Muskoka Mac User Group

As a bit of a follow up to my linux presentation from a couple of months back – here’s an excerpt from a blog entry written by another Mac user trying Ubuntu linux.

As James Maguire sat down to Ubuntu,
he was curious about the dreaded command line. Would it suck him into
the dark swirling abyss of Geeksterism? In a word, no. It turns out
the command line is completely optional. If you don’t want to mess
with it, Ubuntu lets you use point and click for everything. Major
relief.

…

He found the Ubuntu interface to be intuitive and straight
forward.

…

After checking out Open Office, he realized something pretty
shocking: there’s no appreciable difference between Word, which costs
serious cash, and Open Office, which is totally free.

…

Firing up
Firefox he was, again, seriously impressed. “I have never seen the
Internet run so fast.

…

Ubuntu makes the grade. A good laptop running
Ubuntu is a fast, fully productive machine that works for home or
office. Because it does everything that Windows does – and does it for
free – I assume that in the long run it will encroach on (or devour?)
the Windows market share.”

…

Check out the full article here – http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3742066_2

This post is lifted almost verbatim from the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #88 . I’m quite sure they won’t mind me reprinting it here

by Tom Hutchinson

Household voltage is 120 volts. You can think of voltage as the pressure pushing the electricity through a circuit. It can fluctuate and damage your computer and other equipment.

A voltage rise lasting for less than two nanoseconds is a voltage spike. A voltage rise lasting three nanoseconds or more is a surge. Surges usually last less than 10 milliseconds. Damage to electronic equipment may not be immediate; it can be cumulative, showing up weeks later after a series of surges or spikes have done their work. About 60% of surges and spikes are generated within your own home, as a result of an air conditioner or refrigerator turning on or off, for example. The other 40% come from outside your home, often resulting from lightning strikes, hydro transformer issues, a tree touching a power line, or restoration of power after a black out.

There are several things you can do to protect equipment from these surges and spikes:
1. There is a device called a panel surge protector or ‘whole house surge protector’ which can be installed by an electrician on your electrical panel. This device costs about $125 plus installation, which takes about 15 minutes. It provides a first level of protection for your house. It will clamp voltages in excess of 400 volts, protecting appliances like your furnace, air conditioner, hot water tank, hot tub, oven, etc. It is not sufficient protection for electronic devices like a computer or a television set.
2. To protect more sensitive electronic devices, you can use a surge suppressor power bar. A good one will cost from $20 to $50 or more; you get what you pay for. These are rated by the number of joules of energy they can absorb from a spike or surge. Ratings typically vary from 100 joules to 3000 joules. More is better. To help explain the terminology, 100 joules is the energy used by a 100 watt light bulb in one second. All of these suppressors use electronic devices called MOVs (metal oxide varistors). These MOVs are about the size of a nickel. The MOVs in these power bars clamp voltages in excess of 330 volts and they respond in less than one nanosecond, which is sufficiently fast. MOVs have finite life expectancy and they degrade when exposed to a few large surges or many smaller surges or spikes; this is normal operation for a MOV. The ones with the higher joule rating will last longer than those with a low joule rating. Eventually the MOV will degrade to a point where it can no longer protect your equipment; then you replace the surge suppressor power bar. The surge suppressor power bar should have a light on it to indicate that you still have protection; if the light goes out, you have no protection. With the less expensive surge suppressor power bars the light will go out but the bar will continue to conduct electricity to your equipment leaving you unprotected (and you may not even notice). With the better surge protectors when the light goes out, the unit shuts off the power to your equipment, which may be annoying at the time but at least you know your equipment is safe. Many surge suppressor power bars contain a thermal fuse which will blow in the event of a catastrophic surge that destroys the MOVs; this layer of protection may prevent short circuits and other fire hazards. Many surge suppressor power bars also have a circuit breaker switch; this does not protect against surges but rather protects against overloading the power bar as a result of people plugging in too many devices and drawing too much power.
3. Voltage surges and spikes can also arrive through your telephone line; this frequently happens during electrical storms. So if you are buying a surge suppressor power bar to protect your computer or a cordless phone be sure to buy one that will also protect the telephone line. These usually start at $30 or more.
4. A surge suppressor power bar will not protect your computer from a low voltage condition called ‘brownout’ in which the power does not go right off, but rather goes down to some low value that is not sufficient to operate the computer reliably. Much damage can be done in a few seconds as the computer loses control; corrupt data may be written to a hard drive. To protect against this you need a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). A medium priced one will cost about $100. These devices are based on a lead acid storage battery. When the voltage goes too high, too low or right off, the battery kicks in and supplies power to the computer for a limited time. This gives you time to finish your work and shut things off. If the battery gets too low, the device will automatically shut down your computer, using a connection to your USB port. The UPS has built in surge protection (mine is rated for 375 joules) and usually has telephone line surge protection. The only down side of these UPS devices is that the battery has a limited life span of three to five years; then you replace the battery. Some people plug their UPS into a surge suppressor power bar with a higher joule rating, but the manufacturer of mine (APC) does not recommend this, because they say there could be interference between the two devices and also they say that the joule ratings of the two devices are not necessarily additive. There are two types of UPS devices. The inexpensive one described above for $100 is called a ‘line interactive UPS’. There is also a much more expensive ($1000) type called ‘true online double conversion UPS’ which would be used to protect a server, for example, where you would not tolerate loss of data being transmitted. There is a chance of data loss with the inexpensive one because there is a brief (6 to 10 millisecond) delay between a power outage and the UPS responding to it by supplying backup power from the battery. In a network situation the server would be protected with the expensive type and the workstations would be protected with the less expensive type of UPS.

Here’s a cool minor tip from (yep them again) MacWorld.

To open a link in Mail in the background Command Click it. Wish I’d learned that one a while ago!

In a round-about manner I was exposed to this Best Of The Web Mac Freeware page.

It’s another one of those ‘top ten’ kind of lists of free software for the Mac, but I thought it was a reasonable one.

Take a quick look – there’s something there for everybody even though it’s only 15 items. I use at least three or four on that list almost every day….

Pencil is an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source.

The manual for it seems straightforward. Just add some artistic talent! that leaves me out

Download it from the Pencil sourceforge site.

Want another gee-whiz thing you can do with Leopard?
Try using the Mosaic Screen Saver. It will display ALL
of the pictures in your iPhoto files into one big matrix.
• Open Systems Preference
• Select Desk Top and Screen Saver
• Select Screen Saver “mosaic” symbol
(the small square box below the window)
• select whichever iPhoto folder you wish
Sit back and admire.
Bill

Our next MMUG is on April 14 (2nd Monday of the month). Come out and get the attendance figures back up !

Hopefully Tom will finally be able to give us his story and message about surge protectors!

We can discuss income tax options available for Mac Users.

Don McCormick has offered to show us the latest discoveries he has made in Keynote.

Brian will finish off with a discussion of BitTorrent – what is it, why the bad reputation, what software works for Mac users and why you might want to start using it. (Time permitting – it’s a big subject, so if the other presentations run long enough we’ll leave this one for May!)