NVMUG eNews 1/17/2004
Last updated 1/20/2004
Satellite Internet Connection
Midge and Richard Lubot hosted the meeting so members could see a satellite Internet connection in action. Richard described the difference between satellite, DSL, and dial-up. Midge talked with Scott Pelok in Michigan. Stephen Farber demonstrated some of the features of .Mac. Hartley brought in more books for the NVMUG library, and two new members had questions. Read about it below.
2. NVMUG Learns About Satellite Internet Connections
3. .Mac and the Rest of the NVMUG Meeting
5. Mac OS X The Missing Manual, Panther Edition
(See Reviews)
6. Mac OS X Killer Tips
(see Reviews)
7. Mac OS X Unwired
(See Reviews)
8. The Best of the Joy of Text
(See reviews)
1. Been Busy Digitizing
Inspired by our November meeting, I tried duplicating some old 35 mm slides on an inexpensive Epson Projection 1240U scanner. The results were much better than I expected, so I decided to convert 450 old slides to digital, and give my wife a CD with pdf slide shows as well as the original images. I scanned all the slides, then edited them with Photoshop Elements 2. I did not throw any away before editing because I found that some poor exposures could still make photos good enough to preserve the memories.
The project took longer than expected, so she did not get the CD for Xmas, but Dona liked it so much that she went into the attic and found a whole lot more slides. She is organizing them before giving them to me to digitize.
If you have photos you are not using, you might consider digitizing them and finding ways to use the results.
2. NVMUG Learns About Satellite Internet Connections
Midge Lubot demonstrates satellite Internet connections at the Northern Vermont Macintosnh user Group meeting at Martensen Industries office
As reported in the Caledonian-Record, Tuesday January 20, 2004
NVMUG Learns About Satellite Internent Connections
Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group members learned about satellite Internet connections on Saturday.
The members went to Martensen Industries, Inc. near Hardwick to see and hear about Midge and Richard Lubot's satellite Internet connection. Midge Lubot talked with Scott Pelok in Michigan using an experimental Internet video conference program.
Stephen Farber demonstrated some of the features of Apple's .Mac (dot Mac) service using the satellite connection. But first, Richard Lubot compared the satellite connection to a DSL connection and a telephone dial-up connection.
The Lubots have a DSL connection at their home in St. Johnsbury. When you talk over the telephone, your voice is carried in an analog system, that is a continuous modulated wave of electrical current.
When you use a dial-up modem, it translates your computer's digital information into an analog wave so it goes over the telephone line just like a voice message but it sounds awful. A modem on the other end changes it back to digital information the computer understands.
A DSL connection transmits information digitally so it does not have to be converted to analog and back to digital. Richard Lubot said a DSL signal can be sent on the same line and at the same time as a voice analog message without mixing up the two. DSL service is much faster than using a modem, though maybe not quite as fast as a cable connection.
He said the DSL connection costs about $50 a month plus taxes and an installation cost. There was very little increase in Lubot's costs because savings in their regular telephone costs. They were maxing out their telephone usage before they got DSL.
Also, SoverNet offers a discount when you use five of their services. Unfortunately most NVMUG users cannot get DSL because you must live within three miles of a telephone switching station and the company must offer DSL.
DirectWay recently made satellite Internet service available for the Macintosh. It costs about $50 per month plus taxes, and an initial equipment fee of about $600. They installed it for their Martensen Industry's business use.
Uploading through the satellite is not much faster than with a dial up connection, but Stephen Farber measured the download speed as 53k per second, more than ten times faster than using a modem. It is not as fast as DSL or Cable, but it is available most places that do not have DSL or cable. It is also subject to some weather disturbances, and when I arrived, Richard Lubot was cleaning snow off the small satellite dish.
Midge Lubot talked with Scott Pelok in Michigan over the telephone and through the satellite Internet connection. Scott was the former president of NVMUG and a dentist in St. Johnsbury. He is now with the University of Michigan and was trying out its experimental video conferencing program. We could see Scott waving to us, and hear him talk, but he was having some difficulty hearing Midge. It was not working as well with the satellite connection as it had when they tested it with DSL.
Pelok said it was taking about five seconds from the time Midge Lubot said something before he could hear it. The slow satellite connection upload time apparently was causing the problem. The picture of Pelok on Lubot's screen was only about a fourth of the screen size, where with DSL it could be full screen without motions becoming too jerky.
The experiment worked, because we did see and hear Scott, but it did not work well enough to have Scott present a program to the group via satellite. For that we may need to find a cable connection.
Stephen Farber had much better success demonstrating Apple's .Mac services. It worked quite well when he downloaded small free samples of music and some software. However, the slow upload time may make it impractical to use the .Mac iDisk space as a remote backup for large amounts of your information.
3. .Mac and the Rest of the NVMUG Meeting
Here are the rest of my meeting notes translated into something more readable.
Stephen said he has not had much experience with .Mac because he has a modem account. He has not tried iSync. I told him that I have had good experiences with the latest iSync using it with iCal and Address Book and my Palm Zire.
