Macking 150

150 Years of Macking - The End
This is episode 150, the final episode of this column. Think computer-years as roughly equal to one human month. It's hard for me to imagine until I go back and look at them, safely ensconced here on my site.
Back then, and all the way through 120, it was written for a different magazine, ComputerBits, published by/affiliated with Pacific Solutions, who is still in business helping Microsoft and Linux computer users with new systems and repairs. When it folded, a new magazine in the style of the old began publishing, lasting up until last month. Now it's gone as well, and it's time for me to move on. These columns will stay up indefinitely, but soon I will join the crowd and write a web-log (I passionately HATE the word "blog") which will be linked from this site.
My first column, June 1995, was a short one (compared to the 12K ones I write now) about useful font utilities. #2 focused on useful system extensions and control panels.
There were a lot more of them, back then. So many hacks and tricks you could buy or get free and so few that remain. Eyeballs put a pair of eyes on your screen that track the cursor; this was originally brought to Mac from Unix, and PopChar, a drop-down menu that showed you every available character in your active font. That lives today as PopChar Pro; and you can again find Eyeballs at VersionTracker.

Backups and Zip Disks
Episode Three focused on a familiar topic: backups. The hot program of the day? Retrospect. It was designed to work with tape backups, a technology that has largely disappeared, except for some high-end network servers, and is considered less reliable than RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) setups. I use Retrospect to back up the two Macs on my network and to keep a copy of my toolkit hard drive that I take to client sites. It backs up to a LaCie 300Gb FireWire drive. Hard drives were anything but cheap then, so we used SyQuest cartridges, optical drives, tapes and even a stack of floppies for those few still living with 40-meg (yes, that's meg, not gig) drives. Zip drives had recently come on the market and were being rapidly adopted all over the industry. It would be years before we would learn that they were extremely unreliable in the long term.
Oh, you didn't know that? You still have an archive of your old files on a box or two of Zip drives? Yes, they suffer from bit-rot: the slow, spontaneous decay of the magnetic fields that store the data; slight but significant warping of the floppy media inside the cartridge, and problems with the drives themselves known as the "click of death." That would cause a drive to destroy every cart inserted into it, and pass the damage onto the cartridge in such a way that it would damage the next drive you plugged it into.
If you want to preserve that data on your Zips, make a weekend project to archive them onto CDs. Since each cart holds 95 megs of data, and a CD holds 650-700Mb, copy six zips onto your hard drive into a folder and then burn a couple of CDs of that folder. Delete it and go on to the next set of Zips.
To make sure you aren't just making aliases, hold down the Option key and drag the Zip onto the folder. You should see a progress window while the files are being copied. Open the folder when it finishes to make sure they are there. Once you get the feel of the process you will just know when it is going right.
Extra warning: Most of those Zips were created under OS9. Now most of you are using OSX. Many Zip disks, especially those sold in office-supply stores, were formatted for PC, just as flash drives are now. Simply inserting a PC disk filled with Mac files put there under 9 will cause the resource and data forks to be shredded and make the files, with few exceptions, unrecoverable. In a sense, the files are already shredded; it just becomes unrecoverable when read by OSX. Putting them back into an OS9 Mac will not fix them. If you are in doubt about your disks, wait until you can find someone with an OS9 Mac to check your disks with. If they are indeed PC disks, you will need to use that Mac to copy the files off, erase the Zip and copy them back on before you can insert them into your OSX Mac.
This is one of the services I offer - taking files from Zips and putting them onto CD. Let me know if interested.
If you are copying files and discover you have disk errors by seeing the "File could not be read and was skipped" message, you may still have a chance. Norton Disk Doctor or Disk Warrior may be able to fix the disk. It's the last remaining use there is for Disk Doctor, which cannot be used on any disk newer than 10.2.8 and even then it's pretty dodgy.

