March 2004

In This Issue
LaCie USB
G4 iBook Review
How to Copy CDs
on a G4 iBook
March 2004
Small Print
Executive Contact List
What you are looking at is the latest edition of the Double Click
monthly newsletter from the Macintosh Users East, (MaUsE), a
motley collection of old and new Mac users who reside in Southern
Ontario with a motley collection of old and new Macintosh computers. What more do you need to know ? Oh, yes. This Newsletter
is created by Michael Shaw, Double Click Editor, on an antique
Macintosh clone, an ancient 1997 Daystar Genesis MP 800+
running Jaguar (OSX v10.2.8), Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS 9.2.
Please feel free to contact any of the following individuals
if you have comments or questions relating to Macintosh
Users East or Macintosh computing in general.
Position/Name
Phone#
President
Jim Foster
Hm: (905) 433-0777 Courtice
Email: [email protected]
Apple Liaison
Bruce Cameron
Hm: (905) 983-9205 Orono
Email: [email protected]
Treasurer
John Kettle
Hm: 905-404-0405 Oshawa
Email : [email protected]
VP Programs
Len Clement
Web Admin
Sean Murphy
Presidential Assistant
Gary Moore
Logistics
C. Greaves & M. McCarthy
Programs Assistant
???
Secretary
Helen Alves
Submissions from MausE Club members, ‘though rarer than living,
breathing mastodons, are always welcome. Send them to:
[email protected]. I have never refused a submission
yet. There's always room for another piece on ANY Mac-related
topic and I’ll make room if there isn’t. I would like your submissions. But I won’t beg.
Apple, Macintosh, and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple
Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The
MaUsE (Macintosh Users East) is an independent user group and
has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by
Apple Computer, Inc.
The next meeting will be held at Faith
United Church on Nash Road in
Courtice Ontario, at
7:30 P.M., March 24th,
2004
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
eMail: [email protected]
208 Winona Avenue, Oshawa,
Ontario, L1G 3H5 Canada
MaUsE Message Line: 905-433-0777
Double Click
Double Click on the web at:
www.mause.ca
Double Click Editor
Michael Shaw
Hm: (905) 576-2097 Oshawa
Email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
2
February Meeting
The February meeting marked a sad occasion for
the MaUsE club: our new assistant Programs
Manager, John Babister, was called out to a new
career and place of employment with a shift
schedule that conflicts with the timing of our own
MaUsE meetings and so will no longer be able to
participate in helping to run the very important
MaUsE program planning activities for 2004. Our
loss is General Motors' gain and perhaps John
will be able to rejoin us later in the year when his
shifts might permit it.
upcoming months. Anyone interested in helping
out with this activity, quite probably one of the
most important, interesting and challenging positions on the MaUsE Executive, would be welcomed by the rest of the Exec with all of warmth
of which we are capable.
The February 24th meeting was well attended.
Our speakers were our own Jim Foster and
Lennie Clement. As you can see from the pictures
on Pages 3 and 4, a good time was had by all.
Meeting reminder notices went out to all club
members via emails and on post cards via
Canada Post. The post card invitations were well
received and will be continued until further notice.
In the meanwhile, and perhaps as a permanent
addition to the MaUsE Executive, the club desperately needs to replace John as soon as possible in order to help Len Clement maintain the
scheduling of more excellent programs in the
3
As President of the MaUsE club Jim Foster spoke
about club business and gave the Treasurers
Report. John Kettle was absent due to an illness.
Jim spoke of Membership Renewals, due next
month at the March meeting and of the Meeting
Programs update. New stuff from Apple, like the
Pepsi / iTunes campaign and iChat and iSight
updates from Apple were mentioned.
Lennie showed us more of the features of
Adobe's Photoshop Elements, a very economical
program with many of the features of Adobe
Photoshop without the high cost. Using a photo of
a baby with severe "red-eye" Lennie showed us
several methods of fixing this common problem.
Using some images scanned from old faded
scenery photos brought in by Helen Alves Lennie
showed how old discoloured pictures could be
coloured and revitalized to look more like they did
when new. Lennie also touched on the use of layers and masking and described how they are
used in Photoshop programs to separate and
enhance aspects of features. We hope to have
Len back again soon with another presentation.
Jim showed us another KeyNote presentation
and spoke at length of the benefits he has
accrued from his .Mac account. He showed us
how easily he could take photos shot right there
at the February MaUsE meeting and dump them
from the digital camera into his iBook and from
there onto an
internet website
using the software
features
available through
.Mac. He spoke
about .Mac Mail,
i D i s k ,
Homepage,
iCards,
iSync,
Address Book,
and the anti-virus
program
Virex
that are all part of
the .Mac.
