Here’s an interesting suggestion. Buy your Mac with an American Express card and AMEX extends your warranty at no additional cost. Check with AMEX and be sure Macs fall under their guidelines (automobiles don’t). (Thanks, Macs Newsletter, Spokane, WA MUG.)
If you have kids, remember that MacWrite and MacPaint are two of the greatest pieces of educational software around. You can use almost any old version of either program, as long as it works on your current Mac.
HyperCard is also proving to be a good piece of kids educational software. You can even write your own games for your children in HyperCard.
Here is a partial list of some Macintosh kids software: “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”, Number Maze, Stunt Copter, Hangman, Pinball, Crystal Raiders, Puzzles, MacConcentration, Leprechaun, Cotton Tails, MasterType, The Print Shop, Reader Rabbit, Speed Reader II, The Toy Shop, Word Attack, Inigo stacks and Manhole.
If Pyro kicks in during a long PageMaker printing job, either disable it, take the cursor to the pre-determined “never black” corner, or use another screen darkener.
If you have a hand scanner (Lightning Scan or ScanMan), use the spine of a large phone book to keep the scanner tracking in a straight line.
Please write this down somewhere, so you can help people who want to locate a nearby MUG. You can find out by calling 1-800-538-9696, ext. 500 at Apple Computer.
I got a call the other day about substitutes for the ImageWriter. The caller observed that if there was really a great alternative for the ImageWriter, we’d be hearing a whole lot about it. As of right now, that about sums it up.
The Seikosha 1000 AP is one of the few alternatives. It’s about $225 plus cable. It is slow. If you can stand slow, this one will do. Be warned that some people have a devil of a time getting it hooked up correctly, and others can’t stand the slowness. Other than those two caveats, it works.
Also consider that at $225 you are really close to the used price on ImageWriter I and II machines.
To use card by card animation, paste each succeeding image over the image of the previous card. Move it until it matches the location, then Cut, Go Next and Paste. All of this is done with the image in question selected.
If you bought an “academic” version of Word 4.0 which does not include SuperPaint 1.1, be advised that at least one such purchaser complained to MS that SuperPaint had been promised in the academic package, and was sent a free copy to sooth over feelings.
Most games you ran on your 68000 Mac won’t run on your 68030 version. This is probably thanks to some early malicious copy protection schemes. If you have a couple of hundred dollars worth of games, c’est la vie.
If you are going to a 68030 Mac, don’t buy Arkanoid, Portal, Racter, Balance of Power, The Uninvited, Dark Castle, The Colony, Defense of the Realm, or any Mindscape game.
Unless they fix them, of course. Meanwhile, call each one and bitch. Some companies will offer a different game (which will work) in exchange, but don’t you hold your breath. (Thanks in part to MacValley Voice, Burbank CA MUG.)
If dot leaders get crowded and spacing gets uneven, go back and put hard spaces between the words, using Command/spacebar. (Thanks MacValley Voice.)
Neat idea, Burbank, CA MUG! They have a group called the Virus Rangers. These Rangers check out service bureaus and dealers to see if viral safeguards are in place. Responsible bureaus and dealers are then listed in MacValley Voice.
Don’t use a period to start a file name, as in .filename. This can cause system error problems.
Months ago I noted that entering graphics in Word 4.0 is too IBM-like. Member Marilyn Wallace reports that there is a more Mac-like way. Position the graphic using the dialog box. Any old place. Now go to Print Preview (Command/I) and click on the “show margins” icon. Now you can drag the graphic to its final resting place. Next click the cursor on the gray area off the page. The screen reflows with your graphic repositioned. Thanks Marilyn.
To find repeated occurrences of a string in Word, use Find… for the first instance. Now you can close the Find… dialog and use the equal key (=) on the numeric keypad (not the regular keyboard) for additional finds. (Partly from the North Coast OH MUG newsletter, a nice looking 3-color newsletter.
Command/A in Word repeats the previous action. For example, format a subhead. Now select the next subhead and press Command/A.
If you are a philatelist (it’s not illegal, folks; it’s what you call an adult stamp collector—not a collector of adult stamps), consider making your presentation or display pages in PageMaker. Burt Hopkins of Macintosh Users of Delaware (MUD) won a bronze medal for his display of Egyptian stamps.
