From: Tony Lindsey Subject: Mac*Chat#106 Mac*Chat#105/07-Mar-96 ====================== Welcome to Mac*Chat, the weekly electronic newsletter for everyone interested in using a Macintosh computer professionally, no matter what their situation or profession. See the end of this file for further information, including how to get a free subscription. How to contribute financial donations to Mac*Chat: Donations are gratefully accepted, to help defray the costs of putting-out one of the fastest-growing newsletters on earth. Checks may be mailed to Tony Lindsey, 3401-A55 Adams Ave, San Diego, CA 92116-2429, or for info on electronic funds-transfers, send e-mail to and put the word "Donations" into the Subject line. Any [comments in brackets] are by Tony Lindsey. Highlights Of This Issue ------------------------ I announce the new Mac*Chat mirror site for Mac fans in Australia, readers tell us about their favorite computer games that don't involve killing things, we wind-up the discussion of making color-t-shirts for your Mac, Frank Nagy defends DLT tape-drives for backing-up a network, we hear from several folks who have good information about the SCSI cables connecting your Mac to your external drives and scanners, we learn about System 7.5.3 from Apple and several Faithful Readers, and we get several great ideas about printing big, professional jobs on a network. Topics: Highlights Of This Issue Editor's Notes Mac*Chat Is Now Found On A Mirror-Site In Australia Non-Violent Games For The Mac Color T-Shirts, Final Installment Backup Tape Drives, Continued Technical Section Starts... Here SCSI Cable Tips Printing Big Jobs Quicker Legalisms Free Subscriptions To This Newsletter Editor's Notes -------------- By Tony Lindsey I'm still receiving an avalanche of messages in response to the bad words I said about QuickDraw GX. I'm going to wait for another issue or so until I can find time to sort through the pile. ------ This issue contains a goodly amount of technically-oriented writing toward the end. I've included it because the information is timely and important, in my opinion. Please skim it, at least! Mac*Chat Is Now Found On A Mirror-Site In Australia --------------------------------------------------- By Tony Lindsey Folks in Australia should check it out: Thanks to Tim Tuck for setting it up, since the folks in Australia have such a slow connection to the USA. Here's a few words from Tim on the topic: ------ We have a veerrrry slow connection to the rest of the world. The problem is that *ALL* traffic bound for anywhere in the world has to go through the USA first !! We have no connections to Europe or Asia (now, that's silly since we are so close) and the only country we are directly connected to is New Zealand! (although some Australian wags will insist that Tasmania is a separate country :-) Typical download speeds from the well connected USA sites average 800 - 1k bytes/sec and UK sites rarely go over 100 bytes per second, the one I was using yesterday was 50 bytes/sec. Aarrggh! [For comparison, I typically get up to 3,600 bytes/second on my Mac IIci and 28.8 modem here in San Diego.] Non-Violent Games For The Mac ----------------------------- [In issue #100, we asked for non-violent, sensory stimulating games for the whole family.] ------ By: sking@direct.ca (S.M. King) Shanghai II works great on the Mac! I've got my girlfriend's little old Hungarian mother hooked on it. She plays for hours at a time, "trying to get a cookie". The newest version awards a Fortune Cookie whenever you clear the screen. ------ By: Scott_Baltic@troubbs.org (Scott Baltic, Chicago Area Macintosh Area Users' Group) **Pinball games**: The one I have is Tristan, which is out of print, so to speak, but the more recent designs by the same designer -- Crystal Caliburn and Loony Labyrinth -- have gotten consistently favorable reviews. Colorful and fun. **Slick Willy**: Great shareware game. You use the mouse to move a little Bill Clinton head around and gobble up all the cheeseburgers before time runs out, while evading various enemies (Ross Perot heads, scandal-mongering newspapers, hovering microphones). Great fun, more than worth the five bucks. **Ishido**, by MacPlay: Not so much for hand-eye coordination, but a nice strategy game. You place tiles on the playing field according to some simple rules. The object is both to form certain configurations that maximize your point total and to place all your "stones" before you get locked out and have no legal place for the next one. Fairly absorbing. ------ By: rpiester@prairienet.org (Rick Piester) I highly recommend two games from a company called Discis Entertainment. (I have nothing whatsoever to do with the company but they sure make neat stuff!) The first one is called _Jewels of the Oracle_. It "feels" like Myst with rich renderings and contains about 20 very challenging puzzles supposedly created by an ancient people of "extraordinary intellect." This is one of those games that you won't want to stop playing and the puzzles really do offer a satisfying level of difficulty. It's one of my favorite demos to show friends on my Mac. The second game was just released, called _Karma: Curse of the 12 Caves_. It's similar