Tag Archives: Mac OS

Computer Retirement

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I finally let my old PowerBook take a break.

I bought a MacBook Pro at least eight months ago, when I was working on my Leopard book for Peachpit Press. I needed a computer with an Intel processor — none of my computers had one at the time — so I could write about Boot Camp and other Intel-specific topics. I went with a “Pro” instead of a regular MacBook because it offered some feature I needed that the MacBook did not. (Right now, I can’t remember what that was.) But I admit that I also prefer the metal case. (I think Apple’s plastic casing looks cheesy.)

How I Used My Laptops

The MacBook Pro was purchased as a “test mule” — a computer used specifically to test and write about software. As such, I kept it very clean, installing only the software I needed to write about. There was virtually no personalization. Heck, even the desktop picture was a plain white screen so I could get clean screenshots of windows and menus.

For computing on the road, I used my 12″ PowerBook G4. I loved its small package, which made it easy to throw in a backpack or piece of luggage. I took it everywhere. I even had a DC adapter for it that enabled me to get power from a car’s cigarette lighter/power port or the DC port in my camper. That was a good thing because the computer’s battery was the first to go. Even the replacement didn’t last long.

Over time, the PowerBook started getting really beat up. Dents and dings, scratches and dirt. One of its rubber feet fell off. Twice. Alex the Bird pulled off the F5 key and I could only get it partially reattached — it was like that for over a year, until a friendly Genius fixed it for me. My CD-ROM drive went on a trip to Alaska after burning one last disc of photos. Oddly enough, it still reads DVDs but wants nothing to do with CDs. Just spins them and spits them out.

But I continued to use it. It did the job — well, most of it — and I was willing to work around the little problems it had.

My PowerBook’s Fall from Grace

When Leopard came out, I was thrilled with the idea of Back to My Mac. The PowerBook met the minimum requirements for Leopard — barely. So I installed it.

Mistake. The poor old computer simply wasn’t up to the challenge of running Apple’s latest operating system. After a month of watching spinning beach balls and being able to type faster than the computer could take the characters, I finally downgraded it back to Tiger.

But I think its experience with Leopard has scarred it. It doesn’t seem quite as fast as it used to be.

Or perhaps that’s just because I’ve been using a brand new iMac at my desk for the past two months and the old G4 is simply no match for any of my equipment these days.

My MacBook Pro Steps into a New Role

Today, I decided to step into the MacBook Pro for mobile computing. The battery is still healthy and it reads and writes both CDs and DVDs. It can also run Leopard without any problems. So this morning, I installed most of the software I need to use while on the road. I’ll add a few more items later today. And I’m composing this blog post in ecto on the MacBook Pro, just to feel it out. (The PowerBook will return to duty as the kitchen table blogging/surfing machine tomorrow.)

I can still use the MacBook Pro for a test mule. I’ll simply set up a new account and use that to run software for screenshots or screencasting. Fast user switching makes it easy. And the computer has plenty of power to run the software I need to create the screenshots and movies.

Computers on the Auction Block

Will I sell the G4? Probably not. It really is beat up. And it’ll probably make its permanent home in our camping shed up at Howard Mesa someday. After all, it still works and it’s still able to connect to the Internet via my Treo when I’m off the grid. It’s not like I’m crunching video up there. Just blogging, e-mail, and doing some surfing, mostly for weather or phone numbers. And writing the occasional article for Informit.

I did recently sell my old dual G5 on eBay. It fetched about three times what I thought it would. I’m a very happy camper. And I assume the buyer is, too. After all, he hasn’t complained.

I do have one more computer I’d like to sell: a Strawberry iMac. I’m going to try to prep it for eBay this weekend. Once that’s gone, I’ll be down to just four computers: a 24″ iMac (my most recent purchase, used entirely for production work), the 15″ MacBook Pro, the 12″ PowerBook, and a Dell laptop (I can never remember the model). With the iMac running Parallels, I don’t even start up the Dell these days, although I’m likely to use it for my annual Quicken revision when the time comes.

