Macking 85

Educating Yourself
I am ceaselessly amazed at the number of people who spend one to two thousand dollars or more to get their Macs and then resist learning how to use them. It seems that there is some mental block that overwhelms their natural curiosity when it is a lot easier to figure out these things than you think.
Be a hacker. What's a hacker? The idiot press and the hack (no connection) politicians would have you believe that a hacker is a criminal who wants nothing more than to crack into your computer and steal your private information; or terrorists who can magically crack open the computers that control food production and somehow trick the machines to blend in toxic chemicals. Well, some of the producers are perfectly capable of adding toxic chemicals on their own, thankyouverymuch, and the computer-using criminal you are thinking of is a cracker, not a hacker.
A hacker is just a computer user who is always asking the question "what would happen if I..." and tries to find out. Be a hacker. Try things. Most important, make notes. Get yourself a thick legal pad and write down what you do as you experiment. What folder did you open? What did you remove and where did you put it? What settings did you change to Preferences? While it may take you three times as long to do things, you will be building up a personal database of experiences that you can use in the future.
Write down your questions. Keep track of serial numbers. Write down the name of ports on the computer (USB, FireWire, Ethernet, etc.) and make little drawings of them. When you talk to other Mackers make sure you get the correct names for windows, title bars, menu bars, and what they mean. The most important computer peripheral a new user can have is a simple pad and pencil.
Get a copy of Robin Williams' "The Little Mac Book" and keep it in the bathroom. At every opportunity, flip it open to a random page and read something. Take it with you anywhere you have to wait in line. If something makes no sense, flip to a different page. Let it sink in; everything will mean something to you later.
Join PMUG or your local Mac user group. Spend time with others and talk about your Macs. Ask people what they do, and how. Become a volunteer in the group. All groups need officers and volunteers to keep things moving, and your desirability is not related to your user skills. Be active and you WILL learn. Once you know something you will be one step ahead of the next person behind you and you can then teach them. Working on a problem together will help you both learn.
Buy the Apple Extended Warranty for your Mac (especially if it is a portable). Not only will it guarantee you free repairs should something break, but it gives you access to their tech support toll-free line. Use it! Call and ask how to do something. If it's out of their area they'll tell you - for instance you can't get answers on how to format a Quark document, but they will tell you how to deal with font problems.
Public school education has been driving out the joy of learning from people's minds for generations now, but it can still be fun once you are out of the institutional setting. PMUG classes are fun and MacCamp is a blast. Learning goes on all the time. Dive in!

More on Epson Printers
Epson came to the Portland Mac Users Group last month to talk about their products. I thought I knew all there was to know about them, but I learned something anyway.
Their piezoelectric inkjet is unique in the industry. Most other inkjets use a form of bubblejet, that is, heating the ink to boiling to spray it onto the paper. This takes longer to dry and causes the dots to spread out, muddying the image. It also causes decay of the print head, due to heating and cooling, so the head mechanisms must be replaced periodically, or be part of the cartridge, increasing costs. Epson does it with pressure and the ink dries instantly.
Photo-printers use six-color processes, resulting in better fleshtones without dithering colors as a four-color process must. All of their printers use two cartridges: one for black and one that has all five colors. Japanese-market printers use different colors than US-market printers because they like bolder, brighter colors than we do.
Future Epson photo-printers will be moving to a seven or eight-color process, including a light black (grey) ink which makes for much better shadows and B&W photographs/greyscale output.
Most competing printers do not use the black at all when making color prints. Lexmark, and HP, only use the black cartridge when printing an all-black document. When black and color is mixed on a page, they use all three colors combined to fake a black. The Epsons do use true black in all their photo prints and mixed image/text printouts (such as PowerPoint pages or company logos on letterhead). Why the other printers will not do this is beyond me; maybe one of the reps of HP or especially Lexmark reading this will write in and explain why. The cynic says, of course, "so they can sell more color cartridges - what else?"

FreeGeek and Recycling Macs
Finally stopped by the office of FreeGeek.com during their anniversary/block party last month. They have quite a site there: a large warehouse with laboratory, repair stands, huge rooms stacked to the gills with old computers, monitors and peripherals.
They have lots of used small hard drives for sale, and refurbished systems, all with Linux installed. Used commodores, TTD machines, recorders, and other odd stuff. Volunteers are always welcome, and you can earn yourself a system of your own if you participate in a rebuild program. Great way to learn about hardware and Linux, too.
Macs? Nope, but they have affiliated with and become a dropoff site for Mac Renewal, an organization in Eugene that accepts donated Macs, restores them and passes them on to needy groups and individuals in the US and beyond. If you have a Mac to get rid of and don't know who to call, the contact for MacRenewal is macrenewal@mac.com. But you don't have to go to Eugene; FreeGeek serves as a dropoff point. Their address is 1731 SE 10th St., just south of Hawthorne. They will accept any Mac from a Quadra forward (no Classics or Plus/SE), any monitor as long as it works (there is a $10 charge for recycling if it doesn't, but it keeps them out of the landfills), and the Mac can be working or not. They will figure out what is wrong, fix it with cobbed-together parts and pass it on.
If you are nearer to Eugene than to Portland, their address is 1710 Van Buren St., Eugene 97402, phone (541) 686-2366.

