Editor's note: This is the last Miscellaneous
Ramblings column of the year. Low End Mac will be closed next
week, and new content will resume on January 3, 2005. dk
PowerBook Batteries
From Rick Black
Hello there. I read your article on Low End Mac about batteries.
My 1999 G3 Lombard is finally
showing signs of needing a new battery - a full charge registers
only 50 minutes in the control strip indicator, but it won't even
last 45 minutes.
I'm intrigued with the newer batteries with higher capacity (5400
amps) but am concerned that they might hurt the computer. Any
thoughts?
I understand that you were going to get a used battery. Did you,
and is it working out okay?
One final question, if I may ask. The PowerBook battery has
indicator lights which will light up if you push the button. Is there
any documentation as to what this means and how one should perform
the battery test?
regards,
Rick Black
- Hi Rick,
Other
World Computing actually now has a Newer Technology
NuPower 'MaxCapacity' 7200mAh battery for the Lombard and Pismo.
The higher capacity only pertains to how long you can run between
charges, so I'm 99% sure there's no danger of harming the
computer.
The used battery I got worked fine for a few months but then
crapped out. It will run the computer for about five minutes now.
I'll buy new when I replace it again - probably one of the OWC
units.
My inference has always been that the LEDs on PowerBook G3 Series
batteries just indicated the level of charge.
Charles
PowerBook 145 Troubles
From Patty Shannon
Dear Charles,
I came up with your cool site when I searched for "powerbook 145".
Last week I let my husband use my PowerBook
145. He only had it for 5 minutes but managed to mess up the
screen. He said something came up on it, and he clicked OK on it. He
didn't read it. I have no idea what he did, but now the screen is
wild. It blinks yellow and gray, is just not readable. I can still
see it enough, occasionally, to see that everything is still there,
just can't see it.
Can you help me find a site that will help, or do you have any
ideas. I got the PowerBook from my son, when he upgraded, and he has
now moved out of state, so I hate to tell him that it is messed
up.
Anything you can tell me will be appreciated.
Thank You,
Patty Shannon
- Hi Patty,
Whoa! A PowerBook 145. As you're probably aware, that's one of the
oldest PowerBook models from waaaaaaay back in 1992. It's nice to
know that somebody is still getting useful service from these old
machines.
Your husband may just have had the bad luck to be using the
computer when the fault developed. I can't offhand think of
anything he might have done in normal use to induce the sort of
symptoms you describe.
On a machine that old, it could very well be a hardware problem,
in which case it would almost certainly be advisable to not spend
any money on it. A PowerBook 145 in good working condition is
worth about 50 bucks.
I assume you've tried shutting the machine down and restarting
it.
You should definitely try resetting the Power Manager Unit. On the
PowerBook 145, proceed as follows:
- Remove the AC Adapter plug and the battery.
- Let the PowerBook sit without power connected for 3 to 5
minutes.
- Using two paper clips, simultaneously press and hold the
reset and interrupt buttons (Both recessed buttons (commonly
known as the reset and interrupt buttons) are located next to
the power button on the back panel of the PowerBook) for 5 to
10 seconds.
- Reinstall the battery and, if necessary, reconnect the AC
adapter.
- Restart the PowerBook.
If that doesn't cure the problem, It would be a good idea to try
booting from a Disk Tools floppy disk if you have one. If the
machine boots normally from the Disk Tools Floppy and the screen
looks okay, then the problem would likely be with your Operating
System, which probably needs reinstalling.
However, based on what you've described, it sounds most likely
that it's a hardware issue.
Hope these suggestions are of some help.
Charles
Re: PowerBook 145
From Patty Shannon
Hello Charles,
Sorry it took me so long to get back, but I have good news. I did
as you suggested, and my little PowerBook 145 was lots better. Still
a little cranky, but lots, lots better. My grandson came over (he's
14 and has a Mac of his own), and he used the boot disk on it, and it
came back just like it was supposed to.
Thank you so much for your help. I also sent a thank you to the
helpful Mac owner that offered to let me have his PowerBook
170.
Mac owners are just the best.
Thanks again,
Patty from Missouri
- Hi Patty,
Delighted to hear your PowerBook is computing again.
Sounds like you have a Mac family. :-)
Charles
Classic on OS X Restore Disk
From Fred Goff
I just read your Mac OS 9 compatibility
column on Low End Mac and thought I'd shoot a tip your way on
getting OS 9 onto an OS X machine.
You don't have to use the restore feature. Just do the following
instead.
- Pop in the first install disk for you OS X machine.
- Make sure the Finder window for the disk is open and in the
front.
- Choose Go to Folder from the Go menu.
- Type .images (the period is important) in the field and press
Enter.
A new Finder window will open showing gobs of disk images. One of
the will be called OS9General.dmg. Open this image and drag the
System Folder to your hard drive. Voilà, you've just installed
Classic.
Be aware that this is a System Folder designed to be used as a
Classic environment in OS X. If you use this as a startup System
Folder on a machine to boot that machine into OS 9, you'll get
limited functionality and may get unpredictable behavior. You have
been warned.