Don’t get me wrong — it isn’t as if I want four computers. I don’t. But I do need certain computers to get my work done efficiently and effectively. The PowerBook has always been the equivalent of a “home” computer for me. Now the MacBook Pro will be doing double-duty.

New Apple Products in My Future?

I do see occasional glimpses of a new computer in my future: the rumored Apple sub-notebook. If it’s a viable replacement for the 12″ PowerBook — with a decent-sized monitor, full-size keyboard, wireless (including Bluetooth) built in, and CD/DVD drive — it’ll be exactly what I want.

But will it be? Apple hasn’t been creating products that meet my particular needs lately:

  • The iPhone is beautiful and cool but its close ties to AT&T and limited capabilities make my Treo a better solution for me.
  • The iPod Touch is similarly cool, but doesn’t offer enough “wow” factor to make me want to replace my original 30GB iPod Video (now known as the “classic”).
  • I still don’t understand the purpose of AppleTV, although I suspect Apple intended it to do what the iPod does for the iTunes store — get people to buy content. But with video content providers like television networks pulling out of the Apple store, it’s becoming less attractive as time goes by. Of course, I don’t watch much television, so I’m probably not the right person to be evaluating a device like this.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m still a big fan of Apple. You wouldn’t see me looking at a Zune or buying another Dell. But I’m not so much of a fan that I’m blinded by the Apple logo. I still think before I buy — now more than ever. A product has to completely meet my needs — whether they’re real or imagined — before I buy it. Otherwise I’d rather wait until a better product comes along.

Right now, I’m anxious to see the next Apple computer. I’m hoping it’ll put my G4 into full retirement mode.

On Revisions

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At the halfway point of my Mac OS X book revision.

Yesterday, as I completed the revisions to Chapter 10, I reached the halfway point in my revision for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.

No, the book isn’t 20 chapters long. It’s 27 plus an appendix. I’ve revised 14 chapters. I’m not revising in order. I’m revising in the order I think it might be safe to revise in. Some features are still in flux and if I revise based on what I see, I’ll likely have to revise again.

And no, I can’t tell you what I think might be in flux. I’m under non-disclosure and I take that stuff pretty seriously. That’s also why you won’t find Leopard screenshots here (yet). And why I haven’t written any articles about the new features (yet).

This is a Deep Revision

I’ve settled into a pace of about one revised chapter per day. That might seem like a lot. It is, especially since I’m doing what I call a deep revision.

I not only write my Visual QuickStart Guides, but I also do layout for them. This is called packaging — the author provides final files to the publisher, who then (after editing, of course) sends them on to the printer.

I currently use InDesign CS3 for all my layout needs. But that’s not what I was using when I wrote the first edition of this book, which covered Mac OS 8, back in 1997. (I still remember that book’s release at Macworld Expo in Boston. Peachpit sold out on the first day of the show, but UPS was on strike and we couldn’t get any more books in.) In 1997, I was using PageMaker. And that’s what I used to create the original book files.

A revision is a revision. That means you start with something and modify it to bring it up to date. So each year, I’d start with the previous year’s file and modify text, replace screenshots, and make various other changes to bring the content and file up to date.

Every time I switched to a new version of my layout software — PageMaker became InDesign 2 which became InDesign CS which became InDesign CS3 — I can’t justify the expense of updating my software for every release — I’d simply convert the file to the new version at the beginning of the revision process.

Over the years, this led to inconsistently set up files. Sure, the differences were minor, but they were there. And it bugged me that there were tiny differences in the style definitions and that some text included indexing codes from a failed experiment with the indexing feature and that the Zapf Dingbats font applied to bullets wasn’t working right in all files. And that in some chapters, each page was a different InDesign “story” and in others, the stories would go on for several pages.

