NVMUG eNews 5/19/2001
Last updated 6/21/01
No Major Presentation
There was no major presentation, and it was a great meeting. Read about it below. In June Stephen Farber will give a presentation on Mac OS X. There will be no NVMUG meeting in July, and the meeting in August will be on the fourth Saturday. If you would like to volunteer to make a presentation, please let Midge know at
eBusiness Seminar, Mac OS X Demonstration CD, Discussion of Digital Images, iMap, Office 2001 For The Macintosh: The Missing Manual, Bad Finder File, Survey of Members
Sherlock References, Conserving iBook Battery Power, Refurbished Apple Products Warranty, Apple Store Password
AppleWorks Recovery, NVMUG Web Page Use, New Software Is Coming, Congratulations To Berry Hayes, E-mail Virus
1. May Meeting Report
Phyllis attended an eBusiness Seminar. Phyllis was most impressed by a the head of eScout who used to be a banker in the midwest. He said that the banking business was disappearing. The money handled by banks was down 50%. The bank has become a clearing house for a combine of small businesses on the Internet. You need more than a web page. He serves as a broker, connecting small businesses giving them the clout to compete with the big firms. Phyllis said that he opens your mind, and boggles you a lot.
Two of the small businesses at the Seminar were Small Dog, and Gardener's Supply. Small Dog started very small. Today their sales are in millions. Don Mayer, their CEO, says that personal contact is everything. They have 30,000 to 60,000 on their e-mailing list.
Joy Hammond's book, >q class="title">Travels With Wildflowers, has sold over 1,000 copies of the initial 2,000 printing. She is now not only an author, but a money making author.
Mac OS X Demonstration CD
Midge delivered copies of Mac OS X demonstration CDs that Stephen Farber, our contact with Apple, sent. The CDs require a Macintosh computer, Power PC G3 or G4 with 400 MHz or faster; Mac 0S 9.1 or Mac OS X; and a minimum of 64 MB of available RAM. I have a Performa 6400, 180 MHz, not a G3 or G4, and only 48 MB of RAM total, so I expected the CD to cause my computer to bomb. It didn't. I believe there was a lot on the CD that I was not able to access, but ran the demo, at least seeing parts of it, and it did not bomb. If Mac OS X is built with similar care, it must be solid. Stephen will tell us about it next month.
iMap
Hartley circulated two copies of a description of iMap. It is a free program for mapping large amounts of latitude / longitude data. The program comes with ready to use maps, and others may be downloaded or scanned. iMac can calibrate the maps given the correct locations for just two points. It is an elegant program to use with your GIS if you have one.
iMap requires an Apple PowerPC, a minimum of 64 MB RAM (128 Recommended), Mac OS 8 or higher, a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, and an internet connection for downloading additional maps. (It ran within my 48 MB RAM, but I did not test its calibration and plotting.) The work flow is to (1) Get a map, (2) Calibrate your map, (3) Prepare your data files of items to be plotted, (4) plot the data, and (5) export your distributed map. To see a description of iMac, its features, and the work flow, and to download a free copy, go to
http://www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/sys/imap/
In addition to the maps available at this web site, the Get a Map section lists six other URLs.
Coastline Extractor http://rimmer.ngdc.noaa.gov/coast
Black and white coastline maps from the entire world. Choose NOAA/NOS (1:70,000) as coastline database and GMT plot as the coast preview option. When the map shows up in your browser, drag it to your desktop.
NDGC relief images http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/2minrelief.html
Beautiful 2 minute color relief maps of the earth. Perfect for presentations and movies. The maps on this web site are rather large, reduce their size before using with iMap.
GLOBE maps http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globega2.shtml
1 km based elevation maps of the entire globe. Perfect for presentations and movies. The maps on this web site are rather big, reduce their size before using with iMap.
Color landform atlas of the U.S. http://fermi.jhuapl.edu/states
Maps of all the U.S. states. You can choose between shaded relief maps, satellite maps or black and white maps.
African maps http://www.computamaps.com/free1.html
Nice maps of all African countries, perfect for posters and presentations. Click on the JPEG link.
Discussion of Digital Images
Richard said that there is another advantage to images with more pixels. He takes digital photos of pictures that they sell to create a catalog. (Warren helps them edit the pictures after he finishes his machine shop job.) Though Nikon's lenses are good, the digital lens may not be the same quality as a quality Nikon 35 mm lens. There is some curvature near the edge of the digital image. With his newer Nikon with more pixels, he can use just the center of the picture, thus the center of the lens, eliminating the curvature.
Phyllis would like to send pictures of 10 or 12 paintings to maintain contact with customers and friends. She asked if she should buy a digital camera. Richard suggested that, instead, she could take the pictures to his shop, and they would photograph them for her.
Then Phyllis asked if she should buy a Zip Drive so she could get the pictures back on a Zip disk. Richard said, that would not be necessary. He could burn the pictures into a CD. CDs are so cheap that you can burn a CD and give it away, cheaper than smoking a cigarette and better for your health.
If you are having trouble with the Photoshop tutorial, it may be because Photoshop uses layers and modes. The expected will not happen if you try something on the wrong layer, or in the wrong mode.
