Clean That Drive

Reminding us again,  David Passell offers this tip today.  "If you are having trouble reading CDs on your Super Drive (particularly on the Mini) get out that cleaning disk. I recently tried to read a CD with old programs on it, and the drive was either ejecting it or mounting it as a recordable .fbpf disk After I put in the cleaning disk everything worked fine. I find I have to do that every two months or so. I made a previous entry on this over a year ago."

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Help for Switchers

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A detailed article with help for those switching over to Mac is referred to us by Jim Hamm.  He calls it an "excellent summary on what to do to make the switch as easy as possible."  The blog writer, David Alison, switched two years ago.  Review his tips, then scroll down and see what other interesting information he gives.  The entry about batteries is a good reminder.

Flash and iPad

Some interesting observations on the iPad and Flash come from author John Gruber at Daring Fireball.  He points out that everyone was raving about the speed of the new CPU, Apple A4. Jim Hamm believes him to be very perceptive in his comments.  iPad Big Picture  -  Various iPad Thoughts   -   Blue Boxes     (If your eyes don't love that dark background try this remedy:  hold down Control and Option and Command simultaneously with the number 8.  Toggle back when you're ready.)

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Suggested Remedies for DVD Problem

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Three of our PMUG members have responded to the earlier post today, "Transfer Video to DVD."

Bill Williamson asks, "Have you tried MPEG Streamclip? It's freeware and converts almost anything to anything and can be downloaded from the web."

John Carter offers, "I can certainly help with this. I am a volunteer with the Prescott Library and I do Mac mentoring there. I have had similar problems with my video camera. I believe that converting the video files can be done with Final Cut Express, and there are plenty of other applications that can do the job as well, and some of them are Windows based - I have a few of those applications. Email = John Carter

David Passell explains his remedy, "Hello Arti: Welcome to Prescott, and I hope you will be able to become a member of the Prescott Macintosh User's Group. I see two ways in which you can get your video content into the Mac.

1.  Get an external DVD drive with a drawer rather than a slot. You may be able to find a used one. It should accept the mini-DVD. It must have a USB or Firewire port and be compatible with Mac. The .vob, .ifb, and .bup are files commonly found in all DVDs for home and commercial use.

You shouldn't need a ripper for your non-commercial recordings from the Handy Cam. Rippers are a quasi-legal way to duplicate commercial DVD movies with copy protection schemes. (As an aside, you may have noticed that a DVD player cannot play a movie properly through the input connections of a VHS or another DVD recorder.)

With a drive that doesn't "choke" on the mini-DVD  you should be able to read it with the Apple DVD Viewer or the more versatile VLC viewer. You can use the Apple Disk Utility to burn a direct copy or create a disk image from which you can burn full size DVDs.   I have  done acceptable DVDs by just copying a .vob file to a blank DVD. You have to experiment. It is unlikely that any of the mini-DVD files are larger than the 4.7GB capacity of the full size DVD. You don't want to put .mpeg or .avi on the DVDs you give to the veterans, if they are to be played on standard DVD players. You want the same DVD format as you would find on a DVD Movie (less the copy protection).

2. The second method is klunky and slow: If the Handy Cam has the usual video and sound "RCA" output jacks (so you can cable them to the external line inputs of a TV or VCR), then you can obtain a device which accepts these outputs and digitizes them to a form that you can view on your computer with the Quick Time Player. The "Elgato" is one such device. If you have QuickTime player 7 (Snow Leopard) or QuickTime player pro ($29.95) you can  Select File > new movie recording. You then will have to play back your recording from the Handy Cam to create the file you can duplicate to another DVD. I have one ADVC110 (which I don't think is any longer made) through which I have copied full length VHS tapes and TV programs. I still partly live in the stone age:).

3.  I believe that SONY makes a recorder that is designed to make DVDs from the output of their cameras.

David concludes, Hope this is helpful, I am sure there are members of PMUG including myself who can provide hands-on assistance."

Transfer Video to DVD?

This morning's email brings a request from De Prez Allen Laudenslager.  He's received a note asking about transfer of a video to DVD.  Can you help?

"My name is Aarti, and I am new to both Prescott and Macs. I have a MacBook Pro and am looking for some help.  I volunteer with the Veterans History Project, which conducts interviews with local veterans for the national that is organized and archived by the U.S. Library of Congress.

"Our video equipment is the Sony Handycam 105. It was donated by Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, the Handycam only uses mini-DVDs, which can't be placed into a Mac. Furthermore, the camera does not have a port through which to be connected to the computer.

"I am at a loss for how to transfer the video to DVDs that I can submit and give to the Veterans. I borrowed a PC to copy the files from mini-DVD to my external hard drive. But, these files are .vob, .ifo, .bup. None can be opened by my Apple software. I tried advice I found on Internet searches, and downloaded a couple of different "ripping" softwares to convert those files to .avi or.mpeg. Still no success.

"Would any of you have advice? Thank you!"
Aarti Pani

What Are They Saying?

