evought

No, I do not know who manufactured the drive internals. I have also heard "Sony", but I do not know it for sure. Since my first post, mine has started making sounds like an airplane taking off and I am having trouble burning. I think the bearings might be failing. But I got a good bit of use out of the beast. I want to find a newer Firewire burner but they are getting hard to find.

In Firefox, you can open the Preferences and select the "Security" tab. Check "Remember password for sites". Now, whenever you enter a username/password, Firefox will ask you at the top of the window if you want to save the password. You can have multiple usernames/passwords for each site if you need to and you can view all the ones you have saved from the "Security" tab of the Preferences ("Saved Passwords..."). It is a VERY GOOD IDEA to set the "Master Password" on the same Security tab ("Set/Change Master Password..."). This will have Firefox encrypt all of your user names and passwords when it stores them. You will have to enter your master password the first time you go to a site which needs a password it has stored and then Firefox will read and enter it for you. This lets you remember just one password instead of ten trillion and it makes it harder for someone who gets a hold of your computer to steal all of your passwords. Just remember if you walk away leaving Firefox open after you have entered your master password, someone can still steal your logins. It is best to close Firefox or log out of your account if you leave the computer unattended.

I believe the parent poster was talking about running the laptop for a long time while plugged in: essentially using it as a desktop. Many laptops are not good at this. If they have AC coming in, they will not use it to power the laptop but to charge the battery. The battery power then runs the computer. This does not allow the battery to drain and refresh and it keeps it running hot, putting stress on the charger circuitry. With many laptops it is better to charge it up and then unplug it until it runs down or to remove the battery when it is on wall power for a long time. You can also just unplug it and let it run down the battery every so often, maybe once a week or so. Which is best really depends on the laptop and how sophisticated its charging circuitry is. If it is smart about varying the charging voltage according to battery levels, it can do OK. But many laptops and many rechargeable appliances will throw the same voltage at the battery whether it is at 0% or 100% (rather than switching to a "float" charge). That is why a lot of hand-held 2-way radios bite it quickly with the manufacturer's chargers. We have a MacBook about three years old that seems to do this very well (and you can watch its power draw vary with charge level on a volt meter), but my previous Powerbook (G4) did not. It just depends.

People should be aware that a "dead" battery may only be "mostly dead" rather than "all dead." Mostly dead is partly alive and can sometimes be brought back.Draining it down completely several times and recharging it full is one way to do that. I have a 5th Gen iPod w/ video that I got three years ago and, although I was worried about battery life and got an extended warranty with it, it has worked great.Recently I did start having problems with the battery only holding charge for maybe 2 hours. I tend to listen to audio books a lot when I am sick (which is often enough) and because of my condition will not login to the computer or plug it in for many days. Instead, I plug it into an AC plug-in 5 v "USB" charger to top it off. This seems to have been the source of the problem. When I ran it down fully and charged it off of the actual USB port on my Mac mini, it has gone back to working fine. Even three years old with constant use, I still get a full day's run time out of it (audio, much less with video or the back light going too long). We have a 12 v DC Renewable Energy system here available in parts of the farm. If I plug the iPod into a DC->USB 5v port it does not seem to cause problems (or the car adapter on trips for that matter), just the AC->5 volt adapter I charge my cell phone off of.The other interesting problem you can have is when you have drained it down too far (trying to wake it up several times after it has emergency powered-off). Plugging it in to your computer to sync won't actually charge the battery. What happens is that iTunes will scan the hard drive to find out what needs to be synced. The power from the USB will wake the iPod up, it starts to sync which runs the hard drive hard, and this draws more power than it is getting from the USB, so it goes back into emergency shuitdown, eventually the USB power wakes it back up, it tries to sync, ... ad nauseum. It can do this for hours unless you catch it. You can watch the screen and see it throwing fits.The way to solve this is to plug it in briefly to something which provides power but does not try to sync it. You can plug it in while someone else's account is active and then tell it not to sync, sometimes you can plug it into a laptop which is asleep (but USB will often still provide power), into a 5 volt chargepack or AC -> 5 v USB adapter. Once it has enough juice to wake up, you can safely plug it back into your Mac/PC and sync it normally. If it failed to sync enough times you may need to reload it completely, but not usually.