- Hi Fred,
Thanks for the mini-tutorial.
Charles
Gmail, Eudora, and Outlook Express
From Daniel Claessens
I was interested by your article, so I
downloaded every version of Eudora from 5.1 to 6.2.
I have concluded that 6.2 is the only version of Eudora that works
with Gmail.
Furthermore, I believe this is a limitation of Eudora and not the
OS. I tried to connect to Gmail using M$ Outlook Express Mac edition
5.0.6.
I can report that Outlook Express worked perfectly with Gmail, and
that the Read Me files says that it is compatible with OS 8.1.
On caveat of Outlook Express requires the Dictionaries from Office
98 to do spell check.
You can find them here:
<http://home.alltel.net/dc71414/Tools.sit> [Editor's note:
We can't get this link to work.]
Put this in the Outlook Express folder. I also suggest putting the
identities folder there as well.
and Outlook Express here: <http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx>
Now I am not one who usually recommends software from the dark
side, but if your wife can part with Eudora she can Get POP access
with Outlook Express.
Below you will find my notes on Eudora and Gmail.
Eudora 5.1.0 does not support SSL
Gmail does not work
---
Eudora 5.1.1 Does support SSL
Will not connect to gmail
--
Eudora 5.2.0 Supports SSL
requires Mac OS 8.6 with carbon support 1.6
Will connect to Gmail. But the mail does not download or send
___
Eudora 5.2.1 Supports SSL
Will not connect to gmail
___
Eudora 6.0 Supports SSL
Requirs Mac OS 9.0 and Carbonlib 1.6
Will not connect to gmail
____
Eudora 6.0.1 Supports SSL
Requirs Mac OS 9.0 and Carbonlib 1.6
Will not connect to gmail
____
Eudora 6.0.2 Supports SSL
Requirs Mac OS 9.0 and Carbonlib 1.6
Will not connect to gmail
____
Eudora 6.1.1 Supports SSL
Requirs Mac OS 9.0 and Carbonlib 1.6
Will not connect to gmail
____
Eudora 6.2 Supports SSL
Requirs Mac OS X
connect to gmail
- Hi Daniel,
I'm overwhelmed by the scope of your research. Thanks a bunch. You
saved me a lot of wasted time. I agree that it's a Eudora
limitation and not a MacOS issue. POP Gmail works great with
Eudora 6.2 on my OS X Macs.
Oy; Outlook Express :-( . However, it sounds like the
workaround.
Thanks again.
Charles
Gmail Notifier Beta
From Mads Gorm Larsen
Hi Charles
An extra note, on my win machine I have installed gmail notifier,
a small thing that tells you if you have mail, it often gives me this
error "cannot find DNS server", but only on first call, if I click it
again I have contact.
Mads
- Hi Mads,
Yes; the beta designation is there for a reason.
Charles
Re: Rolleiflex TLRs and Digital
From Darryl
Hi Charles,
I was amused to find our
discussion about Rolleiflexes and digital cameras on your
website. I ended up buying the Rollei Magnar zoom lens from the store
in London, and I used it a bit while travelling. It's surprisingly
light but requires a tripod to use as you need to move the Magnar to
the taking lens after focusing etc.
The quality is impressive if you stop down to f16 or f22, but you
have to do long exposures +1 sec even in sunlight as the Magnar cuts
the light coming into the camera quite significantly. This also makes
it hard to see what you are doing on the focusing screen - the
things we do to use medium format. Still cheaper than most new 35mm
zoom lenses though, and better quality! Built before WW2 when things
were made to last or get blown up.
Cheers,
Darryl
- Hi Darryl,
It's great fun to hear about people doing interesting things with
antiquated equipment - especially Rolleis.
There was a quality to stuff from that era that basically doesn't
exist any more, at least in consumer products.
Charles
G3 Pismo Upgrade
From Philippe Helman
Hello.
Check my works: <http://www.sterpin.net/uk/pismologixuk.htm>
Enjoy
Philippe
- I did. Great tutorial.
Thanks for the link.
Charles
Recalcitrant B&W
From Douglas
I picked up a used B&W G3 at
the local university. No RAM, no HD, but it is a rev 2, and it was
$15.
However, I'm having a problem. I pulled the drive and RAM from my
beige, and the B&W won't boot. It goes to the happy face screen,
then I get the flashing "?" over a folder. Does the B&W require
HFS+? Since the HD, RAM, and battery work in my beige, could it be
something else I'm missing?
thx,
Douglas
- Hi Douglas,
The B&W should work fine with HFS standard formatted drives.
However, it would be worth a shot to try another hard drive or to
see if it will boot from a CD or an external drive.
I'm wondering if a bad PRAM battery could cause this sort of
symptom.
Of course there is the possibility that there are motherboard
problems.
Trial and error.