Ready to read more about what "they" are saying about Apple?  David Passell finds lots of information at arstechnica.  Today’s feature articles discuss such weighty issues as problems with the 27-inch iMac screen, predicted iPad features, a poll on flash for iPad, and other raves and pans. He adds, “The arstechnica site has a lot of other news items besides Apple. To see them and other subjects suggest you click on the ‘All’ tab.”

Then to leave you with a smile, David sends this link which includes a picture of a laptop computer that’s been microwaved, and is for sale for US $26001.00 to benefit charity. Scroll down to see the video.              Puzzled by 21 blank boxes on that site, I control-clicked on one of the little ? in the tiny blue square, then choosing "Open image in new window"  that brought up the missing photo.

More on Flash

Following up on the short presentation by Art Gorski this morning, David Passell discovered more.  He writes, "In the meeting this morning somebody asked if the 'clicktoflash' demonstrated for Safari had an equivalent in Firefox. Here is the information. (Double click to enlarge the screen shot.)

"I downloaded it and it works. I notice that you can't unselect once you click on a hidden flash; you have to exit the site then re-enter. Other than that it works fine. Below is the information from my Google. Note that the Flashtracer mentioned is for older versions of Firefox (I have 3.5.7), and I didn't bother with it. A couple of other useful add-ons I installed earlier allow me to have multi-line bookmarks and tabs like Opera. Another thing: I would suggest only installing Add-ons with URLs that contain ...mozilla.org... You'll notice that there will be a warning that says only install add-ons from people you trust."

Starting Off 2010

We started off 2010 with 35 people at the January meeting today at the Prescott Library.
Thanks to Roger Lakner (in the picture here) and Art Gorski for their presentations.  Lucky ticket holders won Avery products.  We're all eager to try out the CDs of the Avery DesignPro software that everyone received.

Double click to enlarge the photos.   Thanks to MaryBeth for the photos, including the new one in the sidebar.

This Blog Gets Fixed

If you've scratched your head over some previous posts on this PMUG blog, wondering if your computer or your technique needed fixing hopefully the problem is fixed.  I was excited several months ago to find the Jump To feature available on Blogspot.  It enabled me to add, "Click to Read More."  Then the rest of the article would come in view.  Alas, something at Blogspot quit working.  An SOS went out to PMUG board, but John Carter looked into it and advised to not use it anymore.  So, I've deleted that line of code from 90 postings!  Scroll up or down, look through the Labels and the Archives.  You should be able to read the entire entries with no problems.

Watch Out For Scams

Continuing to follow the news of Haiti we are all concerned.  But scammers are already at work.  De Prez Allen Laudenslager advises, "Please put a post on the club blog warning against responding to email requests for Relief to Haiti and recommending that anyone who wishes to help give only through charities they recognized as established charities or check with the Better Business Bureau to be sure the charity is not a scam."
        David Passell writes, "Hi All: According to the news some 400 sites purporting to be for Haiti Relief have sprung up. Many are SCAMS designed to profit the originator or worse to collect personal information. I suggest we ignore this email and advise others to do the same. I wonder if our members might also be getting this?
        "I suggest that to donate, go local; give to Salvation Army, Trinity Presbyterian Church, Methodist Church, Red Cross and many others we may know in Prescott."

Backing Up: Part 2

If you read Part One, posted 12-29, then you're ready for the next installment by De Prez Allen Laudenslager. He begins with, "I back up with both Super Duper and Time Machine.

"Super Duper will create a bootable sector on your external drive that will allow you to boot from the external drive if your internal drive quits for any reason. The process to select which drive to boot from is: turn your Mac off. Boot while holding the option/alt key down. This will bring up a dialog box listing any internal, external or CD drive the computer can access. Select your external drive and your back up and running on the external drive.

"Super Duper is free, but will only backup ALL the files you select, changed from the last back up or not. If you pay the $15 bucks, then you only need to fully back up once, all future backups will only be changed files, much faster that way.

"Since I’m on a laptop, my external drive is not always connected. I do a Super Duper back up at least once a week. I backup with Time Machine whenever I do anything that I would hate to lose, every two to three days at least.

"My goal is to be able to restore my hard drive in case of another crash. So my restore process would be to install the new internal drive and then boot from my external drive and restore from Super Duper, which will reinstall all my software including the OS. Then do a Time Machine restore to get my files (to the latest backup date/time).

"Without a fatal crash or a blank drive to try this on, I can’t be sure it will work the way I expect, but my Mac expert claims that it should. I am sure that all the files I need will be on the drive, it is just the recovery steps that are in question. And since restoring the files will not erase them from my external drive, if I make a mistake, all it will take is time to get the step right."

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Free Download to Clean Up Programs

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"Many of you may have heard me complain that my Macbook locks up if I leave it running with the case open and don't do anything with it for as little as 3 minutes." De Prez Allen Laudenslager continues, " I downloaded OnyX and ran the clean up programs. Seems to have fixed the problem! Since it cleans up more than one thing in each category I can't tell exactly what was wrong or what fixed it.

"Do I really care? NO! I just like that it now works right.  OnyX is free and downloads from the Apple site." Need details?  Allen suggests you contact Roger Lakner.  And he thanks Roger, for the help.