I do a fair amount of digital sketching/illustration (mostly botanical sketches), photo retouching (for the family business), and some document work requiring pen support (e.g. "signing" digitized documents and sending them). I have had a Wacom Graphire 3 tablet for a good while now. I finally lost the stylus to it and found out that since Wacom is now two generations further along with the Graphire tablets, that I can no longer get a replacement. So, finally, after some thought and research, we ended up with a new Bamboo "Pen and Touch" tablet ( http://www.wacom.com/en-us/products ). We purchased it for an Intel-based Mac Mini running Macintosh OS X 10.5.8. The tablet also claims Windows and Linux support. This is a short review of the "Pen and Touch" tablet. The Graphire 3 came with both a stylus and a mouse. Either would work on the tablet and both were cordless. The Bamboo "Pen and Touch" comes with only a stylus. The tablet itself acts as a multi-touch touch pad to replace the mouse, much like a larger version of the touch pad on a MacBook. The tablet recognizes basic gestures for single and double click, right and left click, drag-and-drop and so forth. More complex gestures are available (and seem to work, depending on the program) for zoom, rotate, and other common drawing operations. Four buttons along the left side also help replace some mouse functions. One acts as a right click, one as a left click, and one turns on and off touch support (so that you can disable recognition of touch while using the stylus so that stray touches do not confuse the drawing program). I have not figured out the purpose of the fourth button yet; all of the buttons are supposed to be programmable, but I have not figure out how to do so. The stylus itself can also be used somewhat as a mouse and has two programmable buttons (which can be reprogrammed through System's Preferences->Pen Tablet). The tablet's sensor area is 5.8"x3.6" which is fine for most photo work and for illustrations. My illustrations are seldom larger than 3"x4". If you do larger work on a regular basis, Wacom makes larger tablets. For us, desktop space is at a premium, which is why it was important that the tablet also replace the mouse. I like the fact that it has a larger, non-sensing frame than the older Graphire 3. This allows me to use rest my wrist on the tablet for some drawing functions as I would rest it on a piece of clean paper for precise control when I needed it in pencil sketching. The texture of the tablet is a vast improvement for me over earlier tablets. The Graphire 3 was smooth and glossy, which felt totally unnatural to draw on. With a pencil or pen, I use the texture of the paper to control my lines. The smooth surface of the Graphire was much harder to draw on unless I actually taped a piece of paper to its surface. The Bamboo "Pen and Touch," on the other hand, has a slightly roughened texture which feels much more natural. Wacom also includes several replacement stylus tips (because the tips will eventually wear out on the roughened surface) and a metal sleeve whose purpose I have yet to determine. There is a fabric tube on the right side of the tablet to slide the stylus into when not in use--- perhaps I will not lose it this time. The tablet is easy to reorient for left or right-handed use. I typically draw right-handed, but have a nerve and muscle condition which sometimes makes my right hand less than useful. Being able to swap the tablet is useful. The USB cable is longer than most similar peripherals, and this makes it easy to reposition and arrange. The conflict of having to keep it far enough away from my monitor (which ends up being farther than my keyboard tray extends) has resulted in the tablet being dropped several times so far with no apparent decrease in functionality :-) Installation This part was a bit rough. The installation program on the included CD-ROM immediately crashed every time it was started. I submitted the crash report and went to the Wacom website. I downloaded a new driver dated November of 2009. This version ran without a hitch and my "Pen and Tablet" Preference panel was updated. I plugged in the Bamboo "Pen and Touch" and it was immediately recognized. I still had the Graphire 3 tablet connected and both still worked. The "Pen and Tablet" Preference pane worked to control settings for both. Once I was satisfied that the new tablet was working, I disconnected the old tablet. The initial settings for the Bamboo "Pen and Touch" were reasonable. The "Soft or Firm" setting controls the tip sensitivity and that is what you are most likely to play with right off. it would be very nice if the Wacom folks would label this slider with, for instance, like pencils are labeled: 3B 2B 2HB 2H 3H, etc, to give the user an idea of what to expect out of a particular setting. There was no "Bamboo" Preference pane as described in the very brief quick start guide included with the product. There was no printed manual and I could not figure out how to start the "Tutorial" the quick start guide also mentioned. This meant, in particular, that I could find no way of programming the buttons or gestures. The "Pen Tablet" folder now in my Applications folder contained a Pen Utility program which only allowed one to uninstall the drivers. The second disk contained the various programs included with the package, including Photoshop Elements. The installation program on that disk also crashed every time. I looked to see if the extra programs were available in an update package like the driver, but failed. I submitted the crash report, registered my tablet, and left a message with Technical Support. One other interesting problem was quickly apparent: the Bamboo "Pen and Touch" tablet did not like my Plasma flat-panel monitor. The old Graphire tablet has issues if it was within about two feet of the screen, but the Bamboo tablet has more pronounced problems out to a greater distance. Control of the mouse becomes erratic and, if too close, stops moving at all. We are going to need to completely rearrange the cramped desk space to solve this problem. The Preferences pane allows you to use absolute or relative positioning for the tablet. That is, you can make the upper left-hand corner of the tablet map to the corresponding corner of the screen, the center of the tablet to the center of the screen, and so forth. That way, you know when touching the stylus to a particular portion of the tablet exactly where it will go on the screen. This makes some kinds of sketching very natural. You can also map the tablet to only a portion of the screen to make best use of the tablet's size by only using it for the actual drawing area you are worried about. Trying It Out Among the benefits of the new tablet are greater resolution and sensitivity, especially pressure sensitivity. I tried it out in Inkscape ( https://inkscape.org/en/ ), which is an illustration program I commonly use, but, although it has rudimentary tablet support, it really focuses on mouse-based drawing and the better tablet made little difference. I had roughly the same experience with GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program - https://www.gimp.org/ ) but quickly found out that the new version has greatly enhanced tablet support and began downloading it. I fired up a shareware program called, cleverly enough, "Tablet Draw," ( http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) which is an excellent tool designed from the ground up to support Tablet-based drawing. Most drawing programs, even Photoshop and Illustrator to some extent, are designed for mice and add tablet support into the mix, but many of their functions, especially how they draw curves and freehand lines are simply not correct for the short, quick strokes of a stylus in the hands of someone used to sketching with a pencil. Lines come out blocky, flood fills have unfilled white regions (or fill the whole drawing area) and so forth. Tablet Draw really does an excellent job of approaching things from the other direction, and in this little program, the difference between the two tablets was quickly apparent. Tablet Draw lets you use pressure to control thickness, opacity, or a combination of both depending on the drawing tool, and it allows a higher resolution tablet to draw smooth sketched lines that act very much like a real pencil or pen. I have yet to try the tablet in either Photoshop or Illustrator which are on my wife's laptop. I will do so once I have a chance to install the drivers on her machine. Macintosh OS X has general drawing support in all applications, allowing you to use handwriting recognition or add quick doodles in most programs. This is controlled in the Ink Preferences pane. You are allowed to use a button on the stylus to turn Ink mode on and off. If find this seldom works correctly, however: it tries to recognize handwriting when you are using the stylus to drag something or when you are actually attempting to sketch in a drawing program. I therefore end up turning it off completely from a menubar icon when I am not actively using it. Handwriting recognition is alright, better than with the old tablet, but it still makes mistakes unless you take the time to learn what the program expects. Using the tablet as a mouse is 95% correct. Aside from the problems with my plasma monitor, drag-and-drop operations are awkward and error-prone. I tried to select a shortcut folder in Finder, for instance, and ended up dragging the folder off of the shortcut bar so that it disappeared. In trying to repair this damage, instead of dragging the folder to the shortcut bar, I dropped it partway and ended up copying the folder to another drive. This kind of mishap is not uncommon, nor is mistaking a left click for a right click or vice-versa. Selecting long runs of text is also more exciting than it should be. It is fairly easy to hold the stylus in your hand while using the touch support for mouse operations, however, and this is much less awkward than with the older mouse-and-stylus arrangement. The Software As the included software failed to install, I will add details here once tech support gets back to me.

