Yes, you can scan in color on your black and white flatbed scanner. Use Colorset, $399.95, Studiotronics, 1-800-780-3825. Because it works by using several passes with different filters, I imagine it might also work with Lightning Scan and Scan Man 1/2 page scanners. If three members of CMUG are interested, we can get Colorset for $239,95 and CMUG gets a free one to raffle. If one or two members are interested, the special price still applies. Offer ends 4/30/90. Contact Mouse Droppings if you are interested.
Where can you find all kinds of disk storage devices? Try Diskette Gazette, 2278 Trade Zone Blvd., San Jose, CA 95131, Ask for a free sample issue. They have single disk clear plastic, 3-ring binder disk pages, flex-holders, roll-tops, wall units, side-by-side, cassettes, cartellas, attaché cases and almost every imaginable kind of disk holder ever invented.
Just found a source for LaserWriter floppy disk blank labels at less than .043 (4 and 3/10ths cents) per label. Previously, about .19 per label was the best I could find. The new source” Quill Corp., 100 Schelter Rd., Lincolnshire, IL 60069-3621. Ask for a catalog. The floppy labels come 630 for $26.98. And they are Avery, a reliable name brand. Haven’t used them yet, so I don’t know how well they stick (when you want them to stay on) and peel (when you want them to come off).
I read where Apple says you won’t be needing those Teflon glides for SE and Mac II mice, because they have a built-in Teflon bar. Ha! Took me less than 10 months to wear one out!
If you like to use patterned, outlined and shadowed text, go easy. A little bit goes a very long way, aesthetically.
All caps is hard to read. Reserve all caps for very short lines of boldface. I know, I know, I have told you this before, but some of you obviously haven’t been listening.
Don’t letterspace more than 160% in PageMaker, or you will sometimes have problems printing.
When using ATM, b e sure to compare “Best” and “Faster” printing on the ImageWriter. Best gives you 144 dpi. Faster gives you 72 dpi. You choose.
Just for kicks, try negative leading and minus letterspacing in 2 and 3 line headlines. You may like the “look” better.
Are you saving your Fred Meyer cash register receipts? Give them to your local school board, or mail them to CMUG and we’ll make sure they go to a deserving school. For each $180,000 in receipts, Fred Meyer gives a school a Macintosh (or an Apple II if that’s what they are into).
Other supermarkets are taking notice. For example, Grady’s, a progressive supermarket in Waldport, Oregon (pop. 1,600), has cut the same deal for local schools.
Command/Option/w makes all PageMaker pages show as Fit In Window. (Thanks, NotePad, ClubMac of Springfield, IL.)
If a portion of a rotated HyperCard graphic disappears off the edge of a card, you must use Revert to get it back. Udo will not get it. (Thanks again, Notepad.)
The enormous number of hints for PageMaker proves to me the fantastic versatility of this program. I know people who want a spell checker in it, too. Over my dead body! I don’t need more k and yet another dictionary.
Which reminds me. When will someone program a dictionary converter to allow all programs to use the same dictionary.
If you want to clear existing tabs in PageMaker’s Indents/Tabs dialog box, you will get a “cleaner” clear-out if you do not touch the left and right scroll symbols before executing a Clear command. PageMaker sometimes leaves junk tabs when you mess with the scroll symbols first.
When working in HyperCard, you need a “test stack” to try thing out. To use it efficiently, open your test stack first. Now, whenever you want to try something there, Command/R gets you a page of recently visited stacks/cards. Guess what? Your test stack is in the upper left corner where it is always easy to click on.
Optimizing your hard drive once in a while is a pain in the derriere. But not if you use Silver Lining software from LaCie. Silver Lining makes it so-o-o-o easy to optimize a drive. And changing partition sizes is a snap. Once you use it, you will wonder how you got along without it. Just one more reason to buy a Cirrus hard drive.
Bold and Roman text look almost identical when using ATM with small sizes. I sometimes have to peek at the menu to see what is going on.
There are SIMMs out there labeled “030 only.” That is exactly what it means. Don’t use them unless your Mac has an 030 processor.
At press time, ATM does not work with GCC’s Personal Laser Printer, Write Move and Write Impact printers. It works great with DeskJet Plus and DeskWriter from HP. It also works with Toshiba 3-in-One and the Apple IISC.
If you have plenty of RAM, give ATM a bigger cache. The default is 96. More cache speeds up screen redraw time, which if awful with ATM.
One user gave ATM a megabyte. He reports no slowness at all. Well, I guess not!!! On the other hand, I gave ATM one meg, just for fun, and I still notice slow screen redraws under certain conditions.
The December issue of FatBits (Conejo-Ventura CA MUG) has a must-see 17 pages on fonts. Hurry up and send them $3 and ask for a copy. I don’t know if $3 is right, but that should do it. I am sure they will let you know if they want more. 342 Carla Dr., Simi, CA 93065.
If you hate editing italic text, change it to plain, edit, and change it back.
Or use Word 4.0, which gives you a slanted insertion point, which makes it easy to edit italic. (Thanks, Known Users of Sequoia CA MUG.)
Keeping track of your Mac’s serial number in case it is stolen is useless, since the serial number is on a barcode label which the thief can peel off. So, engrave your driver’s license number on the bottom of the case with one of those home engraving tools. And if you open your Mac for any reason, put a sticker inside the case with the serial number on it. Or engrave that on the bottom of the case, too. The serial number helps identify the computer. The drivers license number helps the police find you to give it back. (Thanks, Tropical Mac, Gold Coast MUG, Miami FL.)