Save in TIFF, send in JPG. If you want to retain the quality of your pictures, save them in TIFF format. If you want to send them, or put them on the web, put your pictures into JPG format to move them. JPG compresses the image reducing the quality of the image so little that you may not notice it, specially when displayed on your monitor. People recognize differences in brightness more readily than differences in color, so JPG reduces the colors first.
Office 2001 for the Macintosh: The Missing Manual
O'Reilly has announced a new Missing Manual from Pogue Press/O'Reilly. If you use Office 2001 on your Macintosh, you should have this book. I know because David Reynolds, one of the coauthors, wrote AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual
which I recommend for all of us who do not buy into the Microsoft hype. Anyway, you can read Chapter 2, Editing in Word,
for free online at
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/msoffmacmm/chapter/index. html
You can order the book online at
The book is 637 pages and costs $29.95, but include the user group code and you will get a 20% discount.
Bad Finder File
Sydney's computer was working fine, but TechTool Pro had diagnosed a problem with his Finder file. I offered to stop by after the meeting. It was a joy to work on his fast iMac with its new keyboard and mouse. We ran a test that showed his System File and Finder were OK. Then we ran a test of his files and found a diagnosis of a problem with his Finder File. I couldn't remember what to do, so we connected with Apple's Tech Library and searched for Finder.
We found the recommended remedy, toss out the Finder File, restart with the reinstaller CD, and do a simple reinstall. TechTool Pro verified that the problem was fixed.
Survey of Members
We discussed a suggestion by Bill Amos that we survey our members, and keep a file so that we can direct people with questions to people who can help. The members at the meeting thought it was a good idea, and said they would be willing to fill out a survey. During the discussion, several interesting things came up, including that Midge uses Mind Your Own Business, an old accounting program based upon FileMaker. Her accountant says it is better than Quickbook.
Watch for a survey form in your e-mail. I hope you will be able to double click it or whatever and edit in the answers, then send it back as a reply..
We will continue to have program presentations in the future, but it is nice to know that we can have a very interesting two hour meeting with no major presentation. Special thanks to Phyllis for helping to keep this one moving.
2. From eNews Sources
Sherlock Resources,
From Apple eNews
Sherlock's Reference channel contains new searching resources from Bartelby.com, including the American Heritage Dictionary, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Columbia Encyclopedia, Gray's Anatomy, Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Shakespeare, and World Factbook. It also contains Systran. Select Systran and type in a phrase in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese and Systran will translate the phrase into up to six languages, displaying the result in Sherlock.
To use one or more of these new plug-ins, rouse Sherlock, click the Reference channel, make a selection, and search away.
http://www.apple.com/sherlock/
Conserving iBook Battery Power,
From Apple eNews
Did you know that there's an easy way to conserve battery life on your iBook--and work more productively, as well?
You can do so by creating a RAM disk--that is, setting aside a portion of the memory available to your iBook (usually no more than 50%) to be used as a virtual hard drive, a volume that will appear on your desktop as if it were a physical storage device. Since your computer retrieves data from RAM faster than it can from a hard drive, placing commonly used files in a RAM disk can help you get your work done more efficiently.
How does it help you preserve battery life? By retrieving files from a RAM disk, your system can spin the hard drive down more often, saving power. Want to learn how to create a RAM disk?
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n16809
These two items are included to encourage you who have not signed up for Apple eNews letters to do so at:
http://www.apple.com/enews/subscribe/
REFURBISHED APPLE PRODUCTS WARRANTY
Small Dog announced a new warranty on refurbished Apple products. refurbished computers are now warranted by Apple for one year, and you can now get AppleCare to extend the warranty another two years.
Sign up for Small Dog newsletters at
3. From the Editor
Appleworks RECOVERY, April 28, 2001I had copied some web information into an AppleWorks page, then went looking for more information on the same subject to add to it when Internet Explorer, or the web page, or something bombed. Damn, I hadn't saved the AppleWorks information. I did the three finger salute, and when Mac OS 8.6 came up, there was AppleWorks 6 with the page that had not been saved. Isn't it great when little miracles happen!
NVMUG Web Page Use
We do not have a counter on our web page to let us know if anyone is using it. So it is nice when we get a message from the web page. We received an inquiry from a Mac user who saw our web site. I relayed the question to Stephen Farber, and Stephen supplied the answer.
New Software Is Coming
The Macintosh is getting new software from Europe, such at the free iMap. UNIX based software is also being ported to the Macintosh.
I downloaded R - 1.2.3 which is a port of GNU (whatever that is) statistics software. R for Mac OS is now a Carbon application that will run natively under both Mac OS 8.6 or higher and Mac OS X. I can't tell you much about it because it takes a lot more memory to run that I have, but just the idea is fascinating.
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs out of the box on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux). It also compiles and runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000 and Mac OS.R - 1.2.3 is available through
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=10661
I don't understand all that stuff, but it may give us some useful programs running under the Macintosh operating systems.
Congratulations to Berry Hayes
At the NH photographers convention last month Berry took home a court of honor for a digital image. At the Vermont convention two weeks ago he got an award from Kodak for a digital image. He missed the meeting Saturday because on that day he was graduating from Johnson State College.
E-Mail Virus
DEAR E-MAIL RECIPIENT,
You have just received a Swedish virus. Since we are not so technologically advanced in Sweden, this is a MANUAL virus. Please delete all the files on your hard disk yourself and send this mail to everyone you know.
Thank you so much for helping me!
Ole Hacker
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with the software