I have a Mac Mini with a single DVI-video output. It came with a DVI-to-VGA adapter. I have a DVI-to-HDMI cable, a couple VGA cables, and a DVI-to-DVI cable. We had a decent LCD flat panel we used for daily computer work which had decent resolution and crisp text. We do watch movies on occasion, however, and it was hard to see across the room (we do not have a "TV"), so we got a bigger screen (plasma) at a clearance sale. But the bigger screen, while being fine for movies, is very hard for me to do computer work on. The text is no longer crisp and it bothers my eyes after a short while, often leading to headaches. I would really like to be able to use the better, smaller LCD for computer work and only bother with the big screen when actually watching something. The smaller LCD uses less power as well.But the problem is that the Mac Mini has only one video out and will not support two monitors. I do not want to have to fiddle with cables all the time, especially since I know plugging and unplugging video cables constantly is a good way to ruin the cable or connector--- we have a laptop right now with a dead DVI-out. One used to be able to buy a VGA-switch where you could hook a computer to the switch and then connect the switch to two displays, say a monitor and a conference room projector, and then just flick the switch to go between them. The computer would not be "dual display:" it would just act as if one device had been physically unplugged and the other plugged in its place. The LCD screen takes either VGA or DVI input (or component) and the Plasma takes VGA, HDMI, or component. When I do searches for this kind of device, however, I keep coming up with gobs of KVM-type switches which allow you to use one monitor/keyboard with multiple PCs. This is the exact opposite of what I want.Any suggestions? Can you still buy VGA/DVI switches that do what I need? Is there another way I am missing? Do other people have this problem?

I have found laptop video out connectors to be relatively fragile. We tend to connect and disconnect laptop cables a lot more than desktop ones, too, so laptop video connectors tend to break sooner. Usually, if it is a software/configuration issue, I find that the external monitor will flicker briefly when it is plugged in. Even if the laptop is not set to use that display, the display recognizes that it is connected to something and tries to synchronize. Look to see any change in the display when it is plugged in. You might check your cable and connector carefully for pin damage, try a different monitor with the laptop and the monitor with another computer. You might also see if you can easily see the monitor's video connector by opening the various access panels provided to upgrade RAM, etc., and see if something is obviously loose or disconnected. If the laptop is still under warranty and it will no longer work with any external display, consider taking it in to the nearest service center and getting it looked at. Our MacBook currently has a dead video connector, but it is well past warranty. Something else to look for, especially if your laptop works with another monitor but not this one is your LCD mode settings. Modern flat screens, especially those which can double as HDTVs, have multiple inputs. They may take one or more of component video, VGA, DVI, HDMI, and may have more than one of a particular kind, such as two VGA or DVI hookups so you can hook, say, two computers and a DVD player all to the same screen and switch between them via the remote. If the LCD is 'listening' to the wrong input, say, set for DVI while you have VGA plugged in, or listening to VGA2 while you are plugging in to VGA1, the screen will appear to do nothing. Try looking at the buttons your monitor provides and seeing if one of them switches input modes. If it has a remote, examine its settings. Something might have gotten bumped or otherwise changed since you used it last.

Actually, that really depends. First of all, it is often the case that the biggest drives on the market have slower rotational speeds (RPM) and longer seek times than the next tier down. The drives are optimized for different tasks, the largest drives often for streaming and high throughput, the smaller often for fast access times. Additionally, you can get amazing performance out of am array of disks if they do not have to share channels often. This means either having a specialized RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) controller, which are awfully cheap these days, or having enough memory that the things you need from your secondary drive are usually in memory already and your hard drive controller has more options for rearranging the I/O to happen in the most efficient way. But, since IDE RAID controllers with 8 or more channels are now fairly common, that is a good way to go. You can stripe (combine more than one disk into what looks like one big disk for your software), or mirror (have one drive be a real-time backup for the other) or various combinations of the two. In both cases, read operations can be split across multiple drives / I/O channels and in striping, the writes can be spread across multiple drives. Most controllers support configurations where you do striping with some redundancy such that losing one hard drive or possibly even more than one will allow you to recover all of the data. It has been a few years since I have used this kind of technology and their are brands now I don't even recognize, But Promise is still there and is one of the brands I used on a regular basis. They seem to range from $60-$260 (e.g. http://www.superwarehouse.com/Promise_FastX4000/p/1519558 ). We used to have driver problems with Promise controllers running under UNIX (Linux, BSD, Solaris) but never real problems under Windows and they claim to support Linux properly now. I first started playing with these devices in 1994-5. I forget the brand, but it was a 4-channel RAID controller with a 286 processor and upgradable RAM. I had a 486 DX2 at the time and I joked that the hard drive controller was faster and had more RAM than a friend of mine's 286 computer. I used it for my thesis work (computer simulation) to squeeze as much performance out of that system as I could and have a bit of insurance if a drive failed. Because of the mirroring, I got lazy with backups (I had an old QIC tape backup system) and got bit badly when a power surge took out the hard drive controller AND the hard drives in one go. Don't think that mirroring does not mean you need to do backups! You can also do "software RAID" with Windows, Linux, and Macintosh now. This allows you to do striping and mirroring across multiple drives and even between, say, and IDE and a USB drive, but using software RAID when the performance of the drives and buses are not very close (like say RAID over four internal IDE drives or over four Firewire-connected drives) you will get very strange performance. Usually what I see people do is mirror between master and slave drives on one IDE chain and stripe across two IDE chains. The Promise controller I link to has four independent channels for four drives. You used to see (1997-2002 or so) Promise RAID controllers built-in to quite a few commodity PC motherboards. Asus did that for a while too, and I almost always preferred the Asus controllers. Server systems often use RAID to increase performance. I have worked with professional RAID setups with as many as 16-32 drives in a single array and multiple arrays. When you have, for instance, 32 fast 20 GB drives, the server can handle a lot of requests simultaneously. Hard drive failures were easy to handle with some of these systems: the front of the bad drive lights up; you unlock the case, pull the handle on the affected drive; slide it out and slide a new one in; you can then take the old one back to the lab to see if it can be fixed or needs to go back to the manufacturer; the server automatically starts rebuilding the blank drive from the mirror. Anyway, you can make use of your extra hard drives if you want to and you may get surprisingly good performance.

