2001: Macworld Expo has come and gone, and Mac users certainly weren’t disappointed. A slew of great announcements and one sweet sweet PowerBook release kept the Mac folk happy.
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.
2001: Melonsoft’s Cabrio is a new and innovative Mac-only MP3 audio player.
2001: About two months ago, I received a DayStar Digital Genesis MP 600 with a 200 MHz quad 604 CPU module and a 132 MHz quad 604 CPU module as a gift from some friends of mine. If you have never seen one in person, this is big, heavy, and loud. Its metal case could […]
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 – […]
2001: After shaking up the computer world with sleek hardware designs, Apple is finally getting serious about pushing “the other half” of its business: software. What’s inside the box is essential to the Apple business, but it is widely ignored in print and ad campaigns. After all, a curvy iMac looks much better on a […]
The titanium PowerBook was announced on 2001.01.09 at the Macworld Expo. It is smaller and lighter than any of the G3 PowerBooks that preceded it, measuring just 1″ thick and weighing in at 5.3 pounds. Construction is titanium and carbon fiber, making for a very tough, very light computer.
Apple doesn’t make it easy – this is the fourth model using the name Power Mac G4 and the same case. What most differentiates the Digital Audio version from earlier models is the 133 MHz bus on the motherboard with four PCI slots plus an AGP slot, one more PCI slot than previous models.
Here are two books that warrant the attention of serious Low End Mac readers: The Second Coming of Steve Jobs and Free For All.
ProTools v3.4 Digital Audio Workstation software was released on CD-ROM free of charge by Digidesign as a promotional effort in 1997. It is an older but fully-functional 16-track version of the program. Pro Tools v3.4 was only approved for use with some PCI-based Power Macs, but it is possible to run the program on many […]
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.
2000: Apple has twice as many hurdles to overcome with its new machines. Right now, things are looking up for Mac users. If you want a new machine, you can buy now at a good price. You won’t suffer too much on the performance front (you hope) when Apple releases new machines (we hope) at […]
This is our third and final look at Henry Bortman’s “Macintosh 2000” predictions in the March 1992 issue of MacUser.
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.
2000: Like it or not, Mac OS X will be a reality in a few short months. All of the hand-wringing, hair tearing, and general sighs of resignation (along with a few cheers) will be done, and OS X will make its debut – and it’s in your best interest to swallow the medicine (sweet […]
This is rather unusual for us – two different Low End Mac staffers reviewing the same software. But what Battery Amnesia does can be so incredible that you might not believe just one of us. (Note that Lithium-ion batteries, which Apple has used since the PowerBook 3400c in 1997, are not susceptible to the memory […]
2000: Since I have been banging away at LinuxPPC like a madman day and night for the last few weeks, I thought it would be nice to share how to actually get a LinuxPPC system up and running. It is unclear how many articles I am going to do in this series, but there are […]
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.
If you’ve followed computer news recently, you’ve seen links to articles about 10 GHz processors from Intel (Intel Plans $1500 10GHz PC) and IBM (IBM Reveals 10GHz, 0.13µ PowerPC Chip Tech). Well, Apple certainly hasn’t been left out in the cold – rest assured that Steve Jobs is prepared. Taking a page from the Intel […]
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: Way back when, Apple stock was in the toilet, trading at $11 a share. Don’t look now, but the earnings forecast that came out on Tuesday brought investors close to that same spot. On Wednesday, AAPL closed at 14-5/16. Not a pretty sight.
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,” […]
It’s a good time to be reading about (and writing about) Macs. After the slow years of 1996 and 1997, we’ve seen a trickle of Mac books turn into a respectable stream. Part of the stream is two books that got their start in the early 90s and have just been updated. Enough has changed in […]
Extensions Strip 1.9.3, a $15 ($8 educational) piece of shareware written by Ammon Skidmore, is the best Control Strip replacement there is. Apple would do well to follow Ammon’s example.
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.
Our Fair Computer Company has released some quirky yet useful features in its computer systems and OS, and then advertised them very little – if at all. Apple’s SCSI Disk Mode and it’s modernized offspring, FireWire Target Disk Mode, are excellent examples.
“Which is the better server for my home network, the Quadra 650 I’ve been using or the smaller Quadra 605?”
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.
The Mac Classic uses an 8 MHz 68000 CPU. The installed hard drive is a 170 MB Quantum ELS170S formatted with LaCie Silverlining software. This was not the original hard drive, which was a slower 40 MB mechanism.
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.
2000 – America Online’s Instant Messenger (AIM) is one of a host of chat applications that has become part of an Internet user’s standard suite of tools in the past two years.
