Macking 23

Go For A Portable
So, you are going to shop for a new Mac. Are you sure you don't really want a Powerbook? The new series (1400 and 3400) are so well designed and so powerful that they can do just about anything you expect from a desktop Mac.
But you never travel, right? Of course not, you can't leave your Mac behind! Now if you actually HAD a portable, you might start finding reasons to work elsewhere. Finish that article, proposal or edit those photos in the park. Take off to the Coast in the middle of the week. Drive up to Council Crest and sit in the car. When you have the option, possibilities will present themselves.
When you do work at your desk, the new models will support an external monitor, up to 17", an external keyboard and mouse. But since the screen on the 3400 is 800x600 pixels and sharp, clear and bright, you might not even need an external monitor.
Now I can't really speak about the new Powerbooks from personal experience, but so far I have four very happy clients who have been using them for a month or more.
But, needless to say, they are not without problems. You cannot update a 3400 to 7.6.1 because it requires a special version, which Claris will sell you for a minimal shipping price. You cannot use the video port as a second monitor port because it has only enough video RAM for mirroring (displaying on an external monitor the same info as on the built-in screen).
Also, there have been RAM seating problems. Coming unstuck will result in all kinds of errors or a non-functional unit, but pressing the key combination Control-Option-Command-Space firmly will reseat the RAM card, which is conveniently located under just those particular keys. It is highly unlikely that it will come completely unseated, which would require taking the machine apart to reinsert, but pressing those keys is a lot simpler than a teardown and works, according to Steve Wozniak (via Macintouch), just fine. Soon to be available is a foam strip that installs under the keyboard, which will keep the RAM card in place. It might even be available by now.

Using the MessagePad
Right now my fiance and I are sitting in the living room of a client in Manzanita on a pretty but grey Friday morning. She and the client are designing Web pages on her desktop Mac (which we schlepped along) and I am writing this column on my Newton 130 with optional keyboard.
The new Message Pad 2000 is cool,, very fast, and almost $1,000. Both units will accept a PCMCIA Card modem, an extra ram/storage card, and an external keyboard. The 2000 will accept two cards at the same time, but the 130, which won't, can still be found for around $600. If backlighting is not important to you, and you can get away with even less RAM, the model 120 has been advertised for just $299. All three models will serve as writing devices for columnists and authors provided you can adapt to the tiny Duo-sized keyboard. One warning: The 120 and 130 are painfully slow when your text file (note) gets much larger than 5k or so. And you will need an extension for the Newton if you want it to work on anything larger than 12K. You will also need X-Port or the latest version of Newton Connection Utilities to get your documents over to your Mac. But the Newton and keyboard together are so light I carry them in my backpack almost everywhere I go.
Speaking of the Duo, that model is history. Apple will not be releasing updated models in the forseeable future. Owners of the 280c and the 2300c will be able to keep them repaired and will be able to find NuBus cards for the Duo Docs, but you had better start buying your accessories now, while they are still on the market.
The next sub-notebook model Mac will be a device built by IBM, based on the ThinkPad, and was originally slated to be released only in Japan. Formerly code-named Comet, the 2400 will be powered by a 200-MHz 603e processor, weigh less than five pounds, and cost more than $3,000. It will not have a dock, but will have all ports in the back, including one for an external floppy drive. The Comet was introduced in Japan May 12, and should be shipping in the US by July.
In any case, the uncompromising power and good design of the 3400 make it a viable alternative to a heavy, awkward desktop model. You won't even have to give up any of your external SCSI devices. Apple will be releasing new Powerbooks this summer and demonstrating some of them at the June PMUG meeting, June 9, 6:45pm at the Northwest Service Center, 19th & NW Everett, Portland.

More on the Sony Digital Still Camera
We are so happy with our DSC-F1 digital camera (which took the photo in last month's column) we cannot contain ourselves. Melanie is building a Web page with an animated GIF of a fire in a fireplace. I took the picture by simply setting the shutter speed to 1/1000 and the aperture to its lowest setting, and using the Continuous option to take a quick stream of snapshots -- instant fire photos (very difficult to do with film) that we could preview immediately and save to disk.