We used to mail our used toner cartridges to a company which would send us a rebate for them. Office Depot now accepts them at their stores. We can take used ink or toner cartridges into the store and get credit for them (eventually: it takes a good while to process). On the subject of cheaper cartridges but less ink, we are actually starting to have an interesting problem with this printer. We have printed just about 1200 pages (the driver keeps a count), mostly black-and-white, and quite a few of them in draft/low-quality mode to save ink. We are completely out of all three color cartridges for the third time (the color cartridges are supposed to print ~700 pages each and the black 1400 pages each) and have not yet changed the black cartridge. As this set of cartridges got low, we noticed that the "black" printing was starting to take on a green tinge. What the heck, we have a "black" cartridge, why is it using color ink to print black text? I printed several pages printing specifically in "greyscale" and "use black cartridge only" and got the same result. I looked closely at the "black" text with a magnifying glass and could see that it was using all three color cartridges to print "black". Fiddling with all sorts of settings has no effect. From an internet search, this may be a problem specifically with the Macintosh printer driver HP provides. It seems to do it correctly for some documents and wrong for most others. It will actually do it differently for different web pages. Anyway, if you think you are going through ink faster than you should be... maybe you ARE. Using three colors to create black not only makes a less black "black", it uses ink three times as quickly. We are going to see if HP will do anything about this situation. We cannot have it keep running through color cartridges on plain text and not have color available for our business printing.

Many of us have to manage email accounts using multiple services, especially if we access work mail through POP or IMAP. Here is an example using Apple's Mail program and some tips if you have a custom domain (such as being a hosted member on Xisto). Apple's Mail has some fairly nice features for managing multiple accounts, but it is not the only standalone mail program to do so. Once you see what can be done here, you will know what to look for in the documentation in your own mail program. Mozilla's Thunderbird, for instance, can do pretty much everything I am about to describe. Setting Up Multiple Accounts You can set up any number of separate mail accounts in Apple Mail. You do this from the Accounts Tab of the Preferences screen. Open Preferences from the Mail Menu and select Accounts from the top. The plus sign (+) at the bottom left will add a new account and let you fill in the information. When you have created several accounts, you will see them under INBOX on the left side of the main Mail Window. Clicking on INBOX will show you all new mail for all accounts. You can sort by date or sender, for instance, and the mail in every inbox will be sorted into one list. You can go through new email in order without worrying about which account it came to. The same goes for Trash, Sent Mail, and so forth. If you want to specifically go through the inbox of one account, click on the arrow next to the INBOX icon to expand the list. Now you will see each account listed separately. Clicking on one will let you see only the mail in that account, and, again, you can sort it whatever way you wish. This means I can sit down and go through all mail in order or, if in a hurry, I can just go through new messages in Sales. You can create folders to organize and file your emails by clicking the plus (+) on the bottom-left-side of the window, under the folder/account listing. You can save messages to folders which can be stored locally on your computer, or, if you are using IMAP, stored back on the server. This lets you use Apple Mail to access email at home but still use a web-based email system on travel. For instance, if I set up GMail to use IMAP and create new folders under my GMail account, I can sort mail in Apple Mail and still access my saved messages later through the web. I can do the same thing with email accounts created from CPanel in my own hosting account (e.g. from Xisto) and then use SquirrelMail to access the messages from somewhere else. If I have an online business and have, for instance, a "Sales" email account, I can store sorted messages in a folder, say "New Orders" under the account using IMAP, and my lovely wife can also access the same messages from her computer. Chatting Mail does support a "buddy status" and integrates with Apple's iChat program (which supports a few different chat protocols). This makes it possible to handle multiple chat systems all from the same place. There is a buddy status icon that looks like a dialog bubble for each message in the list of messages. One click will launch a chat session with that person (using their chat information from your address book). Managing Mail Through Multiple Accounts In my Mail setup, I have a GMail account, a set of accounts through my own domain for our family business (my personal, "eric", business mailbox, a Sales account, an Editor account (for comments on online articles), and a Vendor account), and a couple of accounts for a political organization whose domain I also operate. Mail makes managing all these accounts fairly easy and even makes mingling accounts straightforward. I can receive a mail in my Sales account and respond to it from my "eric" mailbox. My wife, in turn, can respond from her "cathi" account. You do this by hitting reply, and selecting the correct outgoing email address from a drop-down menu. The client only has to send email to one account, either of us can field the message and respond. The client then knows who they are talking to and the conversation continues smoothly from there. Either of us can then store the conversation, if desired, back in a folder under Sales. That way if, for instance, she is not around, I can look and see what is going on and respond to a phone call from the client. But, there is more. My GMail account receives mail through a forwarding system, pobox.com. I have multiple email addresses through pobox which all go to my GMail account. I don't want to have to configure a separate Mail account for each one because then Mail will want a separate incoming mail server. I had to enter dummy information in Apple Mail before OS 10.5 to accomplish this, which was ugly and annoying (it would keep trying to connect to "none" to try to fetch mail). Now it is very simple. I just enter multiple email addresses in the "Email Address" box for my GMail account on the accounts tab. For example, I can enter: "foo@gmail.com, foo@pobox.com, bar@pobox.com, tavern@pobox.com". This means that GMail now receives mail for all of these addresses. What does this buy me? I can receive the message through GMail and SEND replies through any of the pobox.com accounts, just like I can send from "eric" or Sales. People communicating with me through my pobox.com forwarders do not need to know I am using GMail, which is good, since the whole point is that I do not need to tell them if I stop using GMail and start using something else. I have a number of similar accounts for the business that all come to "eric" as well, such as webmaster and postmaster for the domains. If I am corresponding with a system administrator about a security problem, for instance, I can use the official webmaster account. Otherwise it