4
The March MaUsE
Executive Meeting
The March MaUsE Executive Meeting took place
on March 3rd and at the usual place (the Oshawa
home of the Editor in Chief of this most excellent
publication). The meeting was attended by Jim
Foster, Bruce Cameron, Len Clement, and
Michael Shaw. Minutes were read, reports were
given, and photos were taken. Plans for scheduling future MaUsE Meeting agendas were floored
and discussed.
OrangeLink+ For Sale
One of our MaUsErs has indicated a desire to sell an
unused OrangeLink+ PCI
interface card suitable for use
in any PCI-based Macintosh
that requires an upgrade. If I hadn't already
bought one for scads of money about ten months
ago I'd be grabbing it. This card, from
OrangeMicro, plugs into the PCI bus of any Mac
with an available slot and provides THREE external USB 2.0 ports and and TWO external
FireWire 400 ports as well as internal ports. Price
is set at $50.00 Canadian. If you have questions
about the card or wish to buy it contact Henry:
March General
Meeting Plan
There will be several presenters at the March
24th MaUsE Meeting. At least two and possibly as
many as three. The theme for this month's meeting will be e-commerce and we will be looking at
some of the things that all of us have heard about
and a few of us have gotten involved in. Be prepared to ask questions if you have any curiosity
about buying and selling merchandise over the
internet as a hobby. Jim Foster and I will be giving an introduction to eBay auctions and discussing how the combination of eBay and PayPal
a have changed our shopping habits and those of
tens of thousands of other online spenders. For
those who want to know more there will be a
question and answer period. We may not be able
to answer all of your questions ut between Jim's
experiences as an eBay buyer and my experiences as a eBay seller we should be able to cover
just about anything you may want to know.
[email protected]
905-983-5097
5
From
The Treasurer
Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
Michael
My friend Katja sends me this
message, which I'm sure you
will enjoy, as perhaps some
readers of Double Click would
too:
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
In Japan, they have replaced
the impersonal and unhelpful
Microsoft error messages with
Haiku poetry messages. Haiku
has strict construction rules.
Each poem has only 17 syllables; 5 syllables in the first line,
7 in the second, and 5 in the
third. They are used to communicate timeless
messages, often achieving a wistful, yearning and
powerful insight through extreme brevity. Instead
of making you want to throw your computer out
the window, they have a calming effect.
You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.
Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. All is blank.
For example:
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located,
but Countless more exist.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
As a general rule I shun the humour
found on the internet, but I’ll make an
exception for email from John Kettle,
Treasurer of the MaUsE Club, who graciously sent me the message on this page.
Lately he has been the only MaUsE
member who has sent the Double Click a
contribution of any sort on any topic and I
don’t want to discourage him.
There are lots of recyclable electrons available if anyone else in the Club
wants to send something my way. This is
YOUR newsletter. Feel free to contribute.
Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
Your file was so big.
It must have been quite useful.
But now it is gone.
6
IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM: JOHN KETTLE
Many members of Macintosh Users East are doing interesting things with their
computers, as I find out with every club meeting and personal encounter.
But despite Michael Shaw's monthly appeals, over many years, for articles for
Double Click, not much of this stuff has shown up on its pages. Jim Foster
writes some great reports on stuff he's looking into (so that's one member), and
I wrote a single piece about making a big spreadsheet (so that's two). There
must be others.
Here's a suggestion. I've been a reporter for many years and would be glad to
write up anything you are doing. The experience would be pretty painless. We
talk on the phone, or we meet at a coffee shop or in your den. You show me
and/or tell me what you are doing that's of interest. I write it up. You check
it over, then send it to Michael.
There are all sorts of possible variations on this. You start writing something,
get in a jam, and phone me for a bit of technical help (writing does have
technical problems). You think of something but want to check whether it's worth
the effort of writing it up (phone or email Michael or me). You want to know
whether anyone else in the club is doing anything like you're working on, so you
just want to put in a brief description and query. I could give you back-up on
anything like these.
If you're interested, my email address is [email protected], my phone number
905-404-0405. I'll answer any queries.
Meets on the 2nd Thursday of each month
at Faith United Church
1778 Nash Road, Courtice
www.durhampc-usersclub.on.ca
7
Apple. So I went
onto the Apple
Store site and found
a clearance section
where
Apple
Computers
puts
stuff on sale. there
were some brand new old stock and
some refurbished units, all with Apple’s
full one-year warranty. I found a pair of
nearly new white 900 MHz G3 iBooks
that looked very appealing. One was
$849.00 US refurbished by Apple and the
other was $899.00 US as new old stock.