to "Jewels" but is more challenging. I received it for Christmas and have only been through a few of its 15 or so puzzles. But I've really enjoyed it so far. This one does a require a minimum 25 MHz 68030 machine. And some of the animations are a little "jerky" on my 32 MHz 68030 with dual-speed CD. ------- By: aeddy@iftw.com (Andy Eddy, Editorial Manager, New Media Group Infotainment World, Publisher of GamePro and PC Entertainment Magazines) I've been covering the video-game business for a while now, and the prevalence of "macho" games is a self-perpetuating cycle that's akin to action movies: The perception throughout the industry is that mostly teenaged males play these games, so they keep making "superhero" games where the object is to beat up/kick/punch/shoot bad guys, often to rescue a kidnapped girl or < insert member of a royal family here> (though often a princess, ergo "kidnapped girl" again). The more that these types of games are created, the more that the audience stays mostly teenaged boys. The more that teenaged boys are the audience, the more the companies make these games, and so on. Granted, the computer industry seems to expand this a bit, because computers are more expensive and not just the realm of teenagers, but there is a similar trend of adversarial games rather than "experience" games like Myst. Yes, Pac-Man and Tetris crossed gender boundaries. But to date, no one seems to know the magic ingredient(s) to make more games attractive to men and women. ------ By: scoop@nkn.net (Shane Cooper) I've always been partial to Maxis Inc.'s games using simulations. I specifically enjoy SimCity 2000 as it is a constructive game rather than a destructive game. All of my nieces and nephews come to my house and head straight to our Mac to play SimCity. The concept of building a city based on real life experiences and needs of a city really seems to stimulate their awareness of the world around them. While driving downtown Dallas, my nephew would look out the window of the car and wonder out loud where the water lines were. He's made several comments and references to our towns library, museum etc... and related it to his own simcity. He's aware that it costs municipalities money to build these parks and services. It's been very interesting to see them actually acknowledge the world around them using a game. ------- [I've decided to allow the following blatant plug, since I'm feeling arbitrary today!] ------ By: rick@pop3.kagi.com (Rick Holzgrafe) I'd like to put forward my own shareware "Solitaire Till Dawn." Obviously, solitaire is non-violent. Less obvious to some people is that it is an exercise in logical thought, and can teach basic concepts like association, matching, and progression to small children. My four-year-old plays some of the simpler games in Solitaire Till Dawn: "The Wish" is a favorite intended for youngsters, and he also enjoys "Pyramid" which, in a lop-sided way, is teaching him to add to thirteen. (Well, you gotta start somewhere.) My seven-year-old has been playing "Klondike" and honing his powers of observation and concentration. Many people also don't realize how many solitaires there are. I have books in my library that give rules for hundreds of different games that can be played by one person with a deck or two of cards. Some are simple and relaxing, while others are puzzles of great complexity. Solitaire Till Dawn 2.1 contains 26 different kinds of solitaire, offering a wide variety of games with something for everyone. Color T-Shirts, Final Installment --------------------------------- [In issues #98-101 and 104, we have discussed the different ways to make color t-shirts with your Mac. The following responses are the last ones on the topic for a while, since it has been covered thoroughly.] ------- By Crystal Heald If you are looking at doing a full colour process [meaning photographs and the like], you should scan your photo and separate it into CMYK, then tone down your blacks a bit as this is where most of the problems occur. If you are doing text around the image as well, make this a spot colour separate from the full colour image. Then you get the film work done at a lab and most screen printers can manage from there. Make sure you see a sample before they go ahead with the project. The other option is to separate all your colours as long as they are solid colour blocks you can do this and not more than 4 colours or you may as well go full colour. You can print PMT's for this... A PMT (photo mechanical transfer) is something you can do on your own printer. Use the type of paper you need, which has a shiny surface. This gives you the cleanest line possible. Just give them to the printers and they will make the films right there. The films are expensive but after that it is just the screening cost. Oh, and depending on the colour of shirt you are printing on you may want to lay down a solid colour for the image to sit on. This sometimes helps the image stay clean. ------ By Jannie Curtin My suggestion to you is to call several t-shirt shops and ask them which kind of art works best for them (and is also cheapest): hard copy (laser or lino) or film. Then it's just a matter of either printing out the hard copy yourself (if you have a good laser printer) or having a service bureau output the lino or film. If it's a good t-shirt shop, they may even have an in-house service bureau. I'm assuming you know how to prepare a file for a service bureau. If you don't, the service bureau can walk you through it, or you can ask a graphic artist you might know. --------- By: Joel K. Furr Ways to reduce cost: 1) Go with a white shirt instead of a colored shirt -- white shirts are cheapest. 2) If you must have a colored shirt, go with a light color instead of a dark color -- dark colored shirts cost more. 3) Go with a 50/50 blend instead of 100% cotton. 4) Have art only on the front -- putting art on the back raises the cost more than adding just one more color on the front does. 5) Don't get carried away with colors -- often, a simple design is best. You pay for each screen and each color that goes on your shirt. Therefore, the shirt costs less the fewer colors you use. I'm not suggesting that you *ought* to go with a 50/50 blend or anything -- just that it's cheaper that way. When I do shirts, I typically take a PC Corel Draw disk to my screen printer and they print off black and white separations, then shoot films, then make the screens from the films. You can do the same thing with a Mac -- printing off the separations, then giving the printouts to your printer to make the films from. If you can find a screen printer with Macs, you can take them a disk instead. ------- By LaVerne B. Kehr An elderly neighbor of my mother's in Hawaii (who became a Mac fanatic in his 80's) used to print birthday t-shirts for his numerous grandchildren, and he told me the book he used for guidance was: "How to Print T-Shirts for Fun and Profit" by Scott and Pat Fresener, $29.95, paperback, at US Screen Printing Institute, 1200 North Stadem Drive, Tempe AZ 85281 <800-624-6532/602-929-0640> He said he made the design on his Mac, printed it, then took the design to a copy shop and had a positive transparency made, then used the transparency to silkscreen the design onto the t-shirts, using the instructions from the above book. ------- By Roger Holmquist, Sweden [In response to a comment by Clark Buchanan in issue #99;] There can never be a "better" picture from a paper copy than from a file because the file-representation is in a general meaning always closer to the "realworld" than a paper-copy. Thatīs because the papercopy is first transformed to a digital form in the printer/copier and then retransformed back to paper again. This 2-step- transformation creates errors in both steps. The REAL reason why you get worse results when direct-printing is certainly lack of knowledge about the correct treatment and the limitations of your printer. Zum beispiel, you shoudn't print a RGB-file in CMYK-mode! Nor should you expect the colors of your screen to appear on your print-papers. There is a lot of traps to fall in when you handle colors on your MAC. But we all know about this, don't we? :-) Backup Tape Drives, Continued ----------------------------- By: Frank J. Nagy A message from Gregory Johnson [in issue #104] stated that if DLT tape drives are used for backups on slow networks, tape capacity is wasted. This is not true. These devices are true start/stop tape drives and not streaming tape drives. If the incoming data rate does not keep up with the tape speed, the tape will be stopped and the data cached until sufficient (?) data is available for the tape to be restarted after the previously written record. DLT drives are looking quite good, being fast (if you can feed it data fast enough), very large capacity and very reliable (so far). Technical Section Starts... Here -------------------------------- SCSI Cable Tips --------------- By Jan Janosh Ivan I'm using products from Granite Digital. Granite Digital, 3101 Whipple Road, Union City, CA 94587-1291 <510 471 6442/FAX 510 471 6267> They deliver with each product also description what is important on SCSI cable and termination. All information what you need on one sheet. My highest recommendation. Best product for normal price. Standard disclaimer, only a happy user. ----- By Pete Rethorn Granite Digital makes very high quality cables and active terminators. These both have diagnostic indicators for visual checking of cable integrity etc. After having many SCSI problems with a high end scanner, removable hard drive, and digital printer in the chain, all the cables and the terminator were replaced with Granite Digital stuff and I have not had any SCSI problems since. They were well worth the investment. They were very responsive to my initial catalog request and when our department IT person called their tech support people to ask some questions before ordering, the Granite people were very helpful. ------ By: Simon Cousins, Sydney, Australia Thin SCSI cables have 25x pairs of wires, twisted and bunched, then shielded with foil. Thick cables have each pair shielded with foil, then bunched, then all shielded again. Using thick and thin cables in the same chain can cause impedance problems, resulting in unwelcome signal reflections. We've seen equally good results using all thick, or all thin. We repeatedly see horrible