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RE: Apple "Puck" Mouse Named One Of The Worst Tech Products Of All Time
The Whoosh of Intel Fanning
Leopard Love - It's Gonna' Take A Little Time - Back In Tiger
Leopard Love - Clean Install And Heat Issues
Leopard Love - Concerning Your Existential Question About Why Upgrade
HELP!
Some free and shareware items
RE: Apple "Puck" Mouse Named One Of The Worst Tech Products Of All Time
From Michael
Your comments on using the Puck as a foot mouse made me laugh out loud. It is the first really useful implementation of this Puck I'd run across.
I got a Puck with my 2000 G4 450 and immediately replaced it with a 3rd party mouse. I might dig it out (I never throw things away it seems) and resurrect it as a foot mouse. I never thought of using it that way.
My wife suffered MS, so I full well understand and empathize with your fibromyalgia and chronic peripheral neuritis difficulties. I am glad you found a workable use for the Puck that helps with your computer use.
Later:
Charles:
I just found it in my cluttered junk pile, and tried it. I am currently enjoying "STOMPING" that Puck as a foot mouse. Works like a charm under my desk!
Thanks for the idea.
Michael
Hi Michael:
Thanks for your note, and I got a smile from your actually trying out the puck mouse in this mode. I didn't expect to start a trend.
I suppose it might even be therapeutic for folks who really hate the puck.....
I just hope I can keep finding them. Over the past five years or so I've found that they stand up to between a year and 18 months of this use, and I've gone through several.
Charles
The Whoosh of Intel Fanning
From Joseph
I suspect that Leopard is optimized for Intel machines.
My Mac mini C2D and my MacBook CD are both set for 1500 rpm minimum speed - always on. It is common for them to run at 60° C. The rpm simply goes up to keep the temperature at 57°.
I think PPCs are not suited for Leopard. Welcome to the new world of permanent fanning, but much more quiet, with a slight whoosh.
Best regards,
Joseph
Hi Joseph;
That's what I suspect. Not a happy lookout for fan noise haters like me, alas. One of the things that has kept me an enthusiastic notebook aficionado over the years is the freedom from fan cacophony.
At least Leopard has made me stop complaining (as much) about the silence more of the time than not in Tiger on this G4 PowerBook.
Charles
Leopard Love - It's Gonna' Take A Little Time - Back In Tiger
From Derek
Hi Charles;
This is Derek reporting back. I had reinstalled Leopard (clean install), reset the PMU, zapped the PRAM, repaired permissions. nothing worked. So, I dug out my Tiger disc.
I've been running Tiger again on the PowerBook for about 48 hours and all is back to normal. My battery life is back, Mail performs beautifully and the fan stays off unless I'm playing a lot of videos. Also, my Airport reception is back. This was a problem in Leopard, and I didn't mention it in my first post. I was getting two bars at best about thirty feet from my wireless router. Now back in Tiger I'm full bars to one short. I'm a happy camper with 10.4.11.
Again, this experience is isolated to one of three Macs in my house. My Leopard experience on my G5 iMac and MacBook has been flawless with nothing more than an Archive & Install. My wife has had no complaints with Leopard on her MacBook, and the iMac (with only 512 RAM) seems to run even better.
I provide all this as one man's findings - no Leopard-bashing. I see posts from those who have had great Leopard experiences on lesser machines than my PowerBook. Without a doubt I will give it another run on my PB, just for grins, after the next update. If it still doesn't work, I have no problem going back to Tiger. I'm a big believer in the value of OS X. For the money, it (in whichever feline incarnation works best for a particular user) is a tremendous value.
Derek
Hi Derek;
I hope I'm not giving the impression of being a Leopard-basher. I like it, if only it would work. Since I kept a copy of Tiger 10.4.11 on another partition on my PowerBook's hard drive, I can switch back and forth easily, and the contrast is vivid. With Tiger, everything works, and works well. With Leopard, there's all that new cool stuff, but some of the very fundamental things like email don't work so well.
Incidentally, Airport works fine on my PB in Leopard.
I agree that this is anecdotal, and I will be interested in trying a clean (or at least Archive &) install if I can ever clear the time.
I've been alternating - a couple of days back in Leopard - more turbulent performance, but then something like Gmail just stopping working with Eudora - receive or send - and needing to get some work done rather than burning time struggling with Leopard, I will boot back into OS 10.4.11, where everyting (including all accounts in Eudora) runs soooo smoothly.....