Compared
to
the
four-year-old
PowerBook I’d missed these nearly new
units looked great. I must have been out
of my mind to even consider a four-year old outof-warranty 900 MHz G3 laptop Mac for $800 US
when I could have a brand new fully warranted
900 MHz G3 iBook laptop for only a hundred dollars more. With Apple’s offer of free shipping it
looked even more attractive.
1 GHz
G4 iBook
Review
First impressions: you never get a second chance
to make a first impression. I suspect that this new
iBook will never look quite as white as it did when
I first received it. And it did look white. Snow
white. After using it to produce this issue of the
Double Click I have grown accustomed to the
whiteness and its starting to look like a normal
colour for a computer.
Of course when I tried to order one of them I
found that “limited offers” clause for the Specials
on the Apple.com site meant that they were available there for Americans only. I went to the Apple
Canada site expecting and hoping to
see the same Specials listed on it but
Apple Canada doesn’t have any specials. You know that hurt.
I bought this ‘Book last month directly from Apple.
I ordered it over the internet from the Apple Store
at www.apple.ca. (I honestly
would not have bought it if I
could have accessed the
Apple Store at www.apple.com
but that Apple Store is exclusively for the American Apple
users. No foreigners allowed.
Charles Manson or George W.
Bush could take advantage of
the Specials at the American
Apple Store but I was just out
of luck).
What I did see at the Apple Store were
new 1 GHz G4 iBooks. After checking
out the specs of the three iBook models available and checking out my
True Feelings I decided that the
iBook that would be right for me would
be the 14-inch model with the combo
drive, 60-gig HD, and 640 MB or RAM.
The iBook is considered to be a “consumer” model, to distinguish it from
the professional and far more expensive PowerBooks. The distinction possibly was
more obvious when PowerBooks all had G4
processors and the iBooks all had G3 processors
but now that G4 iBooks can be had with 1 GHz
chips in them I fail to see that the extra expense
is warranted.
After my eBay misadventures
last month (I told you in last
month’s Double Click about
narrowly missing a 900 MHz
Pismo laptop computer for
$799.00 US.) Irma suggested
that I stop playing around with
other peoples’ cast-off Macs
and buy one directly from
8
The iBooks are white plastic, have the combo
drive, 256 k cache, and max out at 640 MB of
RAM (N.B. Thats 128 MB soldered on the board
and one slot that will accept a single 512 MB chip,
as per info from Apple, but several RAM sellers
on the internet have 1,024 MB memory chips for
sale that they claim will work perfectly in G4
iBooks to increase their limit to 1148 MB of RAM).
They can read and play DVDs and read and burn
CDs also. Nothing is removable and other than
putting in more RAM or an Airport Extreme card
there isn’t anything the owner can do to an iBook.
Thats what makes them a consumer machine.
Just one thing, though. Wash your hands.
Nothing looks worse than a grubby computer and
white sure shows the dirt.
I ordered it from the Apple Store just before I went
to work on Wednesday evening, February 11th.
After I ordered it I checked my order right away on
the Apple Store site and was told that an order
must be held in their system for 90 minutes before
it is considered actual and binding. You have that
long to change your mind. The information I got
the next day in an email from Apple when they
confirmed the purchase was that the iBook would
likely ship from Apple on Feb.13th and arrive
before lunch on Feb. 16th.
The PowerBooks are brushed metal, have the
super drive , 512 k cache, and can be more easily upgraded. They can utilise more RAM than the
iBooks. They can play DVDs like the iBook, and
play and burn CDs. They can also burn DVDs. If
burning DVDs is in your future then you really
need to spend the extra coin for the PowerBook.
Then I went to the FedEx site using the link supplied in the Apple confirmation email. FedEx is
amazing when they get it right. By checking
FedEx tracking I was able to follow the iBook and
see an update every time it got scanned as it
moved with almost indecent haste from Taiwan to
Anchorage, Alaska to the central FedEx depot in
Memphis, Tennessee to Winnipeg to Mississauga
to Scarborough early on Friday morning and then
on to Oshawa. It showed up at my house in
Oshawa at lunchtime on Friday, February 13th,
just when Apple suggested it would be shipped,
and a full three days sooner than expected.
Of course the G4 iBook DOES have a FireWire
and two high-speed USB 2.0 ports, a 10/100
Ethernet port and can be equipped with Airport
Extreme and BlueTooth so unless you intend to
burn DVDs the G4 iBook should be adequate to
all your computing needs. If you are a normal
consumer-type Mac user like me and not a
“power user” the iBook is ideal.