all comes to the same place. Altogether, I handle maybe two-dozen email addresses with a very simple setup. This has a very important advantage for setting up accounts with possibly shady websites and combating SPAM. With my domains under Xisto, they let me set up an unlimited number of email addresses. I can create a new email address just for dealing with one suspect site and forward it to one I check all the time. If I start getting SPAM through that address, I know who leaked my information. I can separate it out into its own account so I can skip its messages when I want to, or I can simply delete that account and have my server automatically bounce all of the junk. Mailboxes are cheap. I can name them according to their purpose, e.g. shadysite@mydomain.com, or randomly, like 145jmfh@mydomain.com. Using Rules Lastly, Mail lets you set up rules that can be used to automatically sort mail. I use these sparingly, but they are a great help when I do. They can be as simple as alerting me when I get a message from a particular client (or deleting mail from an annoying person on a mailing list; I have four or five names in my "kill file" as we used to call it) or as complex as the junk mail filter. These are accessed under the Rules tab of the Preferences window. Conclusion So, in conclusion, Apple's Mail does a good job of making complex email setups easy to manage, but whatever you are using, it is worth exploring some of the features available for making your organizational tasks easier. If you use an online mail system exclusively, consider the power of a standalone mail program. Even the old text-terminal-based ELM or PINE is more powerful than the best webmail system. With IMAP, you can have the best of both worlds: the power of a standalone program at home, and lightweight webmail access when you need it.

I just realized that the photo printing application that HP includes is set up as a printer in iPhoto. That means you can select photos in iPhoto and use HP's tool to arrange and print them. This is actually a very useful feature but it is not announced anywhere that I can find. I had to stumble on it by accident.

Trickle Whither Thou Wilt... Trickle-down economics, also called "supply-side" economics is the idea that making the prosperous more prosperous will cause some of that prosperity to "trickle-down" to the less prosperous. In short, the wealthy will have to buy things and hire people in order to spend their money and the things they buy and people they hire will improve the economy overall and, in particular, aid the poor and unemployed by creating new jobs. "Trickle-down" economics was a major component of Reagan's economic policies and Bush (Junior's) corporate tax cuts but has a long history in the US. The thinking behind the banking bailouts is similar as well: giving banks money will cause them to lend more. On the other side of the political spectrum is "trickle-up" or "demand-side" economics, the idea that giving money to the poor will cause them to buy more products which in turn will cause businesses to expand and so stimulate the economy. This is a major component of Keynesian economics and the stated purpose of the "Economic Stimulus Package," tax credits for the poor, as well as many public welfare programs. Both ways of thinking have serious flaws. Trickle-down economics was always more of a political mantra than an accepted economic theory. Economists have long known that the type of spending engaged in by the rich: yachts and corporate jets, expensive dinners, tailored suits, etc., does not generate much useful long-term economic activity. In addition, the rich tend to save a larger portion of their income than the poor, meaning that less of the money being put into the system stays in the system. The rich are more capable of spending or investing windfall money abroad so extra spending may not stimulate the domestic economy. Large businesses will not expand manufacturing or hire new workers just because they get a lump of money: if consumption is not increasing, they will just pay out the money in dividends or perhaps use it to pay off debts. Large payouts to the rich and big business can be used by them to consolidate power and squash smaller competitors. Trickle-up economics has always enjoyed more academic support, but it really works no better in practice. The poor may save the money or use it to pay down debts which may not "stimulate" the economy. They may go to your local chain store and buy foreign products which fails to stimulate the domestic economy just as much as when the rich do it. Companies they buy products from will not expand manufacturing or hire new workers because they know the money is a one-time influx. It is also the case that many attempts to use trickle-up policies simply consist of wasteful government spending on nothing in particular: the 2009 stimulus contained the text of pork spending bills which had failed to be passed repeatedly for decades all lumped into one ugly package. Most of this spending does nothing to actually improve the economy, manufacturing, or fix the problems which lead to the downturn. By choosing winners and losers: a new tire company gets a boost because they funded a congressional campaign but a bicycle manufacturing company did not and does not, many healthy businesses can be destroyed as collateral damage. Lastly, one must wonder how the rich benefits from the fact that a small portion of the money taxed from them in the first place may or may not eventually trickle back up the economy. ... Problems Still Be Bilt What both theories share is an idea that capital ("money") which enters the economy at one level does not stay there; it circulates through the economy in a cycle or web. The idea is that, by putting new capital in the right place it will stimulate the rest of the economy. What both theories lack is a sound grasp of what portion of the economy is responsible for the generation of wealth. Wealth is distinctive from money or capital. $100 in the bank or spent on a candy bar represents money. $100 invested in a new tool or gaining a skill represents wealth: the actual productive capacity of the economy has increased and everyone benefits from the expansion. $100 in "new capital" generated by banks actual results in a tax on everyone. There is suddenly more money in the economy but the same selection of products to buy. This results in inflation: the cost of everything goes up a small amount. Proponents of the trickle-up effect often say that "any spending will do", that, for instance, paying people to sweep their streets in their neighborhood or to dig holes in the morning and fill them in the afternoon will stimulate the economy merely because money is being spent and activity is occurring. This was the underlying idea of many of the "New Deal" programs under FDR: get people back to work, it does not matter what they do. But people are not learning new skills, no new (lasting) business or enterprise has been generated, and nothing has been changed. In fact, since the money was stolen from the economy in the first place, very little actually occurs at all. But what does occur can be dangerous: a bubble may form. Double Bubble Trouble We said above that companies will not expand their business just because of a one-time stimulus. They know that the money coming in now will not repeat, so if they sell out their inventory and order more than usual to replace it, they will be stuck with unused and unsold inventory. In the end, this will hurt them far more than the