Hacking Mac OS 7.6.1 to Work with Many OS 8 Apps

Blame it all on BBC, the British Broadcasting Company. I like BBC’s radio programs, but as my favorite operating system is Mac OS 7.6.1, there has been a problem called Real Player 8 (RP8). Regular OS 7.6.1 lets you use RP5, and the Appearance Manager brings RP6 (a.k.a. G2) in the game, but the BBC Radio […]

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released on October 26, 2007, was the biggest change to Mac OS X since Apple first released OS X 10.0 in March 2001. For the first time, a version of OS X was certified as Unix, and the new unified appearance makes Leopard friendlier and less confusing for users.

The Future of eMacs in the Age of Leopard

2007 – Apple announced the system requirements for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last week: a drive that can read the DVD install disc, at least 512 MB of memory, and an 867 MHz G4 or better. Although 700-800 MHz eMacs aren’t officially supported, we have lots of tips on installing Mac OS X 10.5 on unsupported Macs […]

It All Started with a Mac Plus in the Classroom

In 1993, I was 11 years old. My experience with Macs had amounted to whatever time I could get alone with the Mac Plus sitting in the back of the classroom. I didn’t do much then. Mostly I would just play games like Shufflepuck Café or Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? I had no […]

MacBook (Late 2007)

This is the fourth version of the consumer MacBook – and the first to use the Santa Rosa chipset that made its way into the MacBook Pro line in June. The entry-level MacBook remains at 2.0 GHz, while the faster models see a tiny speed bump from 2.16 GHz to 2.2 GHz. At the same […]

Line Spacing Problem with Pages Solved

The past two weeks have been quite busy with musical rehearsals at church and some design projects – creating postcards, water bottle labels, tickets, and programs for Rishalina and the River, a musical our church’s music and arts director cowrote in 1976.

Mac Maintenance: Effective Backup Strategies

Everyone knows they need to backup their data, but most people don’t do so regularly (if at all). Backups are confusing and annoying. Besides, who has the time? Well, your perspective may change during a post-crash enlightenment: Most people become religious about backups after their first catastrophic loss of data.

Mac Maintenance: Solve Disk and Hardware Problems

The disk directory is the table of contents for your hard drive. Directory errors build up slowly over time – or quickly after a crash. Such errors can cause problems opening or saving files, and if severe enough they can prevent your Mac from starting up, instead displaying the flashing question mark. Fixing the disk […]

A Quadra with ClarisWorks and Mathematica: All You Need for a Thesis

It was early 1995, and I was a young graduate student in the Environmental Engineering department at Clemson University. I was finishing up my research and desperately needed a computer to produce my thesis on. There were quite a few Macs at the University, but the trend towards switching to Wintel was already picking up […]

Mac Maintenance: Fix Glitches and Sluggishness

Sometimes your Mac just doesn’t seem as peppy as it used to, particularly if it’s been running for a long time. Memory and disk problems are the most common causes of routine glitches and sluggishness, especially the dreaded “Spinning Pizza of Death” (a.k.a. beachball cursor) that never seems to go away. Sometimes RAM and disk […]