It is finally time to keep your eyes open for a lot of non-Apple printer solutions. New options include DeskWriter, Write Move, Diconix, LaserJet IIP, PaintJet and a host of new printer drivers which will let you hook up to beaucoup dot matrix printers from people like Panasonic and Epson.
Non-Apple printers can’t print the Shift/ Option/k symbol. It’s Apple property. Too much hassle to arrange permission to use it, I guess.
If you know a visually impaired person, tell them about I-BIG (International Blind UG), P.O. Box 1352, Roseville, CA 95661-1352, 916-783-0364, or BBS, 916-786-3923.
HP’s DeskWriter is getting raves from some Mac users. All good except: no Postscript, some smearing, no spooler works with it, no support for MiniWriter and MockWrite-type DAs, no AppleTalk, needs more than one meg, and the fonts take up lots of space.
If you can live with that, give it a look. $799 or less will buy it if you shop smart.
Ehman, of reasonably-priced hard drive fame, is entering the large screen market with bargain big monitors . Good going, Ehman!
Can’t you remember those keystrokes in PageMaker for all caps, small caps, sub- and super-script? Think now! K for caps, H for half-size caps, + for super- and - for sub-script.
Easy, isn’t it? Oh, you goofed in spite of that? Command/Shift/spacebar puts it back the way you had it. The mnemonic for that is that you were “spaced out” when you made the original change.
Make your newsletter or brochure material fit your layout—not vice versa. (This tip from C.J. Weigand’s The Weigand Report. If you do DTP, get it. Rae Productions, P.O. Box 647, Gales Ferry, CT 06335, $65 a year — 8 issues.)
One more from Chuck’s Report: To put eps graphics where they are not normally accepted, put the graphic into Illustrator. Now copy it to the Clipboard with the Option key held down. You now have a PICT with embedded Postscript on the Clipboard. You can Paste it into any program which accepts PICT, which is most programs. You get eps quality!
What System 7.0 problems are coming? Networks will have problems upgrading to AppleTalk Phase II. Apple’s suggested 2 megs of RAM won’t run much of anything under MultiFinder. And software will have to be upgraded to make it compatible with 32-bit QuickDraw and virtual memory.
PublicFolder, by Claris programmer Michael Peirce, should be on bulletin boards by now. It lets Apple Talk networked Macs copy files from each other. The files have to be in a specific folder, which protects you from losing control.
All those “speed up” devices quote impressive improvement percentages. But you often can’t see the differences in a practical way.
Chalk one up for MacSprint ($299 list) for the Mac II. MacWorld’s Bob Levitus can tell “in minutes” whether its cache is on or off. He bought the review unit rather than live without it. (Thanks, MacWorld.)
An article on how to buy a Mac starts on p. 253 of the January 1990 MacWorld. Xerox some copies and give them to friends about to make the leap to Macintosh. You’ll have to fill in the street prices, since list prices are used in the article.
Also, the article does not list third party solutions, such as internal and external hard disks instead of Apple’s pricey ones. And they don’t warn you against buying Apple upgrade memory, when far less expensive memory is widely available.
Other than that, this is a good article to give potential Mac owners.
The latest “fix” for Apple/Quantum internal hard drives? Slowly and repeatedly turn the power switch on and off. If that fails to get it rolling, turn it off and knock the side of the computer case lightly.
Hey, Mouse Droppings is just reporting this fix as seen in MacWeek. We ain’t recommend ing it.
I am rapidly getting to the point where I read less and less of UMUG News from the U of Utah. That means that programmers will want to read more and more of it, because there is a lot more of that stuff in UMUG News than in most MUG newsletters.
There is a magazine now for desktop presentations. It is “Presentations Products,” 513 Wilshire, #344, Santa Monica, CA 90401.
Stuffed and split files may not let virus detection devices examine them, so be sure to check unstuffed or un-split files immediately for viruses.
HyperCard 1.2.5 is not necessary unless you have a IIci or a Portable. In any event, it needs System 6.0.4. So keep using 1.2.2. Where did 1.2.3 go? Are you nuts? Can’t you say Lotus 1-2-3? I rest my case. And 1.2.4, when pronounced in Japanese, is said to mean something nasty.
So you get 1.2.5 after 1.2.2. Make sense?
Here is a cute way to get more usable, accurately scaled sizes in PageMaker. Install the Varityper VT-600 driver which comes with PageMaker. Select it in Page Setup. Now, when you Place a graphic (the right way to do it), and use the Command/Shift/resize routine, you get lots more size possibilities. They will all print out sharply on the LaserWriter. As soon at the graphics are resized, go back into Page Setup and change the driver back to your choice of printer. The resized graphic will not change size, and will print correctly.
You just slipped a locked floppy into your Mac. The main disk window appears, and it is an absolute jungle of icons all over the place. You don’t have to drag icons around one by one to clean it up. Select All, drag the entire mess to the disk icon. Boom, all of your icons are lined up neatly.
Of course they will be a mess again the next time you insert this disk, ,but who cares? (Thanks, Jerry Koszut, former CMUG president.)
Doug Miles tries his best to keep me “straight” about ReadySetGo. He says fractional widths are constantly supported by ReadySetGo. So there.
A Mac Portable owner in Washington repots that on a coach class airline flight, there wasn’t enough room to get the Portable out from under the seat. Then, when finally extracted, there wasn’t enough room from belly button to the next seat to use his 17-pound wonder.
He’ll take his MacLite next time, or go first class. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
