Macking 107

New Macs
Apple updated their entire line of Powerbooks in April, revising the 12" model to Rev. C with faster processor and more VRAM. This will push down the price of Rev. A models to below that of new iBooks. As this model supports a maximum of 640 Mb RAM and a 60GB hard drive, that can be quite a bargain. Since this model did not have a DVI port (VGA only) you could not use Apple's ADC displays without an expensive VGA to ADC adapter. Rev B and C models need only a (still pricey) DVI to ADC adapter from Apple or Dr. Bott because the adapter delivers the power to drive the monitor. G5s and G4s have large power supplies which can provide enough power but laptops cannot. The 15" and 17" models also received an upgrade (Rev. B), and the largest internal hard drive available is now 80 gigabytes.
You still can't find a mini iPod to save your life unless you are willing to pay lots more than list price on Ebay.

Pocket Flash Drives
Warning about power demands: these increasingly ubiquitous drives may not work in your keyboard. In previous columns I discussed this issue, one that the manufacturers don't want you to know about. They'll talk capacity, rave about their high, high, USB 2.0 rating and their form factor but if you want to learn whether or not they have low power demands you won't find out in the ads or the packaging.
I can't really even research the issue and make definitive conclusions because the brand names change rapidly. There are but a handful of companies making the drives and they can have any brand name, familiar or not.
You need to go to a dealer (like Pacific Solutions) that tests the drives beforehand and can tell you right up front if they will work in an unpowered hub like a keyboard. Otherwise you will need to have the store open a package right there and plug it into the store Mac's keyboard and see if it mounts on the desktop or gives you a low power error message.
If it works, be sure to erase and initialize the disk with the Apple Disk Utility unless you want to move files between Macs and Microsofts. Never use a PC-formatted drive, Zip or floppy to move files between an OS9 and OSX Mac because the DOS format destroys resource forks and renders the files unusable.

Beware of WPA
Wireless Protected Access, that is. Two options, WPA Personal and WPA Enterprise, are available in the new Airport Extreme base station, but older iBooks and TiBooks with standard AirPort (802.11b) cannot connect to it. The user gets a password error when trying to connect, even though the password is correct.
For security purposes, WPA is much better than the old 128-bit WEP standard. If you have a current model PowerBook, iBook or other laptop with the latest wireless standards, you should set your base station to WPA using the AirPort Admin Utility but if you want to let in older laptops you gotta stick to WEP.

FireWire DV Cable Problems
Don't plug the camera end in upside down! The cable is not well engineered to prevent this, with only a small bump to block incorrect insertion. If you put any force on it it will appear to plug in correctly, but you will put power to the data lines and data to the power lines.
This can fry both the camera's DV connection and your motherboard. Visually inspect the port and socket every time you plug it in, and don't use any amount of force. Apple and Sony needs to re-engineer this.

Bypass iTunes Copy Protection, II
Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen writes, in reference to VLC's support for iTunes's M4P DRM format:
"In case you didn't know, I'm a VideoLAN developer. I reverse engineered FairPlay and wrote VLC's FairPlay support. It's been available in VideoLAN CVS since January, but the first release to include FairPlay support is VLC 0.7.1 (released March 2.).
"Just wanted to let you know that once you have generated the user key file(s), you can copy them to as many computers you want and play your M4P files there using VLC."
DVD Jon is the programmer who created DeCSS, the Linux program that bypassed copy protection and regional coding on DVDs, allowing them to be played on Linux computers. Up until then, the movie industry had made no attempt at creating a legal method for Linux users to play DVDs. Oh, did the MPAA scream bloody murder at THAT. OSX users can find VideoLAN Client at http://www.videolan.org/.
Apple is less than pleased that people are using the PlayFair software to remove the digital rights management (DRM) code from their iTMS files. So displeased, in fact, that when the developer of PlayFair moved the servers and the web site to India, Apple ordered India to shut them down.
Yet the software doesn't do anything that the user doesn't have a legal right to do! The DRM code can be stripped out simply by burning a standard music CD in iTunes, and then re-importing the music as ordinary MP3 files which can be played on players that aren't iPods.
In fact, PlayFair bent over backward to protect the music industry by requiring the tunes be licensed to a particular Mac, and that the user have an iPod to filter them through. Simply copying purchased iMusic songs to a different Mac did not enable copy protection removal using PlayFair.
The programmer community was not willing to take that lying down, so within 24 hours of the new version of iTunes and QuickTime's release, the protection scheme was broken. When, oh when, will those control freaks at Apple Legal and the RIAA learn their lesson? Free ice cream in Hell will be distributed on that day.

Deletion Dangers
There have been a spate of reports from people who have lost all of their mail in AppleMail by clicking the wrong box. If you click REMOVE accidentally instead of EDIT in the Accounts window, it will delete everything, without warning. Having this happen with one click is crazy, so until this is fixed, click carefully!
Also, a problem with Norton Anti-Virus can affect all mail programs including Eudora, which is not normally sensitive to things like this: If NAV is set to automatically delete a virus on sight, it will assume your mailbox IS the virus and kill the whole thing. To protect yourself, open System Preferences and click on the AutoProtect pane. Then turn off Scan Compressed Files. Since the files are compressed they will be unable to spread themselves, and if you decide to save the attachment out to your drive, or try to run it within the email program, it will no longer be compressed and NAV will step in to block it.
With Virex 6, open the control panel Preferences and uncheck Delete Archives Containing Viruses.
Bottom line: Make sure your regular backups include your email database and keep an eye out for an update to NAV.

Letters:
Forward Delete on PowerBooks
Dave Brook wrote in after locating a way to create a Forward Delete key on a PowerBook, which doesn't have one:
"Here's the solution to the problem of no delete-forward key on Powerbooks: free software called MacroKey. it's for OSX and seems to work just fine.
"(Here's the description: MacroKey is a text macro generator. Assign a Calling Key to the macro (any keystroke you wish). Define the Answer (any text or keyboard command). Each time you hit the Calling Key, MacroKey types the Answer for you. Works in in any application/document. MacroKey is a native Cocoa application and Kernel extension (OS X only; v. 3.0 for Jaguar). MacroKey is free.)
"For some reason the MIT web site I downloaded it from took forever but it installed easily. To set it up, I simply plugged in an external keyboard with the Delete Forward key (as you suggested) and recorded the macro. I'll let you know if it's squirrely with any programs I used.
"Forgot to mention, for what it's worth: I used Command-Delete combination to invoke Delete Forward. I would have preferred a single key but although F12 is very close to the Delete key, also being the Power switch, made it not seem like a good choice."

AppleWorks Spinning Beachball
Do you have the spinning beach ball of patience too often when working in AppleWorks? Does it appear whenever you open a document, or do a Save or Save As? Simple cause. Every document you work on gets an alias created in the Starting Points "Recent Items" list. Although you can drag each alias from this window to the Trash, that would be exceedingly tedious if you have let a few hundred of them accumulate.
To clear this out, open AppleWorks User Data folder in your Documents folder (under Users for X, main window for OS9) and look for the Starting Points folder and then the Recent Items folder. Throw out the whole lot, or save the specific ones you would like to appear in the Starting Points window. If you create a lot of documents you will need to do this every month or so.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)