Macking 51

Getting more whelmed
Okay, maybe I was a little harsh on the new iBooks last month. Fact is, my whelmage level increases the more I read about them.
First of all, I really want one. They satisfy a need I have had for some time, but I have not been able to justify the cost of a PowerBook, even used. Now the idea of being able to write out on the front porch while the document stays on the HD on my upstairs office Mac gives me the impetus. But if I do buy, it won't be until the AirPort is released, and maybe not until there are more color choices. Look for some action at Macworld 2K next January. (Wouldn't a "Macworld 2K" actually be expected in 2048?)

Free Quicken upgrade
Don't forget the free Quicken upgrade to all users of version 7 or before. Go to this web site: http://www.intuit.com/corporate/year2000/quicken/qmac.html and fill out the form. Do it quickly because this URL is very hard to find if you just go to intuit.com home page. I figure this offer will be rescinded at the end of the year. Remember, it's a FREE upgrade to Quicken 98.

G4 Upon Us
Pick any Mac magazine that comes out in the next few weeks for the details, photos and evaluations of the new G4, which Jobs announced recently. Notice how the case, still the same strange 4-handled thing, is now a nice smoky grey and white with clear handles instead of G3 Blue. I still think it's an oversized hulk, but the guts are pure cream. It is sad that the PPC and Pentium III are both rated in MHz, because the raw performance of a 500 MHz G4 runs rings around a 700 MHz P3. But people see "700" and think it's faster. It's like rating the speed and power of a car engine by looking at the maximum RPM.
The slowest G4 uses the same motherboard architecture as the G3, but the two faster models have a new board. Upgrades for G3 machines should start becoming available from companies like Newer Technologies pretty soon, but just like the G3 upgrades to the 6100 PowerMac, it will not be able to accelerate the entire system so expect a G4 upgrade to give you about 90% of the performance of a "real" G4.