So this year I decided to clean up the files by recreating them all. I built a brand new template in InDesign CS3, adding the staggered tabs that many other VQS books include but mine never had. I took full advantage of InDesign’s nested style feature to automate bullet and reference formatting. I made my styles intelligent and highly functional.

Then I got an InDesign plugin that enabled me to export the individual stories in a single chapter file as one big story in plain old text. I do this for each chapter. I make sure the text has smart quotes and paste it into my template. I then manually reapply all the styles as I go through the text and edit it to bring it up to date.

Along the way, I reorganized much of the content to remove 2 chapters, add 5 chapters, and move a bunch of content around.

A deep revision.

Other Revisions

Contrast this with the last book revision I did. That was for another publisher which doesn’t allow author packaging. Instead, the book is submitted as a series of Microsoft Word files.

I start with the previous year’s “final” files. I turn on the revision feature so all my changes are marked — supposedly for the benefit of the copy editor, so she doesn’t re-edit the whole thing — and go at it. The result is a mess that only gets messier as the book goes through the editing process. In the end, it’s all cleaned up, laid out and sent to me as proofs so I can make any final corrections to it.

If the software I’m revising the book for hasn’t changed much, this can be incredibly quick — I can sometimes turn out 3-4 chapters in a day, with plenty of time for my morning coffee, blog entry, e-mail processing, and even a little Web surfing. My record was 2 weeks for the entire 400+ page book.

Time Is Not on my Side

But for a deep revision, things go much more slowly. If I’m lucky, I can turn out a chapter a day. That’s a complete 20-40 page chapter, laid out with dozens of screenshots — I’m averaging about 80 per chapter right now — and captions and even a few callouts.

I just did the math. If I can keep up a chapter a day as my production rate, I should have the whole thing done by September 20. Right?

Well, unfortunately, I don’t have the next 13 days to work on this book. Next Friday, I’m flying my helicopter at the Mohave County Fair, giving rides for the whole weekend. On Monday, I fly directly to Page for two separate flying gigs over Lake Powell. I should be back by Thursday afternoon. Then the Saturday right after that, I’m hosting a photographer/writer and pilot from Australia who are preparing a coffee table book about Robinson Helicopters, featuring about 20 operators all over the world. (Can you imagine that they picked me?) When they leave, I have a few days before I head back up to Lake Powell, Monument Valley, and Shiprock with the helicopter for a group of Russian photographers for a big photo excursion.

What does this tell me?

It’s 6:26 AM on a Friday morning. I’d better get to work.

The High Cost of Writing Tech Books

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Only the big names get it all for free — and they’re the ones who could afford to buy!

I’ve been writing computer how-to books since 1992. Right now I’m working on a revision of my Mac OS book for Leopard. It’ll be my 70th title.

A lot of people think that I get all the hardware and software I need to write for free. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have to buy most of the hardware I write about. Although I do get much of the software I write about for free, I don’t get the software I need to do my work. So while I might get Office 2007 right from Microsoft and Quicken 2008 right from Intuit (thanks, guys!), I don’t get Photoshop and InDesign from Adobe — and those two very expensive software packages are what I need to lay out and prepare images for my books.

My Past (and Current) Computers

I’m a Mac user and have had numerous Macs since the first one I bought in 1989. Let’s see if I can come up with a complete list.

First, the production machines, which I use to do all my work. These are machines I’ve customized so they look and work just the way I wanted them to. Each of them lasted 2-4 years.

  • Mac IIcx – this system cost me $8K including a color monitor and laser printer. It had 1MB RAM.
  • PowerMac 7100/66
  • PowerMac 8500/167?
  • PowerMac G3 (beige; can’t remember speed)
  • Power Mac G4/866
  • Power Mac G5Power Mac Dual G5/1.8 – my current production machine

The 8500 and G4 became servers when they were retired from production duty; indeed, the 8500 ran 8 Web sites, a mail server, and an FTP server until 2005. I also had 2 SE/30s (not listed) way back in the beginning that I used as BBS servers. And, believe it or not, I still have them.