Charles
Leopard Love - Clean Install And Heat Issues
From Kevin
Charles
I meant that you should do a clean install to determine if your PB still has fan and other problems under a virgin system. Let it run a day or two. If you find that your 'book runs quietly and or smoothly you could then try to migrate your user profile or manually make changes.
Also I can not imagine that mail.app cannot receive mail from an ISP where Eudora can. What is the name of the ISP. Is your modem an internal version or a USB one. The more internal components that your systems need to use will create heat so turn off things such as bluetooth and airport if not needed and remove any optical discs that might be loaded. One last tip Spotlight is quite busy after a new install and needs time to complete its indexing. All that scaning and listing of data creates heat and slows down performance. Do not forget that Time Machine along with Dashboard and things such as Expose are also running in the background.
Good luck
Kevin
Hi Kevin;
I've found thnat my PowerBook runs quietly, although not without the other angularities I've reported, when I select "Reduced" processor speed in the Energy Saver Preference panel. When in that mode, the processor bottomside temp. stays in the 40° to 47° range, which is well below the fan toggling level of torridness.
As for the email issue, I've now had an opportunity to check out Leopard on a WiFi Broadband connection, upon which Eudora seems much happier in Leopard, and can actually send mail through my ISP's SMTP server, so it seems likely that my very slow (26,400 bps on good days) office dialup connection is a complicating factor for Leopard, although all is well with Eudora and email performance in general when running in Tiger and previous versions of the Mac OS.
As for, Mail, I tried it in Leopard with both my ISP account and Gmail on broadband, and neither would work. Gmail appeared to be working, but when I ran check mail, a fresh test message that was confirmed to be in my Gmail inbox by checking with a browser, was ignored and didn't download, although it came down just fine back on my dialup connection with Eudora.
Then, Saturday evening, running in Leopard, Eudora suddenly refused to send a message via the Gmail SMTP server, which usually works. The next day, it was sending again, albeit more sluggishly than when booted in Tiger, so the issue seems to be erratic, perhaps affected by vagaries of throughput on my phone lines. I was able to send the message out using the Gmail Web Interface in a browser when it wouldn't go with SMTP.
My ISP is BCE Inc's Sympatico, which is the largest Internet service provider in Canada. The 17" PowerBook has an internal modem (thankfully - I detest modem dongles). I keep BlueTooth and AirPort turned off unless I happen to be testing a BlueTooth device for a review or am connected to a WiFi network (both rare instances). And yes, Spotlight indexing did slow things down significantly for a few hours after I installed Leopard, but that was nearly two weeks ago.
Thanks for your observations and suggestions.
Charles
Leopard Love - Concerning Your Existential Question About Why Upgrade
From David C
Concerning your existential question about why upgrade, there are rational reasons such as: increased productivity, new OS capabilities, software that requires the OS, and there are emotional reasons like: thriving on change, being on the bleeding edge, triumphing over conflicts raised, etc. Given identical circumstances, two people can correctly make opposite choices about going with the new, or staying with the old. In the end, I'd say upgrade if it pleases you and save a few bucks for Christmas if you?re happy with the status quo.
Personally, I've committed to quick OS upgrades, from the public beta of OS X up to the present. Each OS version delivered immediate benefits to me that compensated for features lost and software broken. I prefer Apple software, such as Mail, TextEdit, iCal, etc to most third party alternatives. Because of that, $129 buys me new backup software, a new virtual desktop program, an upgraded DVD player, Dictionary, Word Processor, Email client, search engine, media center, calendar and so on. That?s the best software bargain short of free.
Those who prefer the stability of an OS that has gone through 11 rounds of bug fixes, and who are invested in third party programs that will break or behave badly under Leopard, have an understandable reluctance to join the party. After all, Tiger is terrific, why mess with success.
Upgrading an OS, which is never a trivial undertaking, is a curious mix of rational reasons and irrational compulsions. Unless you?re an accountant, or a consultant determining the optimal configuration for his clients, your impulse to upgrade or not, is most likely determined by a mix of reason and emotion.
Hi David;
Thanka for ypur supplementary musings.
As you say, different strokes.