UMAX is Vanishing
UMAX is getting as close as it can to being a virtual company. They don't make anything, their corporate offices are almost unreachable, everything is contracted out including manufacturing, sales, their nonexistent tech support and all is simply not available. Now, to add insult to injury, they are removing their scanner drivers from their websites so if you want an upgrade you will need to send money to the address specified on their site in order to receive a CD. This applies only to their US customers; as of this writing Europeans could still download drivers as could any American by simply going to their UK page.
After the story appeared in The Register, it looked like the company was going to change this policy too. Windoze customers are getting treated even worse: false claims as to why parallel port scanners won't work under XP. Even after being caught in flat-out lies, they persist.
A release from UMAX posted on MacNN.com stated that they are not going to commit to ever releasing OSX drivers for their older and consumer-grade scanners; only for the PowerLook III PowerLook 2100XL PowerLook 1100 PowerLook 3000 professional models.
Bottom line: Dump your UMAX scanner and get one from a company that cares. If you would rather keep your scanner there are non-free alternatives: drivers from SilverFast (LaserSoft Imaging) and VueScan. SilverFast supports OS9 and OSX and VueScan is for 8.6 and 9.x only.

Postal Label Site
It was announced that the USPS was upgrading their Postal Shipping Label website to a version that would not run on Macs. I wrote off a letter of complaint and got this in response:
Thank you for contacting us. Because MAC users are not able to use the new Shipping Labels website, the previous MAC compatible version of the site is still available at the following URL. Even though the message states that it will not be available past July 1st, we can assure you that it will be operational until MAC users can use the new Shipping Label site. We apologize for any inconvenience.
USPS Internet Customer Care Center
icustomercare@usps.com
Be sure to visit and use this site and make sure they don't forget about us. Later releases assured that a Mac version was being developed. There are other services that we may be in danger of being excluded from, so be militant and they will listen. They have to.

Font Problems and Acrobat
I battled a vexing problem with Acrobat Distiller recently in which it would fail to make a PDF document after distilling a PS file. It turned out that the culprit was a corrupt font being loaded by ATM Deluxe, even though the font was not being used in the document. ATM had no clue that it was trying to load a corrupt font.
All the more reason to switch from ATM Deluxe to Suitcase X (which runs under both OS9 and OSX). It can tell when a font is damaged and refuse to load it.

MS Wants to Take Over the World (yawn)
One of my favorite computer news sites is The Register, a British webzine that is unafraid of offending M$ or anyone else while reporting the news and rumors from around the world.
Well, yet another M$ project called Palladium, which is called the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), is built on a chip on the motherboard of M$-compatible boxes, but could eventually be made part of the CPU by Intel and AMD. This is a really scary control-freak measure set out to make sure that an outside party can control what you run on your computer, when and under what conditions. User benefits: none. RIAA benefits: lots because it will be able to prohibit you from ripping CDs (heard this before?) and also movies and DVDs.
Fritz Hollings, the Senator from Disney who is pushing to make all this mandatory, may find out that if M$ succeeds in just including this in all boxes, no laws will be needed. People who do not use TCPA-enabled machines will find themselves cut off from applications that require the chip. This is why so many people are forced to buy MS Word: just to be able to read documents from all the other Word users.
Right now, ICWord can help Mackers avoid this, as can ThinkFree Office, but both have their limitations. ICW can't create or edit Word documents - just read and print them, and ThinkFree can't read files bigger than two megabytes. Hopefully TF will get that particular limitation fixed. ICWord is $20 ($30 including ICExcel) and ThinkFree is $49 and can also read/write PowerPoint documents.
Educate yourself about these horrible abuses coming from MicroShaft and other large companies, and their fellow travelers in the government and entertainment industries. Be active; write letters to your duly elected hacks; they listen when they think enough voters care and it doesn't take many letters to do so.

Global Village *IS STILL* Alive and Well
A reader writes, "Global Village has been bought and sold a time or two. I think it's now owned by Zoom. They still sell a few modems, and software updaters for the old (pre-Boca, pre-Zoom) GV modems. GV is still at the original domain site.
"As of June 2002 that's absolutely correct; the site looks quite good; and a Zoom press release on another page says they definitely plan to continue the Global Village line."
(And I'll put in a personal plug that in my long-time experience with Global Village modems and software they've always been very satisfactory and trouble free - except for the horrid USB powered modem that was their last product - so I hope the brand remains alive and well.)

Mac Disks on Wintel boxes
A French company, Logiciels and Services Duhem, publishes two programs: MacCD and MacDisk ($35 and $70) which enable Microsoft users to read Mac-formatted CD-ROMs, and the full suite, MacDisk, will read all Mac disks, floppies, Zips, CDs and external hard drives.
A demo may be downloaded from the company site
They also offer apps that will manage and decode Mac files on MS systems.
Macs, of course, include all necessary software for reading PC disks and converting most files, out of the box.

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.)