9
Well. Let me tell you. It is bigger than I thought it
would be. And heavier. The outside is white but
the entire inside where the screen, keyboard and
trackpad are is a off-white bordering on pale grey.
The hard drive is dead silent and I have never
heard the fan run. The CD-ROM drive / DVD player makes four or five disturbing clunks when a CD
it sucked in or ejected but hopefully thats normal.
The keyboard took a few minutes to get used to
but you don’t look at the keyboard as much as
you look at the screen. The screen is lovely.
Bright with rich colours.
The only issue I have had with it was a tiny cosmetic problem with the way the keyboard was
installed. I noticed right away that the keyboard
rattled a bit and was not perfectly aligned: there
was a bit of a hump in the middle of it near the
track pad and the space bar was noticeably
raised. Also the gap at the bottom of the keyboard
was wider than the gap along the F keys. I looked
in the manual that came with the iBook and it
showed an illustration of the keyboard
with three tabs along the bottom edge that
had to be tucked in. The centre tab on my
iBook was slightly out of location. I slid
down the catches at the top edge of the
keyboard, lifted the top edge of the keyboard a quarter of an inch or so and slid
the keyboard back into place properly with
all three tabs correctly positioned. Now
the keyboard is much quieter, is positioned exactly in the centre of the iBook
with proper gaps all around and is a lot
flatter.
ble to my old Daystar Genesis computer but it
weighs about one tenth as much (4.9 pounds versus 50 pounds). The Daystar has a slower bus
speed, 50 MHz versus the iBook’s 133 MHz, but
they are pretty evenly matched in other respects.
The Daystar has an 800 MHz G4 processor with
1 MB cache and the iBook has a 1,000 MHz G4
processor with 256k cache. They both have 32
MB video RAM and OSX installed (10.2.8 in the
Daystar and 10.3 in the iBook) but the iBook only
has 640 MB of RAM compared to the whopping
1,500 MB of RAM in the old Genesis.
What this iBook has that the Daystar doesn’t is
modernity and portability. And of course, no matter how you look at it, its a whole lot cheaper. The
quad 604e Daystar Genesis MP 800+ retailed for
about $.20,000.00 Canadian in 1997 with no
RAM, no display and no hard drive while the G4
iBook retails for $2,200.00 Canadian now with
640 MB of RAM, a 14-inch display and a 60 Gig
hard drive.
The G4 iBook came with instruction
books, power supply / battery charger with
cord extender, telephone cable, and a
connector that enables connection to an
external SVGA monitor.
These days all of the new Mac models are bargains. You just have to figure out which bargain
suits you best. The iBook seems to suit me just
fine. The features that will make it most useful to
me are its ability to run DVD movies and its ability to accept the latest Mac operating systems
Panther and beyond. The Daystar has reached its
limits but the G4 iBook is just getting started.
I feel perfectly comfortable using this
iBook after doing all of my computing on
the upgraded Daystar and it feels very
familiar. Performance is actually compara-
10
1 GHz G4 iBook Specs
Audio
•16-bit CD-quality stereo headphone jack for
headphones or external speaker system
•Built-in stereo speakers
•Built-in microphone
•Support for external USB audio devices such as
microphones and speakers
Processor and memory
•1GHz PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity
Engine and 256K on-chip level 2 cache running
at full processor speed
•133 MHZ system bus
•256MB of PC2100 (266MHz) DDR SDRAM
(128MB built-in and 128MB in SO-DIMM slot)
with support for up to 640MB
Video
•VGA video output for video mirroring on an
external display or projector (24-bit color) with
included Apple VGA Display Adapter.
