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BRMUG BRMUG June 1998 Newsletter This is the index of the June 1998 BRMUG Newsletter: Features: Cartoon Netscape Type 11 Errors Regular Columns: Front Page News June Meeting May Meeting Review Washington Pi CD Column Preview After the Meeting Volunteer Needed BRMUG Humor Page Graphic Utility of the Month (Photographic Paper) by Glenn Matherne Nonessentials (Midigraphy)by Glenn Matherne Essentials (Stuffit Expander) by Isaac Traxler AAPL by Isaac Traxler Web Page of the Month (deal-mac)by Isaac Traxler BRMUG Classifieds Return to BRMUG Newsletter Index Front Page News June Meeting The June meeting will be held at the Bluebonnet Library on May 18th, the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 6:30 P.M. This month's meeting will feature a presentation on Multimedia on the Macintosh by Glenn Matherne. The meeting will start at 6:30 P.M. with the presentation starting shortly afterward. At 7:30 P.M., we will begin the Question and Answer session. Meeting will end at 8:30 P.M. so that we can clean up and leave prior to the 9:00 P.M. closing time. May Meeting Our May meeting included an overview of Apple's new iMac and a presentation on Customizing your Macintosh. The iMac is Apple's new all-in-one system that provides a lot of bang for the buck (rumor has it that the $1299 price will go down after the initial surge is over). Customizing your Macintosh covered how to add (and remove) cdevs and inits from the System Folder, how to use Extension Manager, and a brief introduction to ResEdit. Washington Apple PI CD Want to save some money and get a great tool? The Washington Pi Apple Users Group has produced a wonderful CD including the Apple upgrades for 7.0, 7.5, and 8.0. It is great having all of these on one CD. It also includes many other useful items including Netscape, Fetch, etc. They sell this CD for $10 plus shipping and handling. Through a special user group deal, BRMUG has a few of these CDs for only $10.00. You can reserve a copy now by sending e-mail to cd@brmug.org or you can get one at our next meeting. Newsletter Preview This issue includes many of our normal monthly columns. Glenn's Graphic Utility of the Month column tells us about the advantages of using photographic quality paper. My Essentials column this month covers some of the benefits of Stuffit Exapnder. Glenn's Nonessentials column this month talks about editing Midi files with Midigraphy 1.3.7. AAPL returns with a brief update on Apple's financial status. In addition to these fine columns, I am introducing Web Page of the Month. As its name implies, this column will help you learn about a web page. The initial column will talk about the deal-Mac web page. We have another new feature this month, a cartoon. For the first time, we are including one of Pete Steinfeld's wonderful cartoons.Be sure to visit his wonderful Stuff This web page and check out previous cartoons (a link to it can be found on BRMUG's humor page). After the Meeting After the June meeting, we hope to start a new tradition. I will be going to the Brewbacher's on Bluebonnet after the meeting to get a bite to eat and to socialize. Everyone is invited to join me. This will allow us to leave the library in a timely manner and still have plenty of time to talk. Volunteer Needed BRMUG is looking for someone to take over as the second member at large. Jeff Sheldon has been unable to do the task because of previous commitments. We need someone to take over this position. Your responsibilities will include attending meetings, attending the planning meetings, and contributing to the club. If you are interested, please drop me a line at volunteer @brmug.org. Humor The BRMUG Humor Page (http://www.brmug.org/humor.html) is an index of URLs that put a little humor into the Macintosh world. Please check this page out and make sure you visit Pete Steinfeld at http://www.macworks.com/stuffthis/stuffthis.html. If you have suggestions of URLs to add to this page, please drop me a note at humor@brmug.org. Return to Top of Page AAPL by Isaac Traxler Apple has dropped below their $30 per share high that they reached last month. In spite of this news, Apple is still doing good. Their stock value has stayed in the $25 to $30 range all month. Considering that Apple has basically made no announcements this month, is having problems producing their high-end laptops and is waiting to see how the iMac will be received, this has been an excellent month. Without a major positive announcement, Apple usually falls significantly. This stable pricing of their stock implies a lot of confidence in Apple for the long term (the best news Apple could hope for). Return to Top of Page Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherene This month's graphic utility is more of a medium than a utility. While I was at Office Depot looking for a ream of paper, I came across a opened packet of Kodak