As everyone knows, in order to graduate from any reputable IT school, the anti-Mac chant is our first line of defense against having to deal with Mac users. Remember, a happy Mac user is an IT administrator’s nightmare . . . because they never call you!
Author Archives: Jeffery Adkins
2001 – When the word gets out that you want old Macs, people respond. A reader of this column recently donated several Macs to our school, including an old (1993) PowerBook 145b. Since my PowerBook 5300cs was stolen from a storeroom last fall, I have been ‘Bookless, and all computing has been restricted to home […]
I’ve gotten all sorts of interesting mail regarding the revised 75 Mac Advantages series I’ve been working on, but by far the most interesting letter I got was this one from Dan Edelen, the original author of the 75 Macintosh Advantages booklet. With his permission, I am reprinting his letter here for you read about […]
I accidentally set my system clock ahead to 2020 while fiddling around with time zones, and then I received this email. I started to delete it as spam, but I kept it just in case….
2001 – It has always been my tradition to run one OS behind the current version. Many people do this – and with good reasons. If you depend on your machine, you don’t want to trash a hard drive with a buggy install.
2001 – There’s been a hiatus in the Mac Lab Reports, a column I have been writing consistently once a week for several months, while I did research for this entry, especially regarding QuickTime. I’ve wrestled with that one in particular because of the issues surrounding the implementation of multimedia on PCs.
2001 – Based on recent feedback from readers, I think the following points covered in 75 Mac Advantages, part 2 are worth noting.
2001 – Based on reader feedback, I learned there are some advances in the latest version of Windows that negate some of the advantages I wrote about in Part 1. I bow to their superior knowledge of the Windows platform (I use both platforms but am a mere user, not a network administrator or suchlike) and so, I’ve […]
2001 – I got feedback on each of the 15 Mac Advantages I covered last week, but the following responses merit further discussion and acknowledgment. Thanks to these readers for their thorough and thoughtful replies.
2001 – In this series of articles I will be taking a look at Apple’s venerable 75 Macintosh Advantages brochure issued a couple of years ago but mysteriously missing from its website today. Or perhaps not so mysteriously; after Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates declared a truce to the Windows/Mac OS wars, many of the […]
This week’s column takes the intermediate user to that step where they finally dive in and register a domain name.
Today we take a look at the ability to create, use and share custom graphics libraries in AppleWorks. As usual, we are concentrating here on AppleWorks 5 and ClarisWorks 4, but many of the comments should apply to other versions.
2001 – I recently purchased an OrangeLink FireWire 1394 + USB PCI combo card so I could begin to add some of those nifty new peripherals I’ve been reading about. I own a 300 MHz Beige Power Mac G3 desktop at home and had my eye on some USB peripherals for a while now.
In my school and district, we are beset with the many problems associated with an aging fleet of Power Mac 5200s. The 5200, an all-in-one design, contains design flaws described elsewhere on Low End Mac. Suffice to say they are slow, crash a lot, and don’t do anything particularly well (although they are okay at […]
Rather than just buy a USB scroll wheel mouse, the author decides to give the Wacom Graphire USB graphics tablet a try.
Occasionally a teacher discovers that they ask the same students to answer questions over and over because some students are more enthusiastic, while others are content to melt into the background. In order to bring more students into the discussion, I ask students at random – selected by a dice roll or by computer – […]
This short appendix is not a tutorial on how to make presentations on the computer, but rather how to get one started in AppleWorks 5. AppleWorks 5 has the ability to take almost any document and turn it into a full-screen, menu-less display, but the functions are hidden. There are also some built-in presentation templates […]
2001 – This week’s Mac Lab Report focuses on how you connect your computer to a large enough monitor so that students can see your display for presentations, demos, and so on.
My first digital camera was a black and white QuickCam eyeball. The QuickCam was originally made by Connectix, but eventually the product was sold to Logitech. It has mostly survived the transition unscathed, and some models are still USB Mac compatible. However, the old style serial Mac version is no longer manufactured.
This is the second in a series of articles I am writing in support of some staff development meetings I am conducting in the Spring of 2001 for the Antioch Unified School District in California.
This how-to article accompanies an article explaining how to use sensor probeware to generate graphs and data for school lab reports. It describes how to control the graphs (which are really PICT files) and the data (which is tab-delimited number data) when you paste it into AppleWorks.
This is the first of a series of support articles I am writing for some district professional development meetings I am conducting in the Spring of 2001. I’m posting them as Mac Lab Reports because I believe others can benefit from what I have learned.
2000 – Today’s topic is essentially the beginning of the answer to the question: “Now that I have the Internet in my room, what do I do with it?”
2000 – In one of my Mac Lab Report columns, I discussed the usual arguments that fly between passionate users regarding the superiority of the Mac vs. the PC platform. However, a dispassionate outside observer might listen to such an argument and rightfully ask, “What difference does it make? Just get on with your work,” […]
This is the last installment of the story I’ve been telling about how my classroom science lab went from no computers to a Power Mac computer lab in just three years.
2000 – As you spend time repairing machines, mostly by swapping parts, inevitably you wind up with a hulk with nothing in it that works – it’s just a place to hold parts. Bad motherboard. Gummed up floppy. CD won’t eject. Questionable power supply. Things like that.
Continuing the saga begun in last week’s column, at the end of my first year at my new school I had installed a small network of aging 680×0 machines in my room.
2001 – Let’s listen in on your standard Mac vs. PC flame war….
2001 – When you are finally able to obtain a computer, it may be that you are offered a chance to help make the purchasing decision; you may be forced to accept a computer you don’t really want – or you might be faced with accepting donations of PCs or Macs, because that’s all you […]
The reason this column is called Mac Lab Report is that these articles will chronicle the steps I took to go from a classroom with one computer to a classroom with 10 fully networked Power Macs in less than three years – at virtually no expense to our science department budget.