one-time influx of cash helps. Smart businesses will pay down debt or work to reduce future costs, but many will simply pass the money through to owners and share-holders. As the consequences of inflation set in, this new money will simply evaporate. But what if businesses are tricked into expanding by a stimulus activity? Then businesses will begin investing in production that the economy does not actually need. Certain business, resources, or materials which are not normally the target of excess investment will suddenly get more expensive, such as plastic for new toys or real estate for new malls. Existing owners of these resources will suddenly see more money on their balance sheets and feel 'rich'. They may borrow more against their new equity and cause expansion in still other places. Prices go up sharply, but mostly in odd, out-of-the-way parts of the economy. This is how the housing bubble formed: the government changed the rules to force more mortgage loans to "high-risk" borrowers to "stimulate" home buying among the poor. More people bought real estate, especially new housing. The prices of these houses went up. Developers got new contracts to build more houses. People started speculating in residential real estate. They buy a house at $100,000, wait a month, and sell it for $110,000. This causes even more housing demand. But all through this, the actual number of people needing housing has not changed. Investment pulled into housing comes at the cost of things the economy actually needs. Why get a new degree or start a new business when you can make money flipping houses or as a realtor? Why follow a job to a new city when you cannot afford to get housing there? Why get a decent $100,000 house you can pay off quickly when you can get an interest-only loan approved for a spectacular $200,000 house? How does a retiree in a quiet neighborhood afford property taxes when property prices double over night? Eventually the bubble has to burst and people get hurt. But it was "new money" that caused the problem in the first place. It is not much different from the dot-com bubble, the telecom bubble, or the commercial real-estate bubble which is yet to burst. Bounces By the Ounces The $100 spent on a tool, however, not only increases the productive capacity of the economy directly, the manufacturer of the tool also has the opportunity to use their new profit to invest in their manufacturing capacity, possibly by increasing their employees' hours or buying new equipment. A real change has happened and the bottom-layer business has a chance to realize new profits or compete in new areas. Money saved at one layer or another, say deposited in a bank account, makes money available for new loans, but the rules for loaning that money to ventures likely to be profitable have not changed, so it is more likely to be invested wisely. Inflation may be offset by real growth. So, in this sense, "trickle-up" theory works, but only if 1) the new expenditure increases productive capacity (or decreases its cost), 2) the money has a chance to "bounce" through the various layers of the economy a few times. and 3) the investment occurs where a more or less real need exists in the economy. Think about, for instance, spending money at a local (grower's only) farm stand versus going to a chain grocery store and buying foreign produce. The foreign produce purchase increases the marginal profit of the chain grocery a minuscule amount and then exits the domestic economy. The local purchase goes to a small farmer who must buy seed for the next year, fertilizer, tools, labor, machinery, transportation, etc., as well as pay the costs of their own household. Farming is what is referred to as "capital intensive" industry: most of the money coming in gets invested right back into the business in the form of new resources, improvements in the land or its productive capacity. Very little comes back out as cash profits for mad-money-shopping-sprees. The money invested in the farm may bounce around several times (seed producer or nursery, hardware store, feed store, migratory farm workers, etc.) before it ends up in a Wal-Mart and heads to China. At each point that money touches, it has an opportunity to expand the economy and be invested in productive industry or improving skills. The local investment may or may not actually happen but the opportunity is there to create real wealth rather than merely move money. Expansion of local farm production might end up invested in local processing and canning industry for instance, natural textile production, bio-fuels processing, seed banks, tool manufacturers, etc., much of which has disappeared from the US altogether. This is what I call "multiple-bounce" economics. How do you make sure that money spent in your community stays in that community as long as possible before ricocheting abroad? Well, one might think that simply targeting a stimulus package at small farms and capital-intensive cottage industry might work. Local industry always starts as cottage-industry/small industry before capital investment increases its economy of scale. A local machinist who hits a market niche with a new tool gets capital to mass produce it. A local woolen producer working out of a barn with steady business gradually gets newer, higher production tools, and is able to hire staff. Every Hewlett-Packard and Dell starts somewhere in a garage on weekends. So, targeting these businesses with government money taxed from the wealthy should turn everything around, right? Ur... maybe not. Why Do I Keep Hitting Myself In the Head? ... The truth is that government expenditures rarely target this class. The small farm/small business/cottage industry folks do not have the numbers of the poor nor the political connections of big business. Government grants designed to stimulate small business is disproportionately scooped up by big business or people connected to it or to big politics: they are better at writing grant proposals, have more time to find out what grants are available, and the connections to make sure their proposals are seen by the right people. They also tend to have the chutzpah to simply cheat: Congress decides to spend money on "carbon sequestration" and a big business scoops up the funds for "planting new trees". The only catch is that the trees were planted two years before the program started. Tracking and identifying these abuses, overseeing the grants, overseeing the people overseeing the grants, finding out whether the overseers have in-laws with the very businesses applying for these grants, etc., and trying to identify the right businesses to fund--- you want to fund the business with an idea that will revolutionize transportation, not the idiot who has reinvented the square wheel--- costs much more than these programs have any potential to generate. So how do you achieve multiple-bounce investment? The easiest way to do it is to make it easier to start new local businesses. There are already people out there who have ideas and want to make something new. They will work in their garage and eat Ramen noodles at 5 cents a package for years to see their dream become reality. But they cannot compete with government or keep track of the dizzying variety of new regulations passed every day to make new businesses more complex and the consequences of not filing form 4539A-DUH more severe: local, county, and state sales taxes, state and federal income taxes, CIP taxes, business licenses, mandatory safety testing, child labor laws and working papers, reporting