Letters
Kieran Mullen writes, Here is a little trick I think you should mention, for people wanting a bigger hard drive on their G3. Open the Mac, unhook the IDE CD-ROM, plug in an IDE 10 GB HD from Costco or like me get a 20 GB drive from Fry's. Format it and copy your files over. Then unplug the old HD, replace it with the new and put your CD-Rom back in. Voila, bigger HD!
It's good you found the mp3 player. I have been using it since the beginning and have seen it come out since it's infancy. Nice, huh?
Also do I see any articles on www.freemac.com soon? It's sounds great! 1,000,000 free Macs, with ISP service of course. :-)
I am suspicious of Freemac. They aren't promising anything, or charging anything, but they are collecting the email addresses, and other info, from Mac owners or would-be Mac owners. They would never have to actually live up to the offer, while making serious money selling the mailing addresses. But then, I'm just naturally paranoid and suspicious.
Donna MacBride writes, Thanks for the warning about ObjectSupportLib. I found it, right there in the extensions folder, and I have no idea how it got there. Anything else I should remove to improve performance?
Start with Desktop Printing. Even Apple tech support is warning people to disable it, unless they have two or more printers and regularly switch between them. That is who it was originally designed for - corporate or lab sites with multiple Macs and printers - but its inherent instability and quirky behavior is driving people away from it.
Hint: If you have to use it, open the Extensions Folder, locate Desktop Print Monitor and do a GetInfo on it. Change the Minimum Size field at the bottom of the window to match the Suggested Size, and boost the Preferred Size. If it suggests 160 or 237 or so, make it 512. If it suggests 1300, make it 2048. (I like to assign RAM in exact multiples of a kilobyte, 1024.)
Many print problems are alleviated by assigning the Monitor more RAM, whether it's the Desktop Print Monitor or the regular Print Monitor.
OS 8.5 and later changes the GetInfo box, so if you select something and type Cmd-I, you will see "General Information." Click on that popup menu and select Memory. If you use the mouse to invoke GetInfo (from the File menu), you will see a submenu that lets you go straight to memory settings.
Epson printers don't support Desktop Print Monitor, and install their own Epson Monitor. Assign more RAM to it. Only yesterday I saw one of the new USB inkjet printers from HP, and they install their own version of Desktop Printing. Disable that, too.
Do you never use AppleGuide, the built-in Help feature? Disable it. (New users, when I say "disable," I mean for you to open the Extensions Manager in the Control Panels folder, scroll down to the item to disable, and uncheck the On/Off box.) What else can you disable? Depending on whether you are on a network, or use certain features, you can turn off the control panels ColorSync, Control Strip, Dial Assist, File Sharing, Launcher, Users & Groups; extensions Apple Built-in Ethernet and any other Ethernet extensions, AppleScript, AppleShare, all the Color SW drivers, ColorSync Extension, CSW 6000 Series, File Sharing Extension.
If something has Library, or Lib, in the name, it does not load into RAM at startup, but is called by specific applications when needed. Except for the aforementioned ObjectSupportLib, leave all the libraries alone. Not all libraries display in Extensions Manager.
Continuing the extensions you can disable, turn off Find By Content, Folder Actions (useful, but if you don't use them, don't load them), GlobalFax GX, ImageWriter, LaserWriter 300/LS, Microsoft OLE Extension (required on Quadras running PageMaker 5 and all models running MS Works), Printer Share, QuickDraw 3D unless you use graphics programs or games that take advantage of it, Speakable Items and Speech Recognition, StyleWriter 1200, any module that has USB in the name unless you have a USB-capable Mac, and Video Startup.
In case you didn't know, you can invoke Extensions Manager at startup by holding the space bar down after you see the MacOS window. It should appear before the March of Icons across the bottom of your screen.
Some of you will need the above items, and will be so informed by the application that uses them the next time you launch it. That is why you should never just trash an extension but use the Manager to disable it. Then you can turn it back on when needed. Print drivers (that show up in the Chooser) for printers you don't have can be Trashed outright. But keep LaserWriter 8, even if you don't have a laserwriter, because certain programs change their word spacing when formatted for inkjet, then opened on a different machine for laser printing.
Word is the biggest offender here, and the most common problem experienced by people who create a document and then take it into Kinko's for printing. When LaserWriter is chosen, the line endings change, words wrap differently and your carefully arranged formatting goes to hell. If you have an inkjet at home but want to format a document for printing elsewhere, be sure to open the Chooser and turn on LaserWriter 8, which will also force you to enable AppleTalk. (Be sure your inkjet is turned off, or it will start spewing pages of garbage code.) Then go over your document and fix any word-wrapping problems you find, save it and copy to your floppy to take to the laser printer. Be sure to turn off AppleTalk and re-select your inkjet before you leave, and don't forget to bring a copy of your fonts used in the document if they are not part of the standard font package. (When in doubt, ask.)
If you have purchased Norton Utilities and done a standard install, it has placed two defective items you should remove. One is DiskLight, which slows down your hard drive access, and CrashGuard, which many of us have nicknamed Crash Doubler. What it does is interpret certain non-crash events as crashes and acts accordingly, effectively doubling your crashes. Disable the control panel (actually an alias) and the CrashGuard Extension. Then put them both in the Trash.

More useful extensions
I have been adding a few 3rd-party system enhancements I would like to recommend. I don't bog it down with as many as I used to (dancing icons, animated desktops, etc.) but there are a lot of nice products out there, most of which are available as a free download and run as demos for a limited time, or are straight shareware. Some are even free. Find most of them at MacDownload or on the publisher's site. There are a lot of places for free and shareware these days.
Action Utilities 1.2. This utility from PowerOn Software, patches the Open and Save dialog boxes in a manner similar to Super Boomerang of years past. But Action is far less buggy and more powerful than Boomerang was. Action has also bought the defunct Now Utilities and has/will be rewriting and releasing Now Save, Now Menus and others. Now Menus (Action Menus?) replaces Apple Menu Options and does far more, enabling you to assign key commands of your choice to any menu.
DeskPicture 4.5. This panel has been around for years, and the current version works well with 8.6. Even though Desktop Pictures and Appearance from Apple let you place pictures on your desktop, this shareware control panel lets you place multiple pictures and resize them, overlap them and even distort them to your heart's content.
Eyeballs or MyEyes. Both put a pair of eyeballs in the menubar that blink, wink, sleep and follow the cursor around the screen when you are moving it. Eyeballs is free and has no settings, B&W eyes only. MyEyes is shareware and offers several kinds of eyes, with and without eyelashes, and in color. Especially useful on old PowerBooks with passive-matrix screens where you are always losing track of the cursor.
Kaleidoscope 2.1.1. There is probably a later version by now. I don't use this because I have a Theme in Appearance that I prefer, but many people like this to colorize their windows every whichway. It can take a toll in processor speed, but is a lot of fun. Try it and if you don't experience problems with your setup, make your Mac look like an interface designer's worst nightmare.
Menuette 3.0. Replace that boring old English in the menubar with friendly, right-brained and thoroughly confusing icons. Once you memorize what they represent, your machine will be impossible to use by the untrained. If you have a small monitor, the icons take up less space then the menu names. It will also let you choose any font in your system to display menu names if you prefer that to icons. I like Tekton Bold or Sand. The latest version animates the icons when you are holding them down.
Moose Panel. The return of the Talking Moose, familiar to longtime Mackers. It will pop up and make stupid comments at random intervals, and more.
PopChar. This panel produces a dropdown menu that displays all the characters in whatever font you are using at the time. Especially useful for finding extended characters and with iconic fonts like Zapf Dingbats. Does not work with some versions of Word, but fine in all the page-layout programs. Much more useful than Key Caps. There is a Pro version of this, but it doesn't do anything that justifies the cost; the Lite version is free.
Snitch 2.6.2. This patches the GetInfo box to add features including Change Type and Creator, Make Visible or Invisible, Lock Name and other options that used to require ResEdit. There are other utilities that do the same thing, but this puts them conveniently in the GetInfo box. Beware: it can become corrupt and cause the Finder to quit when you invoke GetInfo. It happened only once, but I had to manually remove all the Snitch preferences, extension and control panel and reinstall to fix things. Snitch is one of my most useful add-ons.

Other Utilities
BatchTyper 2 PPC. Do you have a folder full of JPEG images that are all set to launch JPEG Viewer when double-clicked, but you would rather they launched Graphic Converter? This utility will let you convert the whole folder in one swoop.
Installer Observer. What did that installation of Office98 put in your System Folder, anyway? Microsoft is notorious for peppering pieces of itself all over the place. If you run Installer Observer first, then do your install, then run it again, Observer will display a list of what was installed and where. Use before installing any new software.
InformINIT. This is a self-running database of extensions, panels, libraries and the like. If you wonder what all that stuff in your System Folder actually is, this will tell you. It lists all the Apple stuff, and most commonly available 3rd-party items as well. Shareware and worth it; the guy put a lot of work into it.
GURU: GUide to Ram Upgrades 2.8. This is free from NewerRAM. It lists every model of Mac ever made, and what the RAM requirements/options are, info about video RAM, processor speed, etc. Great reference.

Long filenames
Remember my trouble trying to read W98-formatted CD-ROMs? Even OS 8.6 can't read the long filenames, defaulting instead to the embedded DOS 8.3 names. Well, I discovered that the very same MP3 files, if placed on a CD-ROM formatted under Linux, display their long filenames just fine! Once again, if there's a problem, what's the answer? "IT'S MICROSOFT!" But I still fail to understand why someone inside or outside of Apple can't patch the system to read PC CDs properly. So far, no one has had an answer.

MP3 player
I recently acquired an old 6100 for use as an MP3 player for my stereo system. Because my primary Mac is in an upstairs office, I could not feed music from it into the stereo in the living room. Even if I ran wires, I would have to go upstairs to change the program. 6100s are selling retail for as little as $200 these days, and about $75 if you have one and try to sell it to a retailer.
Since MacAmp requires a PPC chip to operate, that is about the oldest and slowest machine capable of running it. (The 6200s are actually slower because the 603 chip has less power at the same MHz than the 601 used in the x100 series Macs.) But the 6100 case, large and awkward on a computer desk, is just the right size to hold your stereo receiver, cassette and other components on top. Plop the smallest monitor you can find on top of that and stash the keyboard and mouse nearby and you have an effective MP3 player for about the same cost as any serious stereo component.
Now all I need to do is run an Ethernet line from the G3 and I can copy MP3 files directly onto the 6100, or maybe even play them from the G3's drive across the network. Ain't computing fun?

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.)