Inkjet Photographic Quality paper. I figured it was just another over-priced pack of 24 lb paper. To my amazement, it look and felt just like real photographic paper. Well almost... In all truth, I had seen this stuff before. Like many amateur photographers, I had a few rolls of film scanned and placed on Kodak PhotoCD disks. The inserts to this PhotoCD disks are printed by an extremely expensive Scitex Iris Injet printer onto this sort of paper. However, I hadn't been able to get my hands on the paper. So, I plunked down $29.95 for a pack of 50 sheets. When I got home I scanned a forty year old family picture at 300 dpi on my Umax Astra 600S scanner, and enlarged it to an 8 by 10. Then, I printed it to my HP Deskjet 855 printer. The prints were amazingly similar to a photo enlargement. It made a nice 86th birthday present for my grandmother. A few days later, I experimented more with the paper. I got best results by setting the page setup to scatter patterning, lighter intensity, and color sync and the paper setting to glossy. For those who aren't aware, Color Sync is a filter technology developed by Apple to synchronize the colors of a monitor to a scanner and then to a printer. The end result being what you see on the computer is what you get out of the printer. You can down load the filters from Apple at www.colorsync.com. They work well with Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Photodeluxe or destop publishing programs like Pagemaker or Quark Express. The really amazing thing about this paper was that the printer didn't waste much ink. This was because the paper is so hard and smooth that it requires less ink to print. Print times varied with printer drivers. The new HP print driver update reduced the print time by 2/3 from 1 1/2 hours to 1/2 an hour. I highly recommend Kodak Inkjet Photographic Quality Paper for all your photo enlargement needs. It is available in 8 1/2 by 11, 117 lbs sheets. At about fifty cents a sheet, it is much cheaper than paying for conventional photoprocessing and it works with most popular inkjet printers and scanners. I wonder if I have enough paper left to redo my appartment before the landlord gets back? Return to Top of Page Essentials by Isaac Traxler Stuffit Expander is the epitomy of an essential utility. This product's history mirrors the history of many products in the Macintosh world. When the Macintosh was released, people started solving the problems associated with transferring files across modems and networks, saving limited disk space, and archiving files. A number of different solutions were created. While most of these solutions were great in their own context, they created a new problem - variety. Because of the variety of available solutions for compressing, archiving and encoding files, Macintosh users had to have (and know how and when to use) numerous utilities. All of these wonderful tools (Stuffit, Compactor, binhex, etc...) had created a tower of Babel for interchange. Aladdin Systems (makers of Stuffit) solved the problem. They released a freeware product called Stuffit Expander which would expand almost any kind of compressed file. As time has progressed, many new functions have been added to Stuffit Expander. The basic product still remains free. Stuffit Expander can turn .sit (Stuffit compressed files), .sea (self extracting archives), .cpt (compactor compressed files), .hqx (binhexed files) and .bin (binary files) into their original files and/or folders. Stuffit Expander can even perform this task recursively (take an .hqx convert it to a .sit and then take the .sit and turn it into its original files). Stuffit Expander supports drag and drop (just drag an encoded file on top of Stuffit Expander and let it go, it hten goes to work). One of the neatest features of Stuffit Expander is its automatic integration with Netscape. When you download an encoded file with Netscape, Stuffit Expander will automatically expand the file. Dropstuff is a commercial add-on to Stuffit Expander that enhances it with the following features: ability to expand .zip (PC zip files), .arc (archive files), .z (Unix compressed files, .gz (GNU compressed files), .uu (UU encoded files) and .tar (Unix archives). Stuffit Expander can be downloaded from almost anywhere. Almost all freeware/shareware CDs include it (like the Apple Pi CD). Stuffit Expander is clearly one of the most common and most used utilities ever released for the Macintosh. I don't know what I would do without Stuffit Expander. It has save me a tremendous amount of time over the years. It was always useful. The Internet made it indispensible. The Internet is littered with exciting files (in all kinds of different formats). Stuffit Exapnder allows most of them to be accessible to my Macintosh. Return to Top of Page Nonessentials by Glenn Matherene A few nights ago, I got a strange request from a friend, he wanted me to edit a midi file he had down