•S-video and composite video output to TV or
projector (requires Apple Video Adapter, sold
separately)
Storage
•60GB Ultra ATA hard disk drive
•Combo drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW); writes CD-R
discs at up to 24x speed, writes CD-RW discs at
up to 10x speed, reads DVD-ROM discs at up to
8x speed, reads CD-ROMs at up to 24x speed
•Support for external FireWire and USB storage
devices
Battery
•iBook G4 with 14.1-inch display: 61-watt-hour
lithium-ion battery provides up to 6 hours of battery life on a single charge
•Integrated charge indicator LEDs on battery
Display
•14.1-inch (diagonal) TFT XGA active-matrix display
•Support for millions of colors at 1024-by-768pixel resolution
•Support for resolution scaling to 800-by-600pixel and 640-by-480-pixel resolution with millions of colors
Keyboard and trackpad
•Built-in full-size keyboard with 77 (U.S.) or 78
(ISO) keys, including 12 function keys, 4 arrow
keys (inverted “T” arrangement) and embedded
numeric keypad
•Solid-state trackpad for precise cursor control;
supports tap, double-tap and drag capabilities
Graphics support
Size and weight: iBook G4 with 14.1inch display
•ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics processor
with 32MB of dedicated video memory and AGP
4X support
•Height: 1.35 inches (3.42 cm)
•Width: 12.7 inches (32.3 cm)
•Depth: 10.2 inches (25.9 cm)
•Weight: 5.9 pounds (2.7 kg) (1)
Communications
•Built-in 56K V.92 modem (RJ-11 connector) (6)
Built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)
•Built-in antennas and expansion slot for optional
54-Mbps AirPort Extreme Card; (based on
802.11g standard; Wi-Fi
Certified for 802.11g and
802.11b interoperability (3)
Peripheral connections
•Two 480 Mbps USB 2.0 ports
•One FireWire 400 port at up
to 400 Mbps (7)
11
It also comes with an elaborate software bundle,
which includes Mac OS X Panther v10.3.2, Mail,
iChat, Sherlock, Address Book, QuickTime,
iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iSync, iCal, DVD Player,
Appleworks, Sound Studio, Quicken 2004 and
World Book 2003. It also comes with three
games, namely Mac OS X Chess, Deimos Rising
and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.
304 reasons to throw out your dial-up modem
and switch over to high-speed DSL internet.
iBook Bargains
For those of you who may not need the power
of a 1 GHz G4 remember that I started out
looking for a much slower G3 with a DVD player in it and if it weren’t for the technicality of
Apple only selling its G3 iBooks to people
with an American mailing address I would
have been just as happy with one of their NOS
(New Old Stock) G3 iBook models for a fraction of the price of a
new G4 model. These
G3 models are brand
new from Apple, still in
the box with full Apple
technical support and
optional AppleCare.
The model I bought does not have a DVD burner
so it did not come with iDVD but it does have the
other three iLife ‘04 iTunes, iMovie and iPhoto
components pre-installed with OS 10.3.2, including GarageBand.
Since I bought this iBook we have been inseparable. I picked up a nice heavy American Tourister
computer carry-all shoulder-bag from Staples that
looks like it was built expressly for this model. The
padded pouch inside the case is a perfect fit. The
case has lots of other pockets and six compartments for accessories
and books. The iBook
goes with me to work
every day and I have
tucked away at work a
surge protector, an extra
USB keyboard, USB
mouse and a set of stereo speakers that can be
plugged into the audio port. I lock it up in a steel
cabinet with a padlock on it every time I leave the
room because I’m spooked by the portability of it.
If you have access to an American address for
a week or more in the Spring remember that
they have these G3 iBooks and other models
in stock on their website and once you order
one it only takes a couple of days for an Apple
computer to arrive at your door. They certainly are a better value and guaranteed to be in
better condition than all of the used older
portables on eBay.
The performance is excellent and the value for
the money is even better. I expect that I will get a
lot of use out of this new computer.
12
LaCie External
USB CD Writer
•Write Methods: track at once, multi session, session at once
•5 Year Warranty
The first thing you notice when you open the box
is how big the drive is. Measuring 6x19x26cm, the
unit is a little larger than I expected and much bigger that the CD-ROM drive. Housed in the unit is
a 5 1/4" Mitsumi Cr-4804TE CD-RW drive along
with a small power supply and fan to keep things
cool. One rather interesting aspect of the case is
the power LED. It's a funky looking blue plastic
bubble on the front of the top cover. Also, the
LaCie cases are stackable, allowing you to save
quite a bit of desk space.
One idea that I've always liked was external CD
drives. We have one SCSI external that just reads
CDs and an external USB model that reads and
writes them. On various occasions I have had the
SCSI CD-ROM connected to the Mac IIci, Mac
IIfx, Mac SE/30, Quadra 950, Quadra 840av, and
my old Daystar Genesis MP 800+. I have taken it
on occasion to other peoples’ houses to use it to
start up off to run utilities to repair hard drives on
their older systems. Unfortunately it cannot create
CDs so I bought a new USB LaCie CDRW from
Carbon Computing when they had a booth at the
Mac Expo in Toronto.
Nothing extrordinaire specifications wise. Most
people who see the drive's rated speeds are not
overly impressed, but this is a limitation of a USB
based CD drive. When we got it the kids complained that their friends with USB on Pentiuminfested computers could burn at much higher
speeds. The USB 1.1 spec has a maximum transfer rate of 12Mbits/sec which translates to
~1500KB/sec throughput, or 1.45MB/sec, and
this is what will ultimately limit the speed of the
drive. The actual Mitsumi drive is rated at 4x4x24
so the USB bus will definitely be a bottleneck. It's
unfortunate that the USB 1.1 spec does not allow
for more bandwidth.