Then there are the laptops. I’ll admit that the first laptop I “owned” was provided by one of my clients to help me do my training job for them. I had it for about 3 years. By then I was hooked and needed my own laptop. A laptop normally lasts me about 4 years.

  • PowerBook 180
  • PowerBook 520c
  • iBook SE (clamshell) – gave it to my neighbor’s kids
  • PowerBook G4 (12″) – current laptop; I love this machine

Next, the test mules. These are the machines I bought to run the software I was writing about on. This is where you’ll find a mixture of Macs and PCs, since I do write about PC software (Word, Excel, Quicken, etc.).They’re kept in factory-installed condition — in fact, I commonly reformat and reinstall operating system software on the Macs. (Doing that is a HUGE hassle on the PCs.)

In the old days, I used to use my old production computer as my Mac test mule. But as technology evolved, those older machines didn’t have the hardware features I needed to write about. So I wound up buying new computers for the task and keeping them at least 4 years. Lately I’ve realized that laptops make excellent test mules because of their portability (duh), so I’ve switched to those.

First, the Macs:

  • Strawberry iMac (G3) – in my garage; I need to unload this thing
  • eMac (G4) – is now a server for Internet streaming at the local radio station. (Yes, the same radio station where they’re doing their accounting with an 18-year-old Mac.)
  • 15-in MacBook ProMacBook Pro (15″) – current test mule; had thoughts of using it to replace the 12″ PowerBook but I like the PowerBook’s size better for taking it on the road.

Then the PCs:

  • Gateway – can’t remember model; it ran Windows 95, which was brand new at the time
  • Dell Dimension 944r? – I gave this to the local library; it runs XP so why not?
  • Dell Latitude (laptop) – my current test mule. But I think that if Parallels or Boot Camp work out well, I might get rid of it while it still has decent resale value.

Other Hardware

The other hardware list is long and frankly not very interesting.

The list includes the usual collection of monitors (including 2 of the ill-fated 17-in Apple displays). I didn’t replace a monitor when I got a new computer — the Dell Dimension, for example, used the Gateway’s monitor and I’m still using the 20″ Sony monitor, which I think I first connected to my G3 all those years ago, every day. (And yes, I am ready for something bigger now that my close eyesight is starting to fail.)

It also includes printers — five laser printers (four of which are still at work in my house — don’t ask) and a collection of junky dot matrix and later inkjet and “photo printing” printers. I’m sold on laser printers and won’t get conned into buying anything else unless a better technology comes along. Oddly enough, I do very little printing these days, since all of my manuscripts are now submitted electronically. I don’t see my work in print until the edits come back for review.

I’ve had at least 3 scanners, including a SCSI scanner that cost a whopping $1,000. I now use a junky little Canon scanner which is far better and far cheaper than that first one.

imageI’ve had to buy numerous AirPort products, including four base stations (two of which I still own) and one AirPort Express. (I got a second one as a gift from Apple for making several appearances at Apple Stores.) I also have two iSight cameras, one of which powers my WebCam.

Speaking of cameras, I’ve also had to buy digital cameras, starting with the QuickTake. I’ve had five of them over the years, each better than the one before it. (My current Canon PowerShot has just died after less than 2 years of life so I’ll probably have to get another one soon.) And digital video cameras — I’ve had three. Why do I need cameras? Have you ever read any of my Mac OS X books? I need to cover how to use Mac OS X with these devices.

Black iPodAnd that’s also why I have three iPods, starting with the original 5GB model and ending (so far) with a sleek little black video iPod.

In the weird department is the Newton Message Pad (call me a sucker; I deserve it) and Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (which sits in my living room, providing stereo sound and a digital picture frame when hooked up to one of my iPods).