loaded from the internet. I knew that I could play midi files with SoundApp, but I really didn't know how to edit these things. Like most people, I can't carry a tune much less edit music. So after an hour, I came across this neat $20 shareware utility, Midigraphy 1.3.7 by M. Maeda from a site in Japan. According to the directions, it works with Mac OS 7.0 or higher with Quicktime 2.0 or higher and Quicktime Musical Instruments. For those who are totally confused at this point, midi is an extremely efficient musical file format used by musicians to control and record their instruments on a computer. Hence, the name Musical Instrument Device Interface or MIDI. A synthesizer on the computer is used to play back musical notes. Apple licensed musical instruments from Roland and added them to Quicktime 2.0 and higher for this purpose. Midi files are extremely small and sound different on different computers. This is because they are more like the roll of sheet music for an old player piano. They are great to play back over the internet, provided tht you have a plug-in to play them back. Quicktime 2.5 or higher installs this plug-in in your browser. Midigraphy 1.3.7 is what the audio experts call a sequencer. It not only records, plays and edits music from an instrument, it arranges groups of instruments into a piece of music. This software sequencer replaces an expensive hardware sequencer that did the same job before 1984. However, you need a $100 midi interface to connect an instrument to your Macintosh. Getting back to my story...I opened up the midi file in Midigraphy 1.3.7 on my old Performa 5300 with MAC OS 8.0 and edited it from 1 minute to 15 seconds. It only took about 5 minutes to learn how to use Midigraphy 1.3.7. Then, I saved it as a midi1 file and emailed it back to my friend. The file was only 5K. Apparently, PCs will only play back this type of midi. My friend is a big PC fan. We argue about this stuff all the time. He always says that I own a dinosaur. Funny, I always seem to have the solutions to his problems be they audio, graphical or utility, and lo and behold, they seem to have the word Macintosh in them most of the time. Now who has the best computer? Return to Top of Page Web Page of the Month by Isaac Traxler Are you looking for a bargain? Do you miss the old From the Back Pages column? deal-Mac is the answer (http://deal-mac.com/). This has got to be my all-time favorite page. It embodies the difference between the Macintosh world and PC world. In the PC world, dozens of organizations compete to turn providing you good pricing information into a profitable business. deal-Mac started out as voluteer process to consolidate the various postings of good deals that were available in the Macintosh community. Macintosh enthusiasts have embraced the page. It is by far, the best place to go to find pricing information for Macintosh related items. deal-Mac is updated each weekday. Pricing information for systems, storage devices, peripherals, upgrades, services, software, buying tips and consumer information can be found at deal-Mac daily. This page has grown so successful that many vendors go out of their way to help deal-Mac determine their prices. Some of the vendors even offer special pricing ot deal-Mac customers. Along with all of these regular features, deal-Mac periodically does indepth analysis of topics such as removeable-media drives, scanners or memory. These features always result in a lot of reader feedback about special prices that most people would not ever have found out about. deal-Mac also has a vendor index. Vendor indices are invaluable when you are trying to find that someone with the best price or the one-of-a-kind part. They also support a forum area where readers may comment on vendors, pricing or almost anything else. Great resource when checking out the reliability of a company. I advise reading this page daily. It takes about 2 or 3 minutes to read it a day. After reading it for a couple of weeks you will become a dramatically more informed consumer. deal-Mac also has a search facility so that you can find pricing information about items that have been covered in the past. Near the end of each month, they summarize any offers that are about to tend. deal-Mac does have a drawback. With so many of the great prices showing up, you will find yourself spending more time deciding which things you want! Return to Top of Page Netscape Type 11 Errors by Isaac Traxler The Macintosh OS sometimes produces Type 11 errors when you try to run Netscape. Here are some things you can do to try to prevent them: Try each version (2,3,4) and see which seems most stable on your machine Double the amount of memory you are allocating Netscape Reinstall Netscape (it may be corrupt) Rebuild desktop with TechTools Re-install your OS (you should be running 7.5.5, 7.61 or 8.1) You can follow these steps to eliminate any crashes. Return to Top of Page