SCSI problems with a mix. The best solution is to use an external 7-bay chassis (200w power supply, 3x fans), and mount all of the external devices in the one chassis. All devices are then linked with the one multi-tap SCSI ribbon, resulting in excellent SCSI signal characteristics. ------ By: Mac users often have an array of SCSI devices. This may include scanner, Syquest drive, external hard disk, etc. These devices may have been purchased over a period of years. Sysquest drives have proved especially problematic with System 7.5 (as if there weren't enough problems with earlier System versions). When you experience mysterious problems, look for the obvious. Are the external devices turned on? In some cases, depending on the arrangement of drives on the SCSI chain, you may not be able to get away with leaving boxes powered off. Sometimes, simply moving a device from one position to another in the chain can result in System bombs, startup freezes, etc. Take a look at the SCSI cables. You may find a cable that is bent near the connector and is beginning to pull the cable right from the connector. Another concern is the cable shielding and wire diameter. Many cables are longer than needed. Shortening the SCSI chain is a good idea. The cost of a cable is $20-30 now. How valuable is the data which is stored on your SCSI devices? Compare this to the cost of new, quality cables. ------ By: David Howland 726-2151 Keep your cables SHORT. SCSI devices usually come with long cables that are fine by themselves but likely to cause trouble if you use several of them. For any computer cable, you should use the shortest available length that doesn't cause sharp bends. SCSI is especially sensitive to excess length. This is very true about Single Ended SCSI, which I gather is what is in the MACs. Differential SCSI is *MUCH* more forgiving about cable length. And no you can't mix and match Single Ended and Differential SCSI devices on the same SCSI bus. The SCSI bus is either Single Ended or Differential not both. One more note. Don't buy a cheap-o SCSI cable unless it is returnable. What you save in buying a cheap cable is not worth the frustration. ------ By: Espen H. Koht We used to have a whole drawer full of cables, some of which where obviously not so reliable, so one day I grabbed an external hard drive and tested the read/write loops on it (using Silverlining) with each cable and threw out the ones that gave poor results (or even failed some of the handshakes types). Its the closest I have come to find something that could be considered a SCSI cable tester. Printing Big Jobs Quicker ------------------------- [Back in issue #014, I mentioned: One of my clients has a shop that does a huge amount of printing. He hates to have everybody click on their "Print" button and then wait and wait while monstrous jobs are sent to the hard disk for spooling to the printer.] ------ By Ryan Lanctot, Kelowna, BC, Canada If they're using Power Macs, tell them to get Speed Doubler from Connectix. As of 7.5.1, the spooler isn't native, as far as I know. When I installed it on my 5200CD, the speed bump was nothing less than remarkable. ----- By: Quaintance, Vernon (CSO) Whilst I don't know of any method of speeding up the initial spooling to disk from the application, there is a neat trick available under System 7 to offload the background printing from your own Mac. Designate a spare, or little used, Mac on the network as the Print Spooler (this doesn't need to be the fastest machine, but the delivery rate of prints will naturally depend on its speed and memory - A Mac Plus with 4Mb will do at a pinch!) Setup file sharing on the Macs and share the System Folder (and its contents) of the PrintSpooler Mac. [Make sure the PrintSpooler Mac has all of the fonts installed that the other Macs are using.] On each other Mac make an alias of the Print Monitor Items folder from the Print Spooler Mac. Move the normal PrintMonitor Documents folder out of the System Folder to a place of safety and replace it with the newly made Alias file, removing the word 'Alias' from the name. Then re-start. Now, when you send something to the printer it will be put in what your machine thinks is its own PrintMonitor Documents folder, however this will actually go into the Print Spooler Mac's folder and ITS Print Monitor will pick it up and print it. WARNING: This might only work if there is only one printer on the network. Furthermore, all the Macs MUST be running the same version of the printer driver. The problem for many people with the normal background printing is that it uses machine cycles and either slows down the application you want to get back to on your machine, or slows down printing while the machine works on your next job. In some cases printing can be slowed down so much that the printer times out - with obvious frustrating consequences. By using another machine as the Print Spooler you save time on your own machine. Another potential saving is that the print spool file sits on the STARTUP DISK. If you don't have much spare space here you could have problems with the temp files some programs also insist on putting there. Until only recently, the internal hard drives supplied