My husband just told me to mention the huge plastic storage bin of cables. That’s where I was able to pull out a vintage 1989 ADB mouse for my friend Jo. I had a bunch of SCSI cables in there, too, but after trying unsuccessfully to give them to an Apple store, I just tossed them into a trash can in the mall. (Those cables cost $25-$50 each when new!) The cable bin is also where you’ll find various microphones and speakers, Zip drives, Jaz drives, and the cartridges that go with them. It’s an antique computer peripheral bin and if anyone needs any of that kind of stuff, Comment below and let me know. Most of it can go for the cost of postage.

Do the Math

That’s about it for the hardware. Do some math. I’m willing to bet that I’ve spent well over $75,000 on computer equipment over the years. In fact, I bet it’s close to $100K. But this is the cost of doing what I do. It’s part of my business expenses.

And yes, I can write it off on my taxes, but I still have to pay for it. A write off is nothing more than a rebate for me. It reduces my total tax liability, but not by the amount I paid — just by my tax rate applied to the amount I paid. For example, if I paid $100 for a piece of hardware and am in a 30% tax bracket, I’m only getting $30 off on my taxes. So the item still cost me $70. It’s nice to be able to write this stuff off, but it doesn’t mean I get it for free.

I’m Not Complaining

Not really. It’s great to be able to work with state of the art hardware. Who could complain about that?

But it would be nice if I got to work with it for free. I don’t mind paying for the stuff that I want to keep and use daily — like my production machines, which I really work hard over the years. But the equipment that I need just to write a few pages of a book — like an iSight camera or the latest AirPort base station — is tough to cough up the dough for. And let’s face it: how many iPods does a person really need? (If your answer is zero, you’ve probably never had an iPod.)

AirPort Extreme Base StationRecently, Apple very graciously agreed to loan me the new AirPort base station so I could write about the new AirPort Disk feature in my Leopard book. I’m looking forward to getting it and giving it a try. But I’m also looking forward to sending it back when I’m finished and not having to see it on my American Express bill. The AirPort Disk feature looks good, but I simply don’t need it.

(When I get my next production machine in October — probably a 24″ iMac — the dual G5 will be wiped clean and set up as a file server, perhaps with an inexpensive 17″ flatscreen monitor attached. I envision it sitting in my living room near the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, displaying a constant slideshow of photos when guests are around. A true digital picture frame with 120 GB of storage space and an AirPort card ready to accept all the files I want to back up via Time Machine.)

Meanwhile, the big names — and you know who I’m talking about — get everything they want any time they want it for free. In fact, Apple and other hardware/software developers call them and offer it up! It’s the reason why many of these guys have come across as real Apple fanboys. How can you be objective when you know that the first negative thing you say in the pages of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal may stop the next phone call from Apple? And the whole time, these guys are pulling in the big bucks and can actually afford to buy any hardware they want.

Am I jealous? Bitter? What do you think?

But because I pay for it all, I can stay objective. While I really do like what Apple develops and sells, I’m not afraid to mention the shortcomings in a product. (For example, I still can’t figure out why people are buying Apple TVs. At least the Newton I bought was kind of cool.) I can’t ruin my chances of getting the latest gadget — iPhone, Apple TV, etc. — for free because I wouldn’t get it for free anyway.

The Point?

The point of all this is that writing computer how-to books can be a costly endeavor. But I think it’s worth it.

Flash Flood Warning

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Flash Flood in WidgetAlerted by a Mac OS X Widget.

It’s raining like hell here — FINALLY!!! — and I thought I’d peek at the Dashboard Radar in Motion widget for the area. Imagine my surprise when it displayed a Flash Flood Alert! (If you’re wondering, I live in the vicinity of the “e” in Wickenburg on the map.)

The rain really is coming down here and there’s some water movement off my house, down my driveway, and down the road leading to my home. But the big wash that runs past my house has a long way to go before it has enough water to start running. I’ll keep an eye on it, but we’d need at least an hour more of rain like this to get to flood stage.

Hard to work when there’s finally so much great weather outside. It’s been more than 3 months since we got a good rainfall here.