requirements, zoning requirements, farm registration, animal identification, workers' compensation laws and taxes, track-back requirements for produce, business inspections, "intellectual property" laws, "business method" patents, workers compensation taxes, unemployment taxes, insurance requirements, unemployment taxes, restrictions on household chemicals "used by terrorists" or "drug manufacturers" often used in small and farmstead manufacturing, disposal requirements, complex medical insurance regulations, special taxes on phone lines for "business use", grants or government favors given to competitors, regulations on online money processing, regulations on weights and measures, health department requirements on "commercial" kitchens, egg licenses, etc., etc., etc. Most would-be entrepreneurs are hard pressed to even find out what half of the regulations they are required to follow are, let alone comply with them. A new farmer has little chance of being able to afford a $200+ inspected food scale and no chance of affording $30,000+ of licensed, commercial dairy equipment or a $15,000 commercial kitchen with a separate entrance and all stainless-steel fixtures which would take roughly 8,000 years of farmers' market cookie sales to pay off. A local hobbyist making wood toys cannot afford $300 worth of CPSIA and ASTM-compliant lead and safety testing to sell their unique $40 wooden toy train. 99.9% of the issues which caused the regulations to be passed are not caused by cottage-industry business. Recent problems with lead-contaminated toys were entirely from large importers with overseas mass-production but CPSIA's rigid (and expensive) requirements on third-party lead and pthalate testing are easily born by these manufacturers making 10,000 identical copies of each toy. Small manufacturers cannot comply nor are powerful enough to negotiate political favors like Mattel's granting them the privilege of testing their toys, responsible for six of the 2008 product recalls, in house. A cattle ranch with 18,000 head can afford the overhead of premises registration and animal tagging where one with 8 head cannot, but one cannot start a new home business with 18,000 head of cattle and a Senator on the payroll. ... 'Cause It Feels So Good When I Stop! So, the first way to stimulate "local business" is simply to stop killing it off. Make it easy to license and register a new business. Make exemptions to many of the stringent "safety" laws for smaller businesses producing and selling locally--- a local dairy with eight goats simply does not require a commercial milking machine capable of milking 800 gallons a day. A gallon of teat-dip and a clean bucket will do the job just fine. The practices of a local business are visible within their community: word gets around and people spend their money elsewhere. Have the buyer decide whether they want to buy a CPSIA and ASTM-compliant toy from a foreign manufacturer with a history of problems or an un-certified toy from the local woodworker who has been selling them locally for 35-years with no problems. Have state governments push back against the Federal by protecting local businesses from laws on "interstate commerce". Regulations appropriate for Missouri are very different from what is appropriate for Connecticut or Los Angeles. Small businesses have much better representation in state government to get stupid laws corrected or repealed--- and so do consumers. Stop picking "winners and losers" in the marketplace by certifying a specific product or technology as the "right" solution. A regulation forcing people to buy today's "efficient light bulb" not only hurts manufacturers of today's inefficient light bulb but of tomorrow's even-more-efficient mercury-free light bulb. Get rid of 50-year-old taxes passed for "emergency funding," like the WWII telephone tax, which are still around today and being patched by legislation to apply to new technologies (like Internet telephony) it was never meant to tax. Make tax codes simpler. Instead of spending money on a CPA to try to save money on taxes--- find the latest loophole or tax credit--- businesses can spend money on... oh, I don't know... their business. Make tax penalties on local trade currencies less harsh. Trade coupons encourage people to start new businesses to take advantage of local businesses with coupons to spend. When trade coupons or barter transactions are taxed (sales/income tax) at full face value and must be paid in cash, trade coupons bleed cash from the communities rather than bringing cash into them. Get rid of three-quarters or more of the grant and loan programs. If an entrepreneur has to spend half of their time looking for new grants in order to keep their competitor from getting an unfair advantage, then they are not thinking about their business. The people who are good at finding and writing grants and the people that have the mettle to push through a fledgling business with private investment and personal sacrifice, build a local market, and respond to customers are not often the same people. Make it clear that people have the unassailable right to make whatever direct, private purchases they want, even cookies baked by their Aunt Tildy in a non-commercial kitchen, a gallon of "unlicensed" milk or eggs from their neighbor with three goats and a couple of laying hens, or a spaghetti dinner for charity at the local church. Period. Rethink "free trade agreements" which put a local producer required to meet 18 bajillion Once people can start new businesses again, encourage local money to stay local. There are a lot of ways to do this which require little or no government intervention. Growers' Farmer's Markets (produce sold must be grown within a certain distance of the market), Producers' Cooperatives, and Local Product Directories make it easy for people to identify local products and spend their money on them. Anyone can find a local organization and go there to buy things. If you cannot find one, starting one is easy; just get together with other like-minded people and do it. Use trade coupons and local currencies to encourage money spent in the community to bounce once or twice before leaving. Make a local hardware store think twice about whether they can get equipment from a local machinist. Make a local consumer think twice about paying a local handyman to fix old equipment versus buying imported new equipment. Where tax consequences make this hard, use indirect methods, like using junk silver coins as a local currency. In the end, the goal is not to eliminate non-local purchases or imported goods, but to make sure that the money can bounce more than once before leaving, and that the local economy has the productive capacity to meet its own critical needs without depending on the vagaries of global markets. A Penny Saved Is A Student Larned Encourage savings. That's right, the boogieman of both trickle-down and trickle-up economics: money which is saved rather than immediately spent, helps local economies. How? By allowing people to save capital for future investment in themselves. One $250 stimulus check will not make a family suddenly decide to send their kid to college. Fifteen years of steady saving will. A $250 stimulus check will not let a family pay off their house so that more money is freed up for starting a new business. Fifteen years of steady saving will. A $250 stimulus check will not convince Bart, his brother Dan, and his other brother Dan to open a new feed store. Fifteen years of steady saving from a 'day job' will. While that savings