murrays

The new Superdrives will use any type of DVD media. You can read about it here. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Hunter S. Thompson and Scotty Carbone - Now that would be a PARTY!!! My 7 year old son is named Hunter...partly because I like the name and partly for HST. Hunter Evan Frederick Stevens or Hunter EFS. (I have no doubt that he will be a skydiver when he's older - he always wants to find the edge) A round of ether and adrenechrome chasers!!! RIP HST, it was a great ride and thanks for taking us along on it. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

A wild man that wrote several books I enjoyed immensely. Google him. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

CNN has a breaking news banner that HST has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Bummer. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Sparklers work pretty good but you have to work fast...these pics are pretty ancient.... -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I use a piece of Freeware called Mac the Ripper to rip the DVD and another piece of freeware called DVD Imager to create a disk image that will work with DVD player. If the image will fit on a single sided DVD you can burn the image using Disk Utility.. If it is too big I use a program called DVD2OneX to recompress it so that it will fit. It isn't freeware. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I am right now listening to tunes on my new Shuffle. It fits perfectly in the little coin pocket on my jeans and I don't even know the thing is there...but I digress from your point. I bought a pair of Bang & Olufsen headphones and am using them for the first time as well.... excellent sound quality and they really stay in the ears well...much better than the standard issue iPod earbuds. Expensive but I am very impressed with the sound quality. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Do you know if it's possible to specify some number of songs, then have it autofill the rest with a random sampling? So I could always have my 5 favorites on there, but have the rest be random (or something like that)? Tom, I just picked up a Shuffle and can see how you can load an album or certain songs and then randomly fill the rest of the space. First, you plug in the Shuffle, select it in iTunes and delete all the songs on it by selecting all of them using the Shift key and clicking on the first and last song. Second,, You drag the songs you want to play first onto the iPod. Third, you uncheck the box that says: "Replace all songs when autofilling" and you click on the autofill button in iTunes. When you remove the Shuffle to play, you use the slider switch on the back to play in order. When the songs you wanted to listen to first have finished, you move the slider to "Shuffle" or just listen to the rest in order. First impressions...easy to use, good sound quality, light, small, great design and usability. Very nice. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I've used a program called Boinx iStop Motion on my Mac. You set the interval in the program and just leave the camcorder on camera. You have to take the tape out or it goes into demo mode. It also does animation stuff...I let my kids, ages 4 and 6 ... do some monsters with playdoh and it was hilarious good fun! -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Any idea how well it will work for eyeglass wearers? -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

If you want to learn more about photography I would recommend that you get a manual body or do all your shooting in manual mode. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Try hooking it up to a PC with Firewire. Don't wipe it clean. There's a way to save your files, of that much I am sure. Try taking it to a PC repair place and ask them to recover the files for you. It really should be an easy task. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I bought Education copies of Office X a while ago...seemed to me that it wasn't a problem as long as you know someone who is going to school. Failing that, Open Office has a build that runs on OS X in X11 (Unix windowing environment). Here's a download page with more information. I don't know much about it except that it exists. I installed X11 a while ago to check out GIMP, the open source image manipulation program. No glitches or problems at all but I didn't like GIMP much....too complicated for me. I believe X11 is on your install disks somewhere or else I am sure you can download it from Apple. I can't remember how I installed it. Appleworks. which came installed on your iMac, will open simple spreadsheets and Word documents but I never use it....I email Word and Excel files I receive to work and use Office to open them there. Also, I should mention to you that Versiontracker is a great place for you to find all sorts of programs and utilities for OS X. I check what's new daily and have found many great little programs there. The feedback is also helpful in deciding whether or not you want to install something you are interested in. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Hector, You're obviously someone who knows far more about computers than I ever will. You can build a machine cheaper...but at what cost in time? I can't make more time for myself to do the things that I want to do on the computer. I use Windows machines enough to know how much time you can fritter away dealing with their idiosyncracies, viruses and spyware. I don't waste time on unnecessary stuff while using my Macs. For me, the saving in up-front dollars isn't worth the cost in time. For someone who knows their way around computers and can deal with the issues and likes doing that sort of stuff, sure why not save the money. But, for people not inclined to want to learn how to do all that stuff a Mac is a far better choice of computer....imo. For instance, I converted my mother-in-law a few months ago. She is so happy to have a computer that is always available instead of the Windows machine which her grandson (who is always over at her place using the computer) periodically reduced to an inoperable hulk with spyware and viruses. Cheers, -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Marc, Don't give up on your photos!! They are priceless. As Josh suggests, a FW enclosure could make recovery pretty simple and not very expensive. I bought a MacAlly FW/USB2 enclosure a few months ago for about $110 CDN I think you're looking at about $80 bucks US. I think that if you get an enclosure you should copy over the data you want...like the pictures, etc. and then reinitialize it as a Mac drive. You use Disk Utility to do this and it is found in /applications/utilities/disk utility. I use the HFS + file format on mine....don't know if having it "journalled" as in HFS+ Journalling lends any advantages....perhaps someone with more knowledge could advise. Let us know how it goes. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

And it would still run Windows and....well, read this San Franciso Chronicle article which explains everything far better than I ever could. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Congrats! Enjoy your new iMac. We bought new iMacs for my boss at work just before Xmas and it is a sweet machine. I can't afford to upgrade from my 15" flat panel G4 iMac right now but will do so in the hopefully near future. Seeing as how you need parental controls, I assume you have kids so here is a neat thing to do on your new iMac with your digital photos of your kids...once again assuming you have been taking digital photos of them

Jimmy Tavino has done this. Here is a good thread about his experiences and how he set things up...with lots of photos by Jimmy. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

How about.. Founders Pathfinders Trailblazers -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

DO some searching...there was a good thread on this in this forum or in General skydiving a while back. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

No. In fact, purchased tunes from iTunes can't be used directly in iMovie projects...you have to burn the tune to a cd and then import it from the cd to use it in iTunes. Burning it to a CD removes the digital rights management roadblocks. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I've watched nearly all the Superbowls...starting with Superbowl I...and I've seen too many that were done by the half. I think this should be a pretty good game. By good I mean good performances by both teams, drama, a chance for both to win but with the true champion managing to make the plays that count and winding up on top. Let's hope it's a good one! -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

I'm 71% Dixie.....not bad for a Canadian Prairies dweller. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Good pick Tuna. Who are you picking in the Super Bowl? -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Same deal...I have to get an FAC to buy a gun from anyone. The firearm has to be registered in our infamous waste of money Gun Registry and if sold has to be re-registered. I'm not going to go through the hassle until I determine how difficult it will be to import a gun from the U.S. -- Murray "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey