The Truth About CRTs and Shock Danger

Let’s face it: High voltages are scary. When someone says “kilovolts”, you usually hear “killovolts”, right? And if you fire off a quick search on the Web, you find dire warnings everywhere that reinforce your natural fears. The warnings are so numerous and frightening, in fact, that it’s easy to believe that a CRT can […]

Core Duo Macs

When Apple made the switch from PowerPC CPUs to Intel in 2006, the state-of-the-art CPU was Intel’s Core Duo processor, which was based on Intel’s 32-bit Pentium M architecture, which was originally designed for mobile use. The Core Duo was Intel’s first dual-core mobile processor, and it was used in all first generation Intel Macs […]

Why You Want DVI on Your Flat Panel Display

Buying the best display for your Mac has never been easy, unless you wanted to pay for Apple-branded products. In the old days, Mac video ports were different from those used in the PC world, and today you need to research whether the display you’re interested in has VGA or DVI input.

Why OS X Doesn’t Need a RAM Disk

2002: As noted elsewhere today, I’ve been using ramBunctious, a classic Mac OS RAM Disk program, for years. Although it works in Classic Mode under Mac OS X, the RAM disks it creates are inaccessible to OS X, so I’ve retired a real workhorse program.

Tanzania and Tanzania II Motherboards

The Tanzania motherboard was introduced in October 1996 and supports PowerPC 603e and 604e processors on a 40 MHz system bus. This motherboard was used in the Power Mac 4400, Motorola StarMax 3000 and 4000, Power Computing PowerCurve and PowerBase, and Umax SuperMac C500 and C600, as well as some lesser known clones.

Vintage Mac 400K Floppy Drive Repeating Click of Death

2001 – Packaged in a plain beige case with a single DA-15 connector, this single-sided 400K floppy drive (model #M130) works with early Macintosh computers. The “Click of Death” likely occurs on drives that have not been adequately dusted or as a secondary result of restoration by the liberal application of lubricant.

Web Design, Part 6: Reading Your Web Log

2000 – You’ve got your site up and running. You know people are visiting it, because they send you email (you do have a contact link on every page, don’t you). You’ve even registered with some search engines, joined a banner exchange or Web ring, and received a few links from other sites. But how […]

Web Design, Part 5: Web Content To Go

2000 – I received an interesting request from a regular site visitor last week: Jonathan Ploudre wrote me on May 3, wondered if I could adapt the new content on Low End Mac for AvantGo. For those, like me, who don’t own a Palm or Windows CE device, the first question is: What’s AvantGo?

Web Design, Part 4: Site Graphics

2000 – Unless you know your visitors have browsers that support Flash, PNG, QuickTime, and other recent innovations, stick to JPEG and GIF images on your website. Knowing the audience of Low End Mac includes a lot of people surfing on version 3.0 and earlier browsers, you won’t find any other graphic formats here.*

Setting Up a Cable or DSL Router

There are several ways to attach a group of computers to the Internet. At work, we have a Cisco router, an ISDN connection, and a range of 128 IP addresses. At home, I’ve used IPNetRouter on my SuperMac J700/180, which also acts as a mail and list server. The $89 shareware program does a great […]

Web Design, Part 3: Cascading Style Sheets

There’s a real danger in web design – the desire to have too much control over what your site visitor sees. There are webmasters who construct their site using very complex style sheets, JavaScript, or separately coded pages for different browsers. And as each new browser ships, the designer has to figure out how to […]

Web Design, Part 2: Site Organization

2000 – Let’s start with a note on include files (the topic of the previous article). If you include a “/” in your reference as in <A HREF=”/news/index.shtml”> instead of <A HREF=”news/index.shtml”>, then it will not matter where the file is located – it will always relative to the root directory. In other words, it […]

Installing Mac OS 8.1

2000 – These instructions were written specifically for installing Mac OS 8.1 on a large group of Power Mac 6100s. However, they can easily be adapted to almost any situation where you may be updating the Classic Mac OS. This was written when the I was the IT Manager at Baker Publishing.

Monitor Dot Pitch

For those of us who cut our teeth with 8-bit computers in the late 1970s, dot pitch wasn’t an issue. A monitor might display 320 dots horizontally by 200 vertically. On a 13″ monitor (the norm back then) with 12″ viewable, you’d have about 9.5″ horizontally. That’s 0.75 mm per pixel, so a horizontal dot […]

How the G4 Compares to the G3

1999 – I disagree about the G4 being a “marginally better” CPU than the G3. Given the 603 vs. the 604, where the 603 cannot handle multitasking properly and has a bus utilization rate that is so high that it cannot be configured for multiprocessing, nor can it handle intensive floating point calculations. The 604 […]

A Subscriber’s Guide to Macjordomo

I maintained several email lists using Macjordomo, a freeware email list server from Leuca Software. The purpose of this page is to explain how Macjordomo works and how you can add, delete, or change your subscription – although the examples provided in this article are no longer in use. (Take that, spammers!)