NVMUG eNews 2/15/2003
Last updated 3/17/2003
Stephen Farber Answers Questions About Jaguar
Stephen Farber answered questions about Jaguar. Stephen was kept busy responding to the questions of the members present, and will give more of his planned presentation at our next meeting. The report of the meeting written for the Caledonian Record is included.
1. The Report of the Meeting in the Caledonian
Stephen Farber, left, discusses Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar questions as, from left, Richard Smith, Neil Raphel, and Warren Walker pay close attention.
Questions, Answers for Mac Users
Midge Lubot opened the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group meeting in St. Johnsbury Saturday with the usual question, "Before Stephen Farber begins his presentation, are there any questions?" This meeting went into overtime discussing questions, answers, how to avoid problems, and the first things to do if you have problems. Next month's NVMUG meeting will feature Stephen Farber who will make his planned presentation about the new features in the Jaguar Mac operating system.
When people come to Stephen, it is because they have some problem with their Mac and want his help. Many of problems have been related to drivers, the software required to connect external devices. Jaguar keeps changing and that has made it difficult for input and outpput device manufacturers to keep their software up. It is important to have the latest version of Mac OS X of the device driver software.
Gordon Alexander of Richmond, Quebec, said his iPhoto worked and loaded pictures fine when he started up, but when he did anything else and tried to come back to iPhoto it froze his machine. He had to turn it off and back on again. Gordon had an attached photo card reader. Another member reported that a similar problem with an attached USB floppy disk reader was solved by simply disconnecting the floppy disk when the floppy was not in use. This may be the solution for Gordon's problem.
Another member could not make long downloads because his Macintosh dropped his Internet connection. Stephen showed him how he could change to a slower V34 modem connection in the Network Preferences if that might be the problem. There is also an option in the Network Preferences to have the Macintosh remind you that you are connected to the Internet and ask if you want to continue the connection. This is OK for those times when you might forget you are connected and run up a larger telephone bill. However, it must be turned off if you will be making a long unattended download.
One of the biggest differences between Mac OS X and earlier operating systems is that it is designed for multiple users. Every user can set it up the way they want without affecting other users. Now Microsoft XP does the same thing. When you log in, you do not see the other user's desktop. One result is that, depending upon how your machine is set up, you may have to deal with permissions. If you are the only user, you can generally ignore this, but, if your Macintosh questions your authority to take an action, click on the padlock icon to unlock it, and enter your password.
A Disk Utility program is provided with Jaguar to repair permissions. It is a good idea to learn how to use this disk utility to run Disk Repair occasionally. If it says that repairs have been made, run it again until it says no errors are found.
Macintosh computers running Mac OS X Jaguar are intented to be left on, and run maintenance programs at night daily, weekly, and monthly. Most of us turn our machines off, or at least put them in sleep mode, so these maintenance programs do not run. For us, it is a good idea to get one of the shareware or free programs like MacJanitor to run these Macintosh maintenance routines when we want them to run.
Stephen closed by saying, "Everything works great. Just get the latest versions. Then worry about fix its if you ever need them."
NVMUG meets at 10 a.m. on the third Saturday at the Old Mill Club in St. Johnsbury. For more information and to confirm the meeting schedule, check http://www.sover.net/~nvmug
2. What Really Happened
What really happened was much less organized and a bit more technical than reported in the newspaper. Stephen came prepared with an outline of things to see, and many pages of notes, but he did not get much chance to refer to either.
Midge Lubot introduced Gordon Alexander to the other members present, Richard Lubot, Stephen Farber, Neil Raphel, Warren Walker, Richard Smith, Ron Lay-Sleeper, Ruth Hay, and Hartley Jim Jackson. Phyllis Joy Harmon was at a show in Providence, R.I.
Gordon has to reinstall his operating system because his computer lost the ability to drag and drop. He said that reinstalling the system was not to bad. It works fine now, but he would still like to know what caused the software to stop dragging and dropping.
Stephen said to uncheck Use a network time server
under Preferences -> Date & Time -> Network Time to stop your computer from dialing the Internet on its own. Of course then you may want to occasionally check it long enough to go on-line to automatically adjust to the correct time again.
There is no reason to click to prevent changes
when you are the only user and you are the administrator. The design philosophy of Mac OS X is that you are one of many users. (This may go back to the Unix college background when many users were connected to one machine, or a network of machines, through terminals. You now have more power than a whole college campus in your home or office.)
Make sure you set the time zone correctly, as well as the time. The system logs the time all of the time in PRAM. As of December last year the set of information stored in open firmware includes the time zone.
Classic is not really 9.2, it is something like 9.1.3, and handles image formats differently based upon pdf. Ted was not able to import JPEGs into iMovie under OS X 10.2, but he could before. Stephen demonstrated loading a JPEG into iMovie, and advised Ted to make sure he had the latest OS X upgrade as well as the latest iMovie software.
Final Cut Express is a $300 version of Final Cut Pro with most of features that a nonprofessional movie maker might want.
Ted said a five minute movie probably requires one gig of disk space and might include 15 minutes of raw movie. You could export it into DVD, QuickTime, or TV and tape recording.
Stephen said the English Mac User UK reported that 40% of them are using OS X. Quark is holding up a lot of people's move to OS X because it is used in the printing industry and it may not be available in an OS X version for several more months.
Neil asked What is the most compelling reason to move to Mac OS X?
Stephen said it was probably because it integrates well with the iLife programs, iPhoto 2, iMovie 2, iTunes 3, and iDVD.
