Macking 112

Buy an HP iPod
It's just an iPod with an HP sticker on it, but according to Macintouch you can save money and extend the warranty by not buying the Apple-branded one:
"A reader reports a potential warranty benefit with HP's version of the iPod:
"I asked costco.com today if the HP iPods it will soon be selling are to be considered computer products, with a 6-month return limit, or electronics, with a (more or less) lifetime return policy. Costco says that the iPod will be considered electronics, and will therefore qualify for lifetime return. That's certainly something to consider when deciding whether to buy an Apple or HP iPod. Why buy an extra year of AppleCare coverage for $60 when you can get all the time you want (within reason) for no charge when you buy an HP iPod at Costco?"

Evidence Eradicator
Do you use your Mac for any unauthorized purpose? I'm thinking about personal email, visiting porn or singles sites or anything else the boss won't let you do. Well, a record of all that is stored on your drive where the snoops can find it and zap, you're fired.
Radon Technologies is the publisher of Evidence Eradicator, an OSX-only application that goes through your drive and wipes log files, history of visited sites, caches and prefill lists for all major browsers. It also clears the Find by Content index cache, shared logs, temporary files and anything else that can be used to incriminate you. Once finished with the program you can uninstall it by dragging it to the Trash and choosing Secure Empty Trash.
Sound good? Peace of mind is only $40, and you can download and run one eradication session for free. If I needed this I would carry it on my pocket drive and run it every time I used the company Mac for my own purposes. If your Mac is not your own, you need this program.
The company also makes a similar program for people forced to use Microsoft computers in their offices.

Read Mac Disks on Windows
If you live or work in a mixed environment, you already know that the bloated, limited horror that is Windows can't read anything but its own formats.
Mediafour offers a product that brings the ability to open and save files on all types of Mac disks including removable drives, CDs and DVDs, floppies, zips, etc. It works on most versions back to W98 but to use all of the features requires Win2K/XP or later. It's $49.95 but the download will work for free for five days. The company also offers a product called XPlay that works as an alternative to iTunes for PCs.

Print Spool Freeze
One of the Excedrin headaches that can affect users of OS9 or older is a corrupt print spool document. No idea how they are created, but when it happens you will crash when you try to print, and then crash after every restart seconds after the Finder finishes loading. This may be related to a number of well-known bugs in Desktop Printing (DP), which is turned on by default.
Epson printers do not have this problem because they don't support DP, but if you use any of Apple's old laser or inkjet printers, or Hewett-Packard's, or pretty much anyone else's, you are at risk for this problem.
The cure is to restart with the Shift key down, disabling all extensions. At that point the desktop printer icon will have an X through it. Double-click on it to open a window (it's just a glorified folder) and you will find one or more spool files in there. Trash them and then restart. That should end the crashing.
If you are using any printer but HP you can disable desktop printing entirely. Open the Extensions Manager and turn off any extensions with the word Desktop in them. This will let you revert to the standard Print Monitor for your background printing. Desktop Printing is designed mainly for people who have multiple printers on a network and want to easily switch between them. Without it you must change printers in the Chooser.
It doesn't work for HP products, with a few exceptions, because they are designed to require DP be enabled or they won't work at all. Yet another reason to avoid HP printers, which are mostly inferior to or more troublesome than their competitors.

MS Bash of the Month
Microsoft servers almost caused a real crash - of airplanes in the Southern California airspace, according to a report in Techworld.com. Their air traffic controllers are using off-the-shelf Dell hardware running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, replacing the Unix servers already in place. Blame for that decision rests with the Harris Corporation which installed the Voice Switching and Control System (VSCS) and later decided to move it to Windows.
It seems that the servers are prone to data overload after running for more than 50 days so they are timed to automatically shut down at day 49.7. To avoid being surprised by this, the technicians are required to manually restart the system after 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to do so and so the server went down, leaving 800 planes in the air for three hours, five of which came too close to each other.
To quote the article, "Soon after installation, however, the FAA discovered that the system design could lead to a radio system shutdown, and put the maintenance procedure into place as a workaround, the LA Times said. The FAA reportedly said it has been working on a permanent fix but has only eliminated the problem in Seattle. The FAA is now planning to institute a second workaround - an alert that will warn controllers well before the software shuts down.
"The shutdown is intended to keep the system from becoming overloaded with data and potentially giving controllers wrong information about flights, according to a software analyst cited by the LA Times."
Naturally Microsoft refused to comment to Techworld, and Techworld didn't ask Harris Corporation why they abandoned perfectly good Unix servers that never needed restarting for the inherently inferior Microsoft products. So I'm asking, but I don't expect an answer.

Dot-Mac Gets Bigger
Apple upped the available storage space each dot-Mac member may use on Apple's servers from 100 to 250Mb. Doesn't seem like much compared to Gmail's one gig, but the space can be used to house your own Web site as well as email large (up to 10Mb) files. $99/year is still a bit high for their services if you don't make active use of them, especially now that Virex has proven to be an absolute failure. (Version 7.5 trashes your entire mailbox if it finds an attached virus, which motivated Apple to pull it from their site and replace it with the less destructive but still horribly engineered 7.2.1.) Still, I maintain an account there and have Eudora check it daily for messages. I don't get many because I never hand out the address. I now have a Gmail account too, but have no real plans to use it.

Preserving Video
I acquired an ADS Pyro A/V Link box to connect my G4 to my Dish Network PVR (hard-disk recorder - think TIVO), replacing the EyeTV 500 which was not the proper hardware for the recording I wanted to do. Now I am learning how to capture TV and convert to QTime movies that I can burn to VideoCD or DVD. Yes, I admit I am late to the video-manipulation party, but I can report that it's pretty simple to do using iMovie. Too simple, in fact. It does not seem very intuitive when it comes to selecting unwanted footage for deletion, especially in segments less than a second long. My next stop will probably be Final Cut Express.

Revive A Dead PowerBook
Pismo won't start? If you discharge the battery completely, it will also discharge the PRAM/clock battery as well. Due to a dumb design decision Apple initiated with the Mac II, the battery also powers the startup circuit.
This is similar to the problem experienced with users of old Macs like the Quadra 605, notorious for this startup failure when the 3.6V lithium battery failed. In those models, a quick fix was to remove the battery so the startup circuit would receive power from the main power supply instead of the PRAM battery.
Letting the main battery discharge (laptop) or leaving a desktop Mac unplugged for a long period of time will result in a dead PRAM battery. Some are rechargeable and some are just replaceable. The 3.6V unit can be found at any Radio Shack if you bring in the old one to show the clerk. Never say the word "Macintosh" in Radio Shack or their eyes glaze over and will have no idea that they even have it in stock. (Yes, there are exceptions, but those are just smart clerks, not company policy.)
Try removing your Pismo or other laptop battery and leaving the power supply plugged in for a few hours, then restarting. That should force the PRAM battery to charge up. You can then replace the main battery and recharge it as well.
Prevent this problem from happening: Take your old PowerBook to an Apple dealer and get a fresh PRAM battery if you plan on keeping it.
Incidentally, sometimes there can be problems with iBooks or recent PowerBooks that cause them to remain on and draining the battery, even though they appear to be shut off and not sleeping. They are really in coma mode, and if left this way, the battery discharges with the processor running full tilt and the fan off. It is obviously noticeable by the extreme heat coming from the case when there should be none. Flip over your laptop, unscrew the lock and remove the battery and then the power cord. Then prepare to take it in to the shop.

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.)