with machines were woefully inadequate for the job as system folders blossomed with inits/extensions, control panels, preference files and fonts. I find even a 250Mb internal hard drive to be tight when running several apps at once (like Photoshop, Pagemaker, etc.) and wanting to print too. ------ By: Randy Chevrier If you have a copy of MacWorld Oct. '95, check out page 157, "Efficient ARA Printing". The idea is to replace the PrintMonitor Documents folder on the users' Macs with an alias of the "Print Server Mac". This _should_ send all print job spools directly to the PrintMonitor documents folder of the print server. The alias idea will only help eliminate the print monitor from hogging processing time in the background, since that will be done on the PrintServer. I think your problem is the amount of time you sit watching the dialog box saying: Document: XXXX Number of pages spooled: X ------ By Jon L. Gardner Here's a cheap(er) solution: put Windows NT Server 3.51 on the PC, load the Services for Macintosh software (Control Panel-->Network-->Add Software), create a printer (Print Manager-->Create Printer), share it on the network, and connect to it in the Chooser on the Macs. The Windows NT box will now act as a print spooler for the Macs, so the users will only have to wait about half as long to get back to work. Put a 100Base-T ethernet card in the Pentium and install a switching hub (like 3Com's LinkSwitch) and you'll speed up the process even more. This, by the way, is the best use I've found for Windows NT Server...a slave to a bunch of Macs. Eat your heart out, Bill. NT Server 3.51 lists for about $900, I think, but you should be able to find it for $400-$500. Out of the box, it includes support for Windows and Macintosh file and print services (they can even share the same volumes), TCP/IP networking, a gateway service for Netware which allows a client to the NT machine to access resources on a Netware server, and a bunch of other cool stuff. The Mac is the best desktop box and Internet server, but Windows NT Server's a darn good file/printserver, especially in mixed environments. --------- By rob j van den berg, Germany I have a software solution that is freeware. But there is a drawback: you need a separate UNIX machine for it. Maybe you have heard of it? It is called CAP (Columbia Appletalk Package), it is a pd package that makes a UNIX machine an appleshare server; I run it on my SUN where it functions a file and print server for my Mac. It also runs on linux, which as you probably know is being ported to the Power Mac. In which case no other hardware is needed. In any case the total cost will be substantially lower that $10.000. ----- By: Steven Holder Adobe Print Central is only about $700 - Last I checked anyway. Even the OPI version Color Central is only about $2000 I think. Good news from Adobe and Apple, version 3.0 CC is actually faster on a Mac than on an NT. What a pleasant change, the pendulum swings toward Cupertino, CA and away from Redmond, WA. Legalisms and Information ------------------------- Copyright 1989-1996 Tony Lindsey. The contents of Mac*Chat may not be republished, either in whole or in part, without the express permission of the editor. Small excerpts of Mac*Chat may be reproduced for personal use, or by nonprofit groups (such as Mac User Groups) if full credit is given, including this notice, how to subscribe, and how to make donations. Please contact the editor for any publication requests. This newsletter is intended purely as entertainment and free information. No profit has been made in return for publication of any of these opinions. Time passes, so accuracy may diminish. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. ----- This file is formatted as setext, which can be read on any text reader. I'd enjoy hearing your feedback and suggestions. Unfortunately, due to the massive numbers of messages I get every day, I can't guarantee a personal reply. Send all such messages to: Tony Lindsey 3401-A55 Adams Avenue San Diego, CA 92116-2429 Tips from readers are gratefully accepted. Please write them in a user-friendly way, and if you are mentioning an Internet site, please include a paragraph explaining why others should visit it. Mac*Chat back-issues may be found within any Info-Mac ftp archive at /info-mac/per/chat - For example: and read with any Web browser at Current issues may be found on the comp.sys.mac.digests newsgroup. Free E-Mailed Subscriptions To This Newsletter ------------------------------------- You may subscribe to Mac*Chat by sending e-mail to: The Subject line is ignored, so it can say anything. In the body of the message include the following line: SUBSCRIBE MACCHAT Your full name As an example: SUBSCRIBE MACCHAT Juliana Tarlton You will receive a nice long message explaining acceptance of your subscription, how to end it (if desired) and general listserv info. You will then automatically receive Mac*Chat in your e-mail box, for free, every week. ============== ____ ================================================== Tony Lindsey \ _/__ Free, weekly e-mailed Mac-oriented newsletter Mac*Chat Editor \X / ================= \/ =================================================