Another advantage is that the key combination, Apple -> Option -> esc, brings up the force quit menu so you can quit any application while leaving all the other programs unchanged. Before force quitting one program shut down all the programs which often resulted in losing items you were working on. (Stephen called it the Command key or the Apple key, and and I had always called it the Open-Apple key. I think I will start calling it the Apple key because the Apple logo is on it, and it is the shortest. Any comments?)
Stephen said that possibly the most significant difference in Jaguar is a new Quartz Extreme video screen if you have 32 bytes of video ram. It enhances the video, and takes some of the video processing off of the cpu and puts it on a separate chip. It makes the image crisper, the screen updating snappier, and everything runs faster if you have enough video RAM.
You can tell if you have enough video ram by looking under the Apple menu -> About This Mac and clicking the button More Info. This brings up the Apple System Profiler which tells you a lot about your computer and the applications installed. Click on the triangles to see the details. If it does not tell you that you have the video ram, possibly called build in ATA, you probably do not have it. Mine is an earlier iBook and does not have it. (There was an Apple System Profiler before Jaguar but it was not found under About This Apple.)
Stephen said that Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar has an auto disk check when starting up which 10.1 did not have, and which may add to the stability of OS 10.2. (Jaguar is much faster than 10.1 was, which may have something to do with being able to include the auto disk check on start up)
Either Stephen or Warren said that not all paper - ink combinations are the same. You can stick to the paper and inks by your printer manufacturer, or experiment with different combinations to see what works best for you. I said that Kodak Premium Picture Paper uses less ink and provides good pictures when my HP printer is normal
mode. In thebest
mode the ink is put on thicker. It probably looks more like a photograph but easily runs if it gets wet.
The iLife package requires 2 gig of available hard disk memory to install.
Stephen said you should find System Preferences, it is like the dashboard on your car. It is under the Apple menu. Explore it.
You should also begin to learn the keyboard commands, such as Command (Apple)- F for the local Find.
Help is sometime frustrating because it goes to the Internet for much of it. Stephen says the reason is because so much is changing more often. He recommends that when you connect to help, you stay connected awhile and give it time to download. Ron Lay-Sleeper said, Nothing makes you appreciate Mac help more than using Microsoft Help.
Stephen said that your first line of defense is the Apple Support Knowledge Base. There you can find the list of keyboard shortcuts. With almost any kind of problem the Support Knowledge Base usually gives some kind of help. Just go to http://www.apple.com. If you start there, within a half an hour you can get where you want to go. Register your Macintosh, then Apple lets you get information and participate in the discussion.
Stephen said that, from a Tech Support view, after you have your work backed up, reinstalling your system software, and your applications will repair most problems. You can try throwing away the preferences for the specific applications that are having problems.
Ted said the backing up his iMovies requires 80 gigs.
Stephen told him that an Apple Support person told a women to reinstall her system without telling her to back up her stuff first, and it blew away all of her stuff. You can buy a new computer, you can buy new software, but you cannot buy the stuff that you have created.
Stephen recommends that you leave the extras that Apple installs where Apple puts them. If an application is installed in your Applications folder, leave it there. You can make an alias if you want to put that somewhere else. Moving a program from the system applications folder, even to your users applications folder, may cause problems. When dealing with system Mac OS X, and playing around with things under the hood, you can get into trouble.
Stephen demonstrated copying and pasting to change an icon on a file, and to add an icon to a folder. He used the keyboard combinatio-> i to open the File -> Get Info panel. I tried to recreate what he did from my notes which were not complete enough. I opened Get Info for a .pdf document, clicked on the icon at the top to highlight it, and copied it. I created a new folder as he had using Apple-shift-n, and opened its Get Info. Then I highlighted the blank folder icon in the Get Info panel and pasted the .pdf icon. Sure enough, the folder now looked like a .pdf document. To double check I used the same method to put make another new folder look like a hard drive. I think I will ask him where it was that he got his icons. The experiments I messed with could make things very confusing fast!
Stephen said, I haven't found many things wrong with the book, Mac OS X, Second Edition. There is some support in the O'Reilly site for their books.
Under 10.1 you needed a separate utility to repair permissions. Under 10.2 it is in Disk Utilities within Utilities. Permissions change what can be done with a file. If you lose permission, you cannot use it. If you are going to run system X, you have to know how to use the Disk Utility -> Information tab -> First Aid tab to repair permissions. Run it. Do it with the start up disk if you have any trouble starting up or starting up a program. It will fix a lot of trouble with specific info and files, Repair disk, verify disk, looks at your hard drive directly. If it says it repaired errors,
run it again until it says, no errors found.
Unix runs a myriad of small files, creating much greater fragmentation than older systems even with a clean install. Disk optimizers are now available including the latest Drive 10. However, you may want to wait. Micromat is coming out with a new TechTool 4 which will be a more complete repair utility which will include optimizing disks. There is a limited edition of TechTool in the Tech Tool Box. What Apple gives you should be good enough for day to day use.
Stephen provided information for three utilities that will run the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks which run at night under Jaguar if the machine is left on. Stephen likes MacJanitor, a one purpose utility that just runs these programs. Another, Macaroni, watches to see if these programs are run on schedule, and if they are not it runs them the next time you turn your Macintosh on.
We agreed to continue to meet at 10 a.m. on the third Saturday at the Old Mill Club in St. Johnsbury. This may require some dues starting next year to pay for the meeting room.
A bit more technical, a bit less organized, and a lot more information than suitable for the general news. I hope you find some of this useful.