This USB CDRW l has been attached at various
times to Caro’s iMac, Irma’s B&W G3, the new G4
iBook and my old Daystar computer. Using it both
as an extra CD-ROM drive and as a CD burner
has been a breeze. Under Jaguar and Panther
the drive shows up as a supported device. I'm
sure everyone likes hardware that is easy to
install, and it doesn't get much
easier than USB devices. USB
is about as close to plug and
play as there currently is. No
termination issues and no
SCSI voodoo.
Until recent developments like Burn Proof, "coasters" were common fare in the CD-burning world.
A coaster describes the situation when a buffer
Specifications:
•4/4/24 Write/Re-Write/Read
•USB 1.1 Interface
•2MB Buffer
•250ms Access Time
•Width 190mm
•Depth 260mm
•Height 60mm
•Firmware version: 2.8C
13
Audio (Stereo)
USB
On / Off
under-run occurs during burning and the burned
CD is unusable. The reason I mention this is
because with USB's rather slow transfer rate, the
CD burning speeds must also be cut back to 2X
to try and eliminate buffer under-runs. The 2X
write speeds combined with a 2MB buffer keeps
the data moving along during periods of heavy
system use quite well.
Power
lacking, but that's related to USB constraints.
Works quite well, gets the job done, and is
extremely handy. A high quality product with a 5
year Warranty to back it up.
With the recent adoption of USB2 and internal CD
writers hitting 16X and higher, the 4x4x24 LaCie
unit starts to look a little rusty. But, working within
the constraints of today's technology, LaCie has
done an excellent job with their 4x4x24 unit.
Performance is very good for a USB 1.1 drive,
meeting and exceeding the specifications in all
cases. The fact of the matter is that this LaCie
drive works dependably with any Mac system in
the house (OS9.1, Jaguar and Panther) and we
experienced no difficulties with the drive. This has
been one of the most useful and trouble-free
pieces of hardware we have ever bought.
Available for next to nothing right now on eBay (I
paid about $380.00 four or five years ago and
saw one identical to this unit going on eBay for
less than $25.00 US), this drive is very well suited to those who need a reliable, portable USB CD
writer and don't need the speed of FireWire. Most
people will want to wait for the next generation of
drives where we expect speeds to match those of
internal CD writers, but for the roaming office, the
LaCie drive is a definite buy. Speeds are slightly
14
MaUsE Membership Renewals Coming Up
A reminder that our membership year ends on March 31st. This means that your membership
renewal is coming due soon. A good time to pay would be at the upcoming February 25th
meeting or, alternatively, at the March 24th meeting.
Alternatively, you can mail your cheque, payable to Macintosh Users East, to John Kettle, 208
Winona Avenue, Oshawa, Ontario, L1G 3H5.
The normal annual dues will be $45.00 for most members. However, if you joined the club
after March, 2003, the amount you will be billed will be somewhat less than this, designed to
bring your account current through March 31, 2005, at which point your account will line up
with the March ending financial year.
Invoices are being prepared for delivery first by email and secondarily by snail mail, but for
most folks it's just a matter of getting $40.00 to John Kettle before April Fool's Day!!
If you have any questions about your MaUsE membership account, feel free to give John
Kettle a call at 905-404-0405.
iBook Logic Board
Repair Program
In order to find out if you qualify for this program
you must take your G3 iBook to either an Apple
technical support representative or an Authorized
Apple Service Provider (AASP) to determine if the
component failure identified for the iBook Logic
Board Repair Extension Program affects your
computer and, if so, to arrange for the repair.
There’s big news for people with G3 iBooks. On
January 28th, 2004, in response to a rising number of video problems with older iBooks, even out
of Warranty, Apple Computers launched a recall
program to fix them for FREE. (Anyone who has
already had the repairs done at their own
expense will be re-imbursed by Apple for the cost
of repairs). The program is a worldwide program
covering repair or replacement of the logic board
in specific iBook models manufactured between
May 2002 and April 2003 that are experiencing
specific video component failures.
