "font smoothing off" setting which was assigned a speed value of 100.
According to MacSpeedZone, font smoothing at 12 points or higher reduced speed to 90%.
At 14-18 points or higher, speed is only reduced to 99%.
At 24 points or higher, font smoothing speed was at the full 100%.
For fastest speed, in Control Panels | Appearance | Fonts either uncheck “Font Smoothing,” or set the size to “greater than 24.” I also unchecked font smoothing in AppleWorks 6 Edit | Preferences | General | Text just to be safe.
5. MP3 Music on the Mac
Small Dog and several other sources reported a new MP3 encoding and playback program on the Mac released by MusicMatch Inc. The beta of Jukebox 1.0 is free MP3. You can download the beta at:
Jukebox 1.0 lets users record, organize, find, and play music cuts. Users
can copy audio tracks from compact disks, cassettes, and vinyl albums and
even transfer cuts to portable USB MP3 players in either MP3 or AIFF formats
at constant and variable bit rates of up to 320kbps.
Jukebox 1.0 offers a music library that lets users organize their music by
artist, album, song title, genre, mood, and preference. With the Auto DJ
feature, users can create custom playlists by selecting music that matches
the categories they choose.
I may try again, but it takes so long to download anything on my 28.8 modem that I have pretty much given up on that source of music for now.
6. Recycling electrons
Northern Woodlands is an excellent quarterly magazine for almost anyone interested in nature in Vermont and New England. I couldn’t do justice to the Summer 2000 editorial without repeating it, and it doesn’t belong here. But, among other things, it is about the problems of over consumption. That brought to mind the importance of using recycled electrons. There are limits to the amount of physical consumption the earth can support. But, there are practically no limits to the amount of knowledge, learning, creative thought, art, humor, and so forth that the earth can support as long as they are done in recycled electrons. Very little energy is required for me to enjoy putting this eNews together for you with today’s energy efficient computers, and very little is required for you to read it. It is possible that using recycled electrons is as environmentally friendly as going for a walk in the woods. Isn’t that a nice thought to end on?