The New MacBook Pro
I got one of these recently and I have to say, it's the best Mac I have ever had. After living for a couple of years with my MacBook Amateur (original with CoreDuo chip) the improvement is marvelous. I had had a ton of trouble with it too, requiring Apple to replace the motherboard twice and the hard drive once. Fortunately, the last year it behaved itself so I was ethically able to sell it. I imagine Apple lost a bundle on that model because so many went back for warranty work.
This model has the new Penryn chip from Intel that runs cooler and uses less power. As a result, as long as I block animated adverts (which demand processor resources) I can get at least 4 hours out of the battery. Since it has separate RAM for the graphics display (unlike the MacBooks, which share RAM) the thing is instantly responsive, loads quickly from the 185Gb "Perp" drive, and is adequately supplied with 2Gb RAM.
Perp drive? I have written about these before, mostly when they were new to the market and people were reporting an increased number of failures with them. Drive-recovery companies stated that they were unable to recover data from them and would refuse to accept them for the attempt.
This means that frequent backups were extremely important, because you couldn't even fall back on their $1500-and-up services to recover your lost data. The "Perpendicular technology" is a method of cramming the magnetized bits ever closer to each other; it's worth a visit to Wikipedia to read about it.
Anyway, I think this new MacBook Pro is the best Mac I have ever had. The display is clear and sharp, with bigger pixels than the MacBook, and enough of them (1440 x 900) that I no longer need my Cinema Display (1680 x 1024) for my desktop work. I like the matte screen better than the shiny one, even though I didn't really have any problems using the shiny MacBook screen. Amazingly, AppleWorks still runs on it, even though a lot of other programs have died or become unstable under Leopard. Since the Pro was engineered for Leopard, it behaves much better than my MacBook, which drove me back to Tiger after a week. I love the Leopard feature called "Spaces," which provides four desktops and an easy keyboard way to switch between them. I have used, and abandoned, virtual-desktop schemes in the past; this is the best ever. I also make extensive use of QuickLook - select an icon and tap the spacebar; a window pops up that will let you read most files, see most images, and play audio tracks.
I did encounter my first AppleWorks glitch, though: for no reason and no action on my part besides typing Command-S, it reverted to the previous day's version of this column and lost an hour's writing, even though I had saved twice while going along. I am going to keep an eye on this, believe me. Since AppleWorks has been declared officially dead by Apple and can't be downloaded or purchased anywhere, it's probably time to switch to something else. Hell, I have been maintaining this web site witha 1995 program called WorldWideWebWeaver, on a beige G3 which exists mostly for that purpose (and converting files from old formats and storage media) so go ahead and accuse me of hanging on to the past.
I do use it as a desktop model, raising it up to eye level on an iCurve stand, and using a separate mouse and iKey keyboard, which I am convinced is the best keyboard MacAlly has ever made. Too bad it's out of production. If you have one, keep it clean and it will last for years. Mine is at least 7. Oh, in case you have one and have not discovered this, the missing CD Eject key can be substituted with the F12 key. It does double duty: A quick tap invokes Dashboard on some systems, but if you hold it down, the CD tray will open and close.
The Pro is a bit heavier than the MacBook, but the aluminum case is sturdy and the keyboard is excellent. I had to get a new laptop bag for it but now that I don't have it tethered to the external display, unplugging it for use is easy and I keep it at hand in the living room all evening and take it more places than I did the old one.
Battery life has routinely exceeded four hours. One of the biggest eaters of processor power (and battery life) is animated videos, so I use PithHelmet to block those animated ads from web pages. Fortunately, there is a version that works with Safari 3.1; I couldn't update for a couple of months until it was released. The $10 shareware fee for PithHelmet was well spent. Google it and download a copy. It does a great job of keeping the ads at bay.
Price was $1999 with a $100 discount from the Mac Store Beaverton for being a PMUG member. For an extra $500 I could have gotten a 2.5 GHz chip instead of 2.4, and a 250 gig drive instead of the 200. Hardly seems worth it. (The 17" is $300 over that.)

Apple Updates
I advise people not to routinely install Apple Software Update's suggestions when they appear. It's okay to update Firefox when it asks, and there have been few noted problems with Adobe's as well. Some reports about the update for MS Office 2008 and the latest update for Office 2004 have been hurting users so it's probably best avoided without precautions, detailed below.
I am running the latest everything on my MacBookPro. I even had Software Update do it, normally the least safe way. I do this to test for myself when the Mac blogs report problems. So far, none to be had.
However, I am always safe to do this because I have an external FireWire drive running frequent backups with SuperDuper and a continuous backup with Time Machine. That way I am prepared in case I am one of the six or seven percent of users who will have a problem as a result of an update. If you are also maintaining a backup the same way, using either SuperDuper or SilverKeeper, or some other program that lets you create a bootable clone of your internal hard drive, you can also safely run the updates.
How to tell if your backup is working correctly? Run from it. Restart your Mac and immediately hold down the Option key. You should see an interim screen with icons for your hard drive and another for your backup. Click on the backup and then the arrow to continue. Note that it can take up to 90 seconds for the wait watch to go away and let you click the drive icon. This will not work if you are using a B luetooth wireless keyboard and mouse, which don't work in startup mode. Keep your wired ones available for just such an instance.
Your Mac should start normally and look the same, except the backup drive's icon should be the topmost one in the right corner. I assume you keep that area clear of folders and document icons; if not, you should.
Look to see if the most recent documents are in place on this drive. That is all the proof you need that your backup is working correctly.
Bottom line is this: Not enough reports are showing up in the Mac blogs to mitigate against the updates. Only exception is the one offered by Microsoft for Office 2008; you should skip that one. Otherwise, go ahead and do all of the Apple updates, although I would still recommend just reading the list from Software Update, and going to Apple's Downloads site and getting the DMG for each one and installing from that.
Be sure to repair permissions, using the Disk Utility program in your Utilities folder, after doing any software update or fresh installation.

Items for sale
These are things I have, or a client has requested I add to my list.

Blue & White G3 Tower
385 Mb RAM, SCSI and USB cards, 3 hard drives. Works, or use for parts, $50. Contact me.

Laptop Bags
Nice looking leather oversize bag. See on Craigslist at an unknown URL (changes every week). Fits up to 17" MacBook Pro or anything else that big. Total overkill for me. New, $119; yours for half.
Apple-branded heavy nylon bag, originally designed for 2300 PowerBook or Duo model. Fits 12" iBook, Powerbook or original early model. Does NOT fit MacBook. Rare model, perfect shape, $30.
VGA to ADC Conversion box. Use the previous-generation Apple Cinema Display with any VGA Mac. I originally got it for my 1st-gen 12" G4 PowerBook; later models had mini-DVI. Also works with PCs and Titanium G4 PowerBooks. Originally sold for $299; yours $75.
Contact me about any of these.
See you in the blogosphere.

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.)