Stephen used this faster satellite connection to look at some of the .Mac features.
He looked at Backup, an Apple program which requires that you have a paid .Mac account, and then can backup to the .Mac iDisk, or to another hard disk or CD. It can do incremental backups and synchronize files.
It is not very feasible to Backup to iDisk with a dial up modem because both uploading and down loading take so long. The advantage to using the iDisk is that the backup is offsite. It might be feasible if you scheduled it to upload the backup when you are sleeping or on vacation, but it would be a lot faster to back up to another hard drive, CDs, or DVDs and put them in a safe place. Backing up to iDisk could be a useful feature with a DSL or cable connection. Since Backup can be used for making local backups, the software is one reason why you might want a .Mac account even if you do not use it to backup to your .Mac account.
You can download other free and demonstration software including a good virus protection program if you have a paid .Mac account. A new PhotoStudio X demonstration program is available, as is Macromedia Contribute which an author can give to other people along with necessary authorization to upgrade all or parts of a Macromedia web page.
It did not take long for Stephen to download PhotoStudio X in both English and Japanese versions. He found a folder with SkyWalker sounds and another with free play music. He downloaded two short Washington Music recordings.
Speaking of sound, Stephen said that every recent Mac can interpret your voice instead of having to use keyboard commands such as open folder
or launch program.
Once your Mac is trained to your voice it works pretty good. Stephen had a headphone that came with Via Voice to reduce problems with background noise.
Another advantage to a .Mac account is that you can upload files and then access them anytime when you are traveling. Richard said that you can now get a roaming capability from SoverNet with 3 or 4 hours for free (if Sovernet is your ISP) and more at a low monthly cost.
Stephen showed a folder containing two photographs that it had taken him about an hour to upload with his modem connection.
If you have high speed, you might explore Audible Books for books and news. If I had high speed downloading, it would probably cost me more money because I would take a look at iTunes Music Store.
Judy Dales, a world renown quilt maker has a web page, and it took almost no time on the satellite connection to look at it. Most Internet browsing involves uploading an URL which is small so takes very little time, and downloading a web page which generally takes much longer so a satellite connection should work well.
Judy asked how to key an accent on the e character. Stephen told her to enter option-e then let up and enter the e.
Another new member, Geralyn Roscoe asked how to enter the degree symbol. Stephen told her the combination is shift-option-8. Geralyn has an iBook using Panther, so I showed her how to get the character palette, and double click on a character such as one half ( I am sure the ? symbol does not work well in normal e-mail or web site use). Then Stephen showed her the KeyCaps keyboard layout that shows the symbols available with different key combinations so you can learn the combinations you need.
Geralyn is taking an course which requires her to use a PC program. So she has Virtual PC so she can run the PC program on her iBook. When asked how it works, she said, Slow.
Judy is using OS 9 on her Macintosh. As a quiltmaker, she works with images a lot. She has images of her quilts produced professionally. Her goal is to be able to produce them herself. She said that quilt making is a 1.2 billion dollar business. She also said that a photographer charged her $450 for images of one quilt, which takes most of the profit.
Richard brought in some digital photos of the images they frame and sell. Midge had taken the pictures. Then Warren printed them after he edited them in Photoshop - cropping, straightening, and adjusting the color when necessary.
Warren takes and prints digital pictures of wildflowers. He said digital photos are sharper for the same quality of lens. He also said that half the art of photography is in the darkroom. In this case it is a digital darkroom which does not have to be dark, just not much brighter than your computer monitor. Warren says the Adobe Photoshop training book for professionals is better than the one he started with because it is organized so that you can study only the sections you are interested in.
A print can never look like a transparency, and a print can never look exactly like the image on a monitor or even a projection of it. . A quilter, who knows Photoshop or Photoshop Elements 2, should have an advantage in producing accurate images because she, or he, can compare the image to the original quilt. .
4. How to Get Books
The NVMUG library has enough books now so that it is difficult for Midge to bring them all inside to the meeting. It will help if you know which books you might be interested in before you come to the meeting to check one out. Or you might want to get on a waiting line for some book that someone else currently has. The best way to find out what books are in the NVMUG library, is to look at the Reviews on this Web site - click the Reviews button.
Most if not all the books in the Reviews section of our web site are in the NVMUG library except AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual. If you use AppleWorks at all you really ought to have this book by David Pogue. You can get it directly from the publisher, O'Reilly or from a bookstore like Amazon.com, and it only costs $19.95.
Speaking of O'Reilly, they now also handle books by No Starch Press, Paraglyph, and Syngress and give the same discount on these books. No Starch Press has a new edition of Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen W. Linzmayer. I have the old 1999 edition and I believe this may be the most fun history of Apple that you will find. This 350 page book is just $19.95. For more information or to order from O'Reilly go to
Peachpit also handles several publishers including New Riders. For more imformation or to order from Peachpit go to
http://www.peachpit.com
In addition to O'Reilly and Peachpit, Wiley publishing provided several of the books in our library. For more information or to order from Wiley go to
http://wiley.com