She then went into Photoshop and reduced the images to 10% of their normal size, made buttons out of them with the Deko-Boko filter from Sucking Fish, saved to GIF and animated them with GIF Builder 0.5. Presto, a clickable animated fire button in under an hour from fireplace to the Web. Check it out at OceanEdge, which is a friend's rental beach house in Manzanita. We stay there often; it's wonderful. All the pictures on the page were shot with the Sony. This may not be the best of the new digital cameras, but it is the smallest, and it has become indispensable to the Web business.

Iomega: Good Company to Avoid
Quark XPress users are already familiar with the problem -- good product, but don't ever try to deal with the company unless you like Excedrin headaches. In these pages you have already read about Iomega's don't-call-us policy and difficult-to-reach tech support, but at least we thought they had good products. Now a slew of reports are coming in from Jaz owners about serious problems with the cartridges, overheating of the models sold by Iomega (which do not have an internal fan) and the latest glitch, an extreme sensitivity to the magnetic fields generated by large (15" or above) monitors. Even Iomega's own tech support engineers are advising the user to keep the drives at least TWO FEET from your monitor, and FOUR feet if you have a full-blown 21" unit. The fields, which are virtually undetectable (hold a compass near one) are nevertheless capable of burning out the record heads. Graphic designers are reporting a failure rate of nearly 50%.
Last month Iomega announced a recall of 75,000 Jaz carts, those manufactured in Malaysia between March 13 and April 20. Locate the date on the back side. Above the words "© Iomega 1995 patents pending" and below the central spindle. If the date is from "03 13 97" to "04 20 97" and the letters "MS" appear at the end of the second line, the disk is from the affected batch and should be returned. Iomega said the majority of the cartridges are still in the channel, but U.S. customers with bad disks should call (800) 336-1314 to order a replacement. Iomega will send out a new disk and a postage-paid return envelope to send back the recalled unit, at no cost to the consumer.
SyQuest is offering a competing product, the SyJet drive, which holds 1.5 gigs per cartridge. Expect SyQuest to start buying adverts to explain how their products are not sensitive to those magnetic fields, and never suffer from overheating, etc. Many consultants, including me, are advising their clients to avoid the Jaz entirely and go with SyQuest instead.
Macintouch offers seven tips to help improve Jaz reliability:

1. Keep Jaz drives oriented so that the cartridges are horizontal. Do not place them on edge with the carts vertical.
2. Avoid Jaz drives that lack adequate cooling. Iomega-labeled external drives lack cooling fans, which are typically used in third-party external drives.
3. Avoid using Jaz drives in servers or other applications that place the drive and cartridge in constant use.
4. If problems occur, allow drive and cartridge to cool. You may then be able to extract a troublesome cartridge or read its data.
5. If data cannot be read from a cartridge, Iomega may be able to recover the data for you. The two layers of a cartridge reportedly can shift, particularly with excess heat, requiring realignment.
6. Try enabling write-verification in the Jaz drivers. This may help data integrity substantially.
7. Avoid placing Jaz drives near magnetic fields, such as those created next to monitors. (Note: check for all other kinds of magnets usually found in offices and home-office desks, such as electric pencil sharpeners and paper clip holders. Keep them all away from your equipment.)

Put your Stuff on CD-ROM
Do you have a stack of filled Zip disks or SyQuest cartridges that you must archive? Do you have a stack of filled Jaz carts that you are now worried about? Fellow PMUG member Charles DeVore (503-641-4510), among others, will burn a CD-ROM for you, for just $35, that can free up six of those Zips for re-use. A CD-ROM can hold about 650 megabytes worth of data. If you want to burn your own CDs, the drives are now selling for less than $600. The projected shelf-life of a CD-ROM is measured in decades, not years, like magnetic media. (Just be sure you buy only the best, gold CD blanks.)

Global Village getting crowded
I still like my Global Village Platinum modem and its excellent fax software, but the company has become so sloppy and incapable in its tech support, even by email, I am going to have to start recommending Supras to new modem buyers. But I say this without ever having experienced Supra's tech support myself. I just hear a lot of compliments from users. They use FAXcilitate, which is based on FaxSTF, a good 3rd-party faxing package. But be aware of reports from Now Contact users that the SupraSonic modem responds too slowly to AT commands and there is no workaround. For more info, keep in touch with Now Software. This is not relevant if you do not use your modem to make calls to people in your Now Contact database. US Robotics modems, considered by many to be the best on the market, use the awful MacCommCenter software. If you wind up with this package and faxing is important, dump it and get FaxSTF instead.

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.)