If Campus Technology Products has tried to get you to buy software from them, be advised that MacConnection has better prices on all but WINGZ, Illustrator 88, Streamline, Image Studio, LetraStudio, MacDraw II, MacProject II and ReadySetGo.
They only serve people connected with education.
Tricky, tricky! To get Sound Leech to extract sounds from other than a HyperCard stack, make a copy of the file. Change its type and creator to STAK and WILD. Now Sound Leech thinks it is looking at a HyperCard stack and extracts the sound for you. Be sure to throw away the mangled Copy of the file. (Thanks, MacNexus, Sacramento CA MUG.)
If you have a lot of disks, there is absolutely nothing better for disk storage than Vertical Solutions’ wall mount shelves. They come in 120 and 240 disk sizes and retail for $49.95 and $59.95. The other method I use is the Apple carousels, which hold 80 disks and can be stacked 3-high. The rest of my disks are in desk drawers, etc.
If you have discovered using two copies of PageMaker (name one PageMaker2), you will know that this may screw up hyphenation. To get hyphenation correct again, close both copies and reopen the document in question. It will hyphenate correctly now.
To print out a list of PageMaker styles, export your text to Word. In Word, open Define Styles and while the dialog box is open, Print. You get a printed list of styles in Normal style and font for that document.
MacCountry News says that a good test for a word processor for a college student is to see if the student could do a 10-page term paper with full formatting the night before the paper is due. They say that Word flunks that test.
If you are out of warranty and don’t have AppleCare, why not hunt out a reliable third-party Macintosh repair service? They don’t pull entire modules and replace them. They find the component which is bad and replace it. Usually at much lower cost than dealer prices.
The Cadillac of the screen dump capture tools is Exposure by Preferred Software, $99. It has paint tools for touch up, scaling, and commands like StickAround, Bleach, WhiteOut, TearOffs, Frames, Stamps, Brushes, FatScale and Set Halftones. Lots of other stuff and a big manual, too.
When writing “go to card_” scripts in HyperCard, the card id number is foolproof. However, naming the card intuitively helps you make sense out of scripts later on. Like “Go to card “Average Scores.”
Never use card numbers (go to card 4) since any card added in front of that card will cause your script to take you to the wrong card.
If you are considering an HP DeskWriter, remember:
1) Its inkjet and pages take 20 seconds or more to dry. They are also vulnerable to moisture at all times.
2) The duty cycle is just a few copies a day.
3) It is slow
4) There is no PostScript capability.
5) eps files print at 72 dpi.
Somebody sends you a Word 4.0 document. How would you like to see their rough drafts? Simple. Open the document in Word 3.02 or 3.01. All the author’s changes and modifications will be appended at the end of the file. The MacPacker from Richardson, TX says try it on employee evaluations and raise requests. Ought to spice things up a little. MacPacker calls this one the “Cap’n Gates Decoder Program.”
As far as Guy Kawasaki’s new book, “The Macintosh Way,” is concerned, MacPacker says “Joe Bob sez check it out.” Mouse Droppings agrees. This book is fun to read.
If your boss uses the Fish INIT, which causes fish to swim across the screen like an aquarium, you could sneak in some night and draw obscene phrases to float across the screen the next day. MacPacker thought of this devious scheme, not me.
October MacUser suggested that Mac II owners could upgrade with a $6000 Daystar accelerator board. But you can buy a IIcx with a hard disk, keyboard and color monitor for less money. Then you will have a Mac II and a Mac IIcx. (Thanks, Don Shupe, MacYak, Ellensburg WA MUG.)
Shortcut from Raymond Lau, Aladdin Systems, $29.95, searches for files, remembers recently visited folders, decompresses Stuffit files, remembers frequently used files performs file maintenance and more.
Here’s a HyperCard script to obtain coordinates on the screen. Drag the message box until its upper left corner is the point you wish to find coordinates for. Type “the loc of msg” without the quote marks. Press Return and you get the location of the upper left corner of the message box.
Do you forget what push or pop card mean? Think of a stack of plates in a cafeteria. They “push” a new plate onto the stack. You pop that top plate off to use.
Hope that helps. (Thanks, Carol Kaehler in “HyperCard Power.”
If text following a check box in Word is too high or too low, use the Super or SubScript command to adjust its baseline.
Free mousepad! MacDoctor Electronics will send you a nice one. Tell ‘em you read about it in Mouse Droppings. Write to Betty Violette, Mac Doctor Electronics, 1145 Terra Bella Ave., Mountain View, CA 94043.