The program is available for iBooks with
serial numbers in the following range(s):
•UV220XXXXXX to UV318XXXXXX
iBooks with the serial numbers listed above are
also known as:
•iBook (16 VRAM)
•iBook (14.1 LCD 16 VRAM)
•iBook (Opaque 16 VRAM)
•iBook (32 VRAM)
•iBook (14.1 LCD 32 VRAM)
The Program covers iBooks that have a particular
component failure on the logic board, resulting in
the computer starting up OK but the built-in and
attached external displays exhibiting one or more
of the following symptoms:
The repairs outlined in this program, including
shipping charges, are covered at Apple's cost. If
you have been having problems with your iBook
and think that you need to participate in this program, call the AppleCare Contact Center for the
country in which you are located.
•Scrambled or distorted video
•Appearance of unexpected lines on
the screen
•Intermittent video image
•Video freeze
•Computer starts up to blank screen
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Zinio Magazine Reader
Maybe this is an idea whose time has come or
maybe Zinio is pushing things. As you can tell by
the number and variety of magazines in magazine departments of bookstores, drugstores, grocery stores, variety stores and smoke-shops, for
the most part the magazine industry has never
been able to really make the digital leap. People
can and do go online for music, pornography,
communication, research, shopping, planning
holidays, buying cars, banking, radio, and movies
but for the most part unless the magazine content
is suitable to the same people as computing is,
the preference is for people to subscribe to or buy
real paper hard copies of their favourite publications. Zinio wants to change the way we buy and
read magazines.
So far the idea doesn’t seem to be catching on. There are several reasons for this. I suspect that one
of the them must be that when people shell out the cost of a subscription or buy a single copy of a
magazine they want to have something material to show for it. Like the software deals where you can
buy the software over the internet and select your choice of "Download Now" or receive the CD in the
mail. When users shell out $69.99 or $119.99 for Stuffit Deluxe they like to get that box in the mail with
the CD and the printed manuals. The only time that downloading the software would make sense would
be if the user just couldn't wait another day for the software.
I also suspect that people resist magazines over the internet
because if the formatting is kept identical to the published paper
edition then the printing in them is just too small and the pages
too big for most CRT monitors to present with the clarity that we
are accustomed to when reading from a glossy printed page.
With these thoughts in mind I will proceed to tell you about a
neat program that shipped with my new iBook. There was no
mention of it in the literature. I found it by accident in my Panther
Applications folder right at the very bottom because it starts with
a "Z".
The program has several parts. One
part is the Zinio Reader, an application that opens Zinio documents on
my iBook screen in great clarity and
colour and allows me to browse
through them. The other part is the Zinio Delivery Manager. This application is a specialised browser that takes you to the Zinio site and enables
you to set up an account and look at the magazines that can be subscribed
to over the internet. Once you subscribe and pay for a periodical you can
download it (very fast in a compressed state) right to your hard drive and
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open it with the Zinio Reader. All of
the original content and formatting is
maintained just as if you were looking
at a colour picture of each page.
Using the controls provided by the
Reader application, keyboard commands or the arrows on your keyboard you can flip through the pages
and zoom in on articles and ads that
catch your fancy. As you can see
from the pictures MacWorld looks
just like Macworld. Each page looks
just like the same page in the original
magazine but just too small to comfortably read. That could be because
of the size of my own 14-inch display
but I think you would need at least a
19 or 21-inch display to see
MacWorld in its entirety and have it readable just as it appears without magnification.
In order to allow potential users to try out the program the Zinio site offers FREE downloads of a selection of popular magazines. I downloaded a couple of issues of
MacWorld and a copy of some PC magazine just to see what they would look like.
The magazine opens initially in the Zinio Reader with a two-page spread that perfectly covers my 14-inch ibook screen. Using the "zoom in" button once blows up
the image of the magazine to put one half of one page on the screen. Using it
again further reduces the portion of the page while further expanding the
text. Text is crystal clear at all magnifications. Some of the pictures look a
little washed out or pixellated. I tried zooming in repeatedly and the
images got more pixellated but the text remained clean. Using the track
pad it was possible to click and drag the page around the screen and
change the visible part in order to read the articles.
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Navigation is very simple. Along the bottom of the
window is a simple navigation tool with arrows to
click on to jump to the beginning or end of the
magazine and for turning the pages one by one.
A slider indicates how relatively far you are into
the publication. Along the top of the magazine
pages is a bar with little icons that enable you to
print the page, contact Zinio, send emails, jump to
the table of contents, magnify or minimise the
text, write notes on the magazine, highlight passages in yellow for future reference, find words
within the text, and launch the Zinio Delivery
Manager application to check to see if you have
downloads due and shop for more magazines.
and can be made visible or invisible as desired.
All amendments are stored with the periodical
and can be called up in a special window.