For my own purposes, other than the fact that as a writer specializing in Apple-related topics, I need to stay reasoinably current, I would probably be happy in Tiger for a good long time yet ( or for that matter even OS 9 if there was a decent, up-to-date Web browser availoable). I do have a partiality for thoroughly developed software.
Good point about the sort of application software one uses/prefers as well. Frankly, I've never been that smitten with Apple productivity software other than the OS itself. I do most of my text-based work in Tex Edit Plus, Eudora is my favorite email client by a wide margin over anything else, and its seeming partial incompatibility with Leopard is one of the most disappointing aspects of this upgrade for me. I use Photoshop Elements, Color It!, ToyViewer, and lately Pixelmator for graphics work, store my photos in folders, don't have a .Mac account, and so forth. I do like Safari 3 for its speed, and will likely configure it as my default browser for the foreseeable future, but it's included in OS 10.4.11 as well.
Windowshaede X's current incompatibility with Leopard is a major issue for me, somewhat but far from entirely mitigated by Spaces, but I hope that one will be rectified soon. Eudora is more of a conundrum, since it's no longer being developed, and the nameplate-engineered Thunderbird-clone Open Source "Eudora" that's currently in Alpha release does not entice in the slightest.
Charles
HELP!
From Adam
Good Evening Mr. Moore,
I hope all has been well with you. I recently read your musings on Leopard and found them to be astute and thoughtful, as you always are. I've yet to upgrade any of my PPC machines to the big cat, however we received our bulk copy from Apple via our Apple Maintenance Program for all of our machines at work but I will admit I've been slow to upgrade at work as well. I currently have it installed on my dedicated development machine... maybe I'm just not as adept to change as I once was but so far my experience has been the opposite of yours as I'm finding this transition to be a bit more difficult than was the one from Panther to Tiger. As an interesting aside, I also installed it on the big 24' iMac we have down in our print shop. I've yet to do much research into it yet but I am wondering what changes Apple made to Rosetta as Photoshop CS2 has been "wonky" to say the least...
Nonetheless... my current woe has nothing to do with Leopard. It's not really that big of a deal but just a major nuisance that's throwing me off - big time. I just got around to updating my PPC machines to X.4.11 and with it came Safari 3 and there lies my problem. I'm not a "tab" man, I hate it to be quite honest... I like all of my web pages to be in their own wiindow, because of that my routine relies heavily on command-click to open new windows. It seems Apple has changed command-click to now open new windows in the background instead of the foreground. If I were on a desktop or used a mouse this wouldn't be that much of an issue but I'm a 'book guy and this is just really, really annoying.
Do you know of anything that would restore command-click back to opening new windows in the foreground? If not maybe one of my fellow readers would know of something. I believe that you, like I, are a habitual user... we have our routine down to a science. So while this isn't the end of the world it's really going to hinder my productivity for a while. I've always enjoyed Safari as my "daily driver," and other than this I really like Safari 3... but I need my command-click back! Until this gets figured out I'm going to have to goto my backup browser - Seamonkey.
As always, any help is much appreciated.
Best Regards,
Adam
Hi Adam;
I like Safari 3 too, and indeed in my case it's the first version of Safari that I've ever liked a whole lot. It's speedy (relatively speaking) on my dialup connection, and seems stable in both OS 10.4.11 and OS 10.5.1.
As for the command-click issue, it had never registered with me. I love tabsm and simply can't abide using a browser without them.
There are a bunch of keyboard shortcut options in the Safari preferences, including Command>Option>Shift>click for Opening links in a new window and selecting it.
I think that's the mode you;re looking for, but you do have to hit three modifier keys, which is a bit cumbersome.
This function is probably hackable, but I'm not emough of a hacker to tell you how to do it.
Perhaps someone in readerland.
Charles
Some free and shareware items
From Kevin Shaffer
Hi there:
Not sure if any of these may really be useful, or helpful; some could be good for kids to learn things and so on. Most are free titles and a few are shareware items. With tons of free stuff, these are just more of so many. Some may be good to pass some time, as they'll work offline. These are in windows xp and mac x versions, too.
There are a few dozen listed that download direct from this site:
http://customsolutionsofmaryland.50megs.com/product.htm
Since most are free, the worse they could be is boring or silly.
(Unless they hide 'something special' for those xp users!)
Best regards,
Kevin
Thanks Kevin.
Charles
***
Charles W. Moore
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