Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks June 2004

Lots of things that could be happening at PMUG, won’t be—at this time. We would really like to see the office open between 2:00pm and 4:00pm due to the increase in foot traffic at the Galleria building. But until we have enough volunteers, the PMUG office will not be open during the day. We are not asking for people who have vast amounts of technical knowledge. We are looking for folks who enjoy using their Macs. All the volunteers really need to do is talk to people that walk in and tell them about the things PMUG offers; and allow members to use the network and library. Please contact me if you would like to do this. Currently we have one person opening the office on Tuesday afternoons when he is in town.

I would like to hear your ideas of what to do for a membership drive. We need to grow our ranks in order to fund projects—like more classes and activities. It would be nice to have another fast Mac in the classroom to allow the video folks to run projects.

If you have not yet heard, there are some special offers available for PMUG members. To take advantage of these you will need to have your current PMUG membership card with you. The Mac Outlet Store in Tigard is offering a discount of 5% off your purchase. If there is a sale or special going on, that’s OK, show the card for additional savings. PMUG would like to thank the Mac Store for providing this extra benefit to PMUG members. Please note: this is only at the outlet store on SW Nimbus.

The CompUSA store in Tigard has offers on specified open box Macintosh items—mostly PowerBooks and iBooks. Talk to Alex in the Apple area at the store about the prices for the open box then present your PMUG card for the extra discount on the open box items in stock. Keep in mind that open box items come and go so there may or may not be inventory at the time you visit the store. PMUG would like to thank Alex and CompUSA for offering this sale to PMUG members.

If you just purchased one of the brand-new iBooks or PowerBooks along with AppleCare, be advised that the AppleCare CD will not boot your computer, so it will be hard to use it to troubleshoot problems. Apple has confirmed that the CD is not capable of booting machines that require 10.3.3 and that currently there is not an updated disk for those machines. So you should keep in touch with Apple about the status of this, and be sure your data is backed up! There’s a new version of DiskWarrior (Alsoft, Inc.). The current version is 3.0.2 and should be used on all machines booting into System 10. You can download the update that will help you create a new CD if you have a CD-R writer. Just go to www.alsoft.com. Be aware some people have reported problems using the updater, including me. Basically it took me two tries to get an updated CD made. If you’re going to do this, you need your DiskWarrior serial number handy, your original DiskWarrior CD, and, of course, a couple of blank CDs.

NEW DVD STANDARDS ON WAY
Sony is about to introduce a DRU- 700 dual layer (DVD-9, 8.5GB) DVD burner. Early testing of the unit basically points out that it burns much slower than advertised. It is expected that these drives may sell for $230 (for an internal) and the media (disks) for $10 each. Be aware that in the next business quarter many other Taiwanese media makers are entering the market and prices will quickly plunge. Unless you like spending gobs of money and being on the very cutting edge, you may want to cool your heels for a few more months.

LEARNING CURVES
It always amuses me to see people spend vast amounts of money on a computer, then expect to learn how to use it with little or no training. There are many ways to get training; but some folks wait until they are so angry about not being able to do what they want that they take it out on the instructor. A bit of advice to those folks (and you know you are), calm down and tackle one program at a time. Stop asking forty questions and focus on your top two. You may even have to cut that back to the top one.

I can remember back to 1988 when I got my SE with a 30 Meg hard drive and MacFriends had loaded everything under the sun on that drive. I had no idea what it all did, and had no documentation to find out. So I spent about two months getting the machine to the point that the hard drive data got destroyed when I tried to optimize it. Yes, I had most of the stuff backed up; but the drive had to be reformatted and the system reinstalled. Wow, what a pain! However, at this point I only put a couple of programs back on, and spent time learning how to use them. At that time, PMUG General Meetings were the only contact Janet and I had with the Mac community. Both of us worked nights and had to take time off from work to attend meetings. We didn’t take any of the classes PMUG offered due to night shift, but we did ask lots of questions. So if you see a class you would like to take, be sure and sign up for it. If it costs money, send a deposit to make sure the instructor knows you really want to attend. If the PMUG classes don’t meet your needs, you may be interested in some classes given by our local stores. Look through Mouse Tracks for ads from companies who offer training; or ask at the store where you shop.

It’s always interesting to see what people want to do with their computers. I spent a full day at one client site showing them how to copy a homemade DVD by using their internal drive to copy to an external drive. Then we hooked up a Dazzle analog-to-digital video converter and I showed them how to get data from it into iMovie for editing. The problem is that they don’t want to edit, they just want to record to DVD, and stop and start it like it was a tape recorder. My, do I wish it were that easy. There are ways, using products like Toast that you can do one hour’s worth of tape directly to DVD, but you can’t stop and start it. In fact, if you want to do something like that, your best bet is one of the commercial DVD recorders for recording from tape to DVD. It’s not perfect, but you can record and save several hours worth onto the same DVD with each section saved as a different movie. The other thing that people do not understand about putting things onto DVD is that when you start with tape you are not going to improve the picture quality by moving it to DVD. In fact, the product you end up with is, most likely, a little worse than the one on the tape due to the analog-to-digital conversion that happens. Once the product has been converted to digital, very little is lost during the DVD to DVD copying. No, this is not my best topic, but someone has to break the bad news to new users. Even worse, the process of converting really old fi lm like 8mm and Super 8 is going to lose even more due to the fact it has to be projected and re-recorded on to DV tape. This costs both time and money; you should be prepared to pay about $.12 a foot, plus paying for the blank tape and even a DVD if you want. Why not convert it yourself? Yes, I can hear you thinking that as I type. Well, for one thing, you need a really good screen and DV camera that has been set up and focused correctly. All reel changes and fi lm breaks need to be edited out as you fi lm the projected image. All in all, it takes a while to do this. Then after you have all the fi lm footage, you get to create a DVD using one of the $500 recorders; or you can move everything to your computer to create and edit your new DVD there.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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