If I must say something about Zinio software I will
say that when Apple congratulated me on my purchase of a new iBook and offered me a free subscription to Macworld magazine as a gift I had no
problem deciding whether I wanted it emailed to
me right away or mailed to my door in four to six
weeks. I opted to receive it by mail. I’m not sure
whether or not you still receive a free fun shareware and DEMO CD with every issue of Macworld
like you do with MacFormat and MacAddict, but
there certainly won’t be one with any issue that I
download off the internet.
There are several really neat features to the visuals associated with Zinio software. When navigating from page to page the software actually
shows a smooth 3D animation of pages being
turned as if they were real paper. Even those
annoying Macworld subscription add-in postcards
flip over like they were made of stiff paper.
There are other advanced features too. The magazine is a Zinio “document” and I can make subtle changes to it using the Zinio Reader software
by highlighting passages in the magazine or sticking notes and comments to various articles. The
notes and highlighting remain with the document
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Macintosh computers used to come with oodles of documentation. The desktop models came with a
manual specific to the model and a huge soft-cover book that covered the basics as well as everything
from SCSI rules to ethernet. The simpler the Mac the more complete and the more complex the set of
manuals that would ship with it.
There is less and less included with modern Macs. Now that the typical new laptop or desktop model
from Apple ships with enough computing power to control every facet of running a small maritime
nation, like Portugal or New Zealand, a small booklet the size of a comic book suffices. When I got the
G4 iBook with built-in CDRW I went looking for information in the booklet about how to copy a CD. Note
I don’t say burn a CD. What I want to know is how I can take a CD and make another identical copy
of it. This should be a simple operation for someone with Macs around the house. All of my previous
experience with making CDs involved external CD burners and Toast. With Toast you put a CD into
any internal or external CD-ROM drive connected to your computer. Then you put a blank CD into the
external drive. Toast launches automatically and asks what you want
to do with the blank CD. One of the choices is “Copy”. Toast checks
for other CD on the Desktop and it shows up in the application window.
Click on the burn disk button and the data is read off one CD and
burned onto the other.
I asked for advice on the internet among the iBook and PowerBook
users. What I got were replies that assumed that I was capable of navigating my way to the hard drive icon and opening the Disk Copy application in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. It made perfect
sense to me that there would be a Disk Copy program that would
enable me to copy a disk. I think there has been a Disk Copy application since OS7.1. I opened the Utilities folder as instructed and found
that there is no Disk Copy application any more.
When I looked up information in the iBook Mac Help application I was led to
the Disk Utility, a program that I thought was for repairing disk permissions
and running Disk First Aid. Apparently in OSX 10.3.2 the Disk Utility does double duty as Disk Copy and as Disk First Aid. I popped the first CD that came
to hand into the iBook and opened the Disk Utility. The MacAddict #80 CD
showed up in the drive list window and I clicked on “New Image” and speci19
fied in the dialog box that I wanted to call it
“Test CD” and have it put on the Desktop.
(The default is the Documents Folder). A
progress bar monitored the creation of the
image and when it was done the new disk
image showed up as a document icon on the
desktop, just as requested, with the “.dmg”
“disk image” suffix. It also showed up in the
drive list in the Disk Utility program and the “Burn” button in the Disk
Utility became active. The Burn button had previously been grayed out.
Now the procedure was starting to look a bit more sensible. Since I now
had two versions of the CD on the Desktop, the real CD and the disk
image I had created, I could theoretically eject the genuine MacAddict
CD and proceed to use the image of it with the Disk Utility to burn another copy.
I left the Disk Utility application window open and I returned to the Finder
and ejected the MacAddict #80 CD. Now the CDRW drive was empty.
Then I selected the “Test CD.dmg” by clicking on it in the drive list window of the Disk Utility and I clicked on the “Burn” button. A dialog box
appeared that indicated that a blank
CD was required in order for the
operation to proceed. I inserted a
blank CD into the CDWR drive and
was asked at what speed I wanted
to copy the CD.
The choices of burning speeds were
impressive. I was accustomed to burning CDs at
slow 1X, and 2X speeds because most of my
experience involved the old USB LaCie drive
and I expected much more than 4X from a brand
new 1 GHz G4 iBook with a built-in CDRW drive.
I put in a CD that said on it that it could be
burned up to 48X. As you can see from the
application window all of the suggested speeds
are pretty fast.
I elected to burn the CD at 24X and clicked the
Burn button to let the process proceed. Perhaps
I should have picked a CD with less data on it for
my first test: the 640 MB MacAddict #80 CD took
a few minutes to burn.
The outcome of the exercise is that I now have a
procedure that will enable me to duplicate CDs
using my new G4 iBook.
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