The PMMU chip which lets 68020 Macs take advantage of Virtual memory retails for $495. But check the back pages of MacWeek, where BayTech offers it for $200. 813-360-8617. (Thanks, MadMacNews.)
What reads best (most easy to read)? Serif or sans serif type? A study by Colin Wheldon states that body text comprehension is 67% for serif and 12% for sans serif. For headlines, 92% said serif upper and lower case. 90% liked sans serif upper and lower case. All caps text, italic text and cursive text all ranked much lower.
One startling statistic: only 39% will turn pages to finish a continued story. Ouch!
But if you worry about widows (a single line of a paragraph standing by itself at the bottom of a column), don’t. Exactly 0% even recognized any widows.
That’s a surprise, but I still don’t like widow lines and orphan lines (an orphan line is a single line of a paragraph appearing at the top of a column).
If you are a WriteNow user, don’t use DiskTop to delete WriteNow files until the application has been closed. You get problems if you ignore this warning.
What’s the first thing to do when you are trying to perform an operation and you get an “almost out of memory” message?
First, highlight a single character—any character—and copy it. Now select another single character and copy it.
Why twice? Think about it! The first character you copied replaced the large item you probably had on the Clipboard. But it holds the previous item in a buffer. Why? Because that is how you are able to Undo the last Copy command.
The second time you Copy a single character, the buffer lets go of the big item and replaces it with the single character copied to the Clipboard initially. You now have about as small a Clipboard as it is possible to achieve.
This maneuver reduces the memory being used for buffer and Clipboard to the minimum. Hopefully you will now be able to perform the next move.
An item on UseNet says that if a “good” disk asks to be initialized, try heating the disk moderately (between the hard drive and the Mac, for instance). The disk may work after arriving at a temperature more in line with the temperature when the information was committed to disk.
If you ever lock up a FullWrite Professional file, Ashton Tate has a utility which will help you recover it. It’s FileRecover, and it is on the bulletin boards.
You just copied six files from one disk to another. Now you want to trash them from the source disk. With a color capable Mac, try this:
Select the six files. Now assign a different color to them. After your copying is finished, simply select the six files with the weird color and trash them.
No color on your Mac? Awwww! Create a new folder on the source disk. Put the six items in it. Drag the entire folder to the target disk. Now it is easy enough to select the folder on the source disk and trash it.
If your output device is a LaserWriter, some sources say don’t use fonts with both very thick and very thin lines (Garamond comes to mind), or which terminate in gentle flared curves (Optima?). Fonts like this reproduce poorly at 300 dpi. If you are not picky, you will probably ignore this advice.
Never set script fonts in all caps. It looks crappy!
One of the common mistakes in using the LaserWriter is letting your Mac substitute a LaserWriter font for the ImageWriter font you used during composition. Either use a LaserWriter (PostScript) font to start with, or switch to a LaserWriter font before printing, checking line and page endings and spacing before doing a final Save.
Jean Louis Gassé says that Apple’s goal is to be like Honda: where there is no need to even talk about the warranty.
Cute, Louie, but no banana!
To get to that goal, Apple would have to deal with things like burned up power supplies (I am on my fifth one), noisy SEs, locked up 40- and 80-meg internal hard drives, no-work LQs and other such items.
Would “the rest of us” be talking about the length of warranty if it were not for things like that? Wake up and smell the roses, Louie!
Honda doesn’t have to worry about length of warranty because the product outlasts the warranty with no problems.
That’s why, Louie!
Just one more Louie item. Gassé attacked questioners at a recent PMUG meeting so vigorously that at least one member decided not to come to the mike to take that kind of abuse.
There is always more than one way to skin a cat. For instance, to retrieve all the scripts from your “broken” HyperCard stack, open the stack in Word 4.0. Just hold down the Shift key while you click Open and Word will import the stack you select. Your scripts will all appear, but there will be some junk characters hanging around here and there.
Using HyperCard with an extended keyboard, you can program that row of F1-F15 keys to do all sorts of things. Here’s a script:
on functionKey whichKey
if whichKey = "1"
then flash 3 times -- or whatever
if whichKey = "2"
then play boing -- or whatever
--add other actions for other keys
end on functionKey
Now, from within the stack containing the function key script (or all stacks if you place the script in the Home stack) you can simply tap the appropriate F key to perform the action described in the script.