Charles
Editor's note: Two other possibilities. The RAM may not be fast
enough for the B&W G3 (it uses PC100 RAM vs. PC66 on the beige),
or you may be trying to use a version of the Mac OS (anything earlier
than 8.5) that won't work on the B&W. dk
SE on DSL with Ethernet Card
From Mark Looper
Hello,
On X-Day (24 March 2001), I posted a webpage, A
Macintosh SE that Uses DSL?, that discusses how to get a very
old Mac, in my case an SE dual 800k
machine, on the Internet via DSL. It was in response to a
Macworld article that talked about how to set up old Macs for DSL, as
I recall, but not ones as old as my SE. I connected my SE to a router
using a 10Base-T card in its PDS slot, which I obtained at closeout
from Asante; you may still be able to find 'em on eBay
.
Mark Looper
- Thanks Mark,
Nice tutorial.
Charles
Splitting Files for Burning to CD
From Peter da Silva
On OS X at least a script could do the job. The problem is that
the Unix tools don't know about resource forks, and Apple's command
line tools are written by people for whom Unix is a foreign country,
so they require some careful hand holding.
You can use "lsmac -fboth" to get the size of all the files in a
directory, but the output is 'user friendly' and computer
hostile:
--- 2.8 MB powell-stern-2004-10-26.mp3 --- 2 items -
Public/ --- 160.0 KB robertson-2004-10-20.mp3 --- 3 items -
Sites/
So let's start out with something to get the total file
size for a directory:
find . -type d -print0 |
xargs -0 lsmac -fboth |
awk '$5 == "MB" { total += $4*1024*1024}
$5=="KB" {total += $4*1024}
$5=="B" {total += $4}
END {printf "%d\n", total}'
That gets you the total bytes, but your CD is likely to be in
ISO9660 (2k blocks) or HFS (4k or 8k blocks), so we need to add up
the total by blocks, so let's get the number of kilobytes for 8k
blocks:
find . -type d -print0 |
xargs -0 lsmac -fboth |
awk '$5 == "MB" { total += $4*1024}
$5=="KB" {total += ($4+7)/8}
$5=="B" {total += 8}
END {printf "%d\n", total}'
OK, now let's say you've got all the folders you want to archive
in one directory. You want to get the first 650 MB of that
(cdchunk.sh):
--8<--cut--here--8<--
#!/bin/sh
# Function to get kb of a directory tree, including resource forks, for 8k # allocation units.
kb() {
find "$1" -type d -print0 |
xargs -0 lsmac -fboth |
awk '$5 == "MB" { total += $4*1024}
$5=="KB" {total += ($4+7)/8}
$5=="B" {total += 8}
END {printf "%d\n", total}'
}
# 639.8 * 1024, size of a CD in kilobytes max=655155 total=0
# Now, print directory names until you're out of space... for i do
ls "$i" | while read dir
do
kb=`kb "$i/$dir"`
total=`expr $total + $kb`
if [ $total -ge $max ]
then exit
fi
echo "$i/$dir"
done
done
--8<--cut--here--8<--
Play with that, it'll list all the subdirs you can fit into the
first CD.
Of course, you don't just want to print them, you want to make CD
images of them. So let's change the last few lines, starting right
after "total":
--8<--cut--here--8<--
volume=1
# Now, create vol1.txt, vol2.txt, and so on, containing the names of the directories # to dump...
touch vol$volume.txt
for i
do
ls "$i" | while read dir
do
kb=`kb "$i/$dir"`
total=`expr $total + $kb`
if [ $total -ge $max ]
then
total=$kb
volume=`expr $volume + 1`
touch vol$volume.txt
fi
echo "$i/$dir" >> vol$volume.txt
done
done
--8<--cut--here--8<--
Now you have the text files containing the playlists, how do you
burn them? Well, you can create DMG files containing them... using
this script (mkimages.sh)
--8<--cut--here--8<--
#!/bin/sh
for file in vol*.txt
do
vol=`basename $file .txt`
if
hdiutil create \
-size 650m \
-layout NONE \
-fs HFS+ \
-type SPARSE \
-volname "$vol" \
$vol
then
if
info="`hdid $vol.sparseimage`"
then
dev=`echo $info | awk '{print $1}'`
mnt=`echo $info | awk '{print $2}'`
while read dir
do
ditto -rsrcFork "$dir" "/volumes/$vol/$dir"
done < $file
hdiutil eject $dev
else
echo "Can't mount $vol.sparseimage - exiting"
exit
fi
else
echo "Can't create $vol.sparseimage - exiting"
exit
fi
done
--8<--cut--here--8<--
Once you're done, you'll have a bunch of "vol*.sparseimage" files
ready to burn with Disk Util.
Open Terminal.app
cd /wherever/the/stuff/is
cdchunk.sh directory-containing-gigabyes-of-whatever # optionally
edit the vol*.txt files here, maybe skip a subdir or two you know #
you don't want...
mkimages.sh
- Thanks Peter.
Charles
Letters sent may be published at our discretion. Email addresses
will not be published unless requested. If you prefer that your
message not be published, mark it "not for publication." Letters may
be edited for length, context, and to match house
style.
Go to Charles Moore's Mailbag index.