grows, it is available to banks to be loaned out for new mortgages or new business ventures, but only if people have money for down payments, if the economy is strong enough to support those new ventures, and the regulatory environment is stable enough to make the risk worthwhile. What kind of idiot is going to buy a new farm when they have no money for a down payment, the economy is bad enough that they cannot guarantee they will sell anything, and a new "food safety" bill is sitting in the Senate which may require them to make $30,000 in new improvements to their farm and $8,000 a year in ongoing expenses before they can sell a carrot to their neighbor? What kind of idiot starts a new business without the savings to get by if the sales don't start pouring in on Day One? In my contracting days, the rule of thumb was to save up 6 months of coasting time in case business was particularly stale. A farm has to count on a bad harvest now and then, meaning they need to get through a full year to the next big harvest. No savings, no new business. Savings does not happen in "bubble economies". There is no point to putting money in the bank at 0.000000000025% per year interest when you can make 84,556,673% per month flipping houses (until the music stops) or buying bad paper on the run-away derivatives market. There is no point to sitting on money in any form when inflation due to tax-and-spend or borrow-and-spend budgets causes the dollar to lose its value just sitting in your pocket overnight. A silver dollar from 1930 is worth fourteen times the value for its metal content than for the number stamped on the front. That is a direct measure of how much that dollar has lost in actual buying power. Until we learn "Multiple-Bounce Economics," there will be nothing in our local economies to save and no money available to pay our way out of crushing debt. Our "trade imbalance" will not improve, no matter how low the exchange rate falls, until there is something produced in the US worth buying with foreign money and that will not happen until we revive local industry. ...And We Close With Some Pithy Sayings In some ways, Keynesians are right in that it does not matter what local industry produces--- it might be a great new recipe for liver and onions or a new electric motor, a great dance hit or a biography of Alan Keyes, hand-woven wool rugs or a tool for pounding fence staples without hitting your finger with the hammer--- as long as it produces, but it also has to invest in itself along the way and that tends to weed out the truly wretched ideas over time. Only a rolling stone gathers no moss, and only a bouncing buck keeps from getting stuck. In many ways, this is why our family farm-based business spends a lot of time encouraging other local cottage industry and patronizing other local businesses. Rather than being a source for new competition (which keeps us on our toes anyway), it means more places to spend our income locally and more local businesses with money to spend on our products: "a rising tide lifts all ships" as the saying goes. The more businesses start thinking this way, the faster our economy will really recover.

:-) I didn't think it would be fair of me to just re-post the article on my own site since it would rob you folks of search engine hits. I was 'paid' for this article in terms of hosting credits and I don't like to "double dip". Feels dishonest. But I did want people going to the MMM site to find the article, so ... I probably will update/rewrite and re-post the article eventually on mistymanormercers.com, after Xisto has gotten its money's worth and when there are enough new studies and information to merit it. I believe strongly in what Xisto does. It has some similarities to what we are trying to do with our business and with the Statesmen. Instead of just saying, "the world could be better," we need to start actually making it better ourselves, one small piece at a time. Businesses do not merely exist to make money. Rather, money exists to sustain business in its role in the community. We have long since forgotten that.

People use the flowers and leaves of the plant at the height of flowering (usually mid-to-late June). You can make a poultice or salve by mushing it in a mortar and pestle and then adding water (poultice) or oil/grease (balm/salve). This is what people do to treat external injuries. Otherwise you would make a tea or infusion to drink or, better yet, a tincture (alcohol extract). To make a tea, you just pack a tea ball loosely with the herb and steep it in very hot (not boiling) water for several minutes. An infusion is a much stronger tea. Fill a mason jar about one-third of the way loosely with the fresh herb (maybe closer to a quarter of dried herb) and pour very hot (just under boiling) water on top of it. Seal the jar immediately and let sit for 6-8 hours until cool. I was taught that sealing the jar was important: as the water cools, the lid will be sucked tight down, the pressure in the jar will drop, and more of the herb's active ingredients flow out of the plant. This is cheap vacuum distillation and you are also effectively canning the infusion which can then keep for a few weeks as long is it remains sealed. A tincture can be made in either alcohol or acid (i.e. vinegar). Some plants tend to be done in one or the other and it changes which active ingredients are concentrated. I have almost exclusively read of St. John's Wort being preserved with alcohol but I have recently found some very old references which I am still investigating which talk about using vinegar as well. In any case, use either 40%+ grain alcohol or a strong vinegar (5% acetic acid). Chop the herb finely and add it to a jar of your alcohol/vinegar as you would for an infusion. Let it sit for a week or two, shaking it once or more each day to make sure it stays well mixed. After that time, pour it through a sieve and a filter to remove the herb. The resulting liquid should be a deep red for St. John's Wort. Store cool and dark. Most tinctures last as long as three years if stored well before spoiling. People disagree on how long some of the medicinal effects of St. John's Wort lasts and often claim less than six months of storage. 30-90 drops of a tincture are more concentrated than a cup or two of tea. You typically measure the strength of a tincture by weight of alcohol versus weight of herb. In other words, if you use 3 parts alcohol to 1 part herb, then the tincture has a 1:3 strength. You will see this referred to in herb books when talking about dosage. If they give dosage for a 1:1 tincture, you need to triple the dosage for yours. On the other hand, strength of herbal preparations varies quite a bit depending on just when the herb was harvested, what the weather had been like, the soil it grows in, the amount of leaves versus flowers, etc., so it is always prudent to start at a low dosage and increase if necessary. You have to pay attention and follow a disciplined process with plant medicines. I have also produced an herbal wine by adding St. John's Wort to the primary fermenter with the sugar (or juice) and yeast. Filter the herb out when you bottle. Herbal wines do not store as well as tinctures (perhaps a year or two) but are much less expensive to make. I have very recently experimented with using active cultures in vinegar for preserving herbs. I use apple cider vinegar that still has the yeast culture in it ("the mother of vinegar" as it is sometimes referred to) to make an acid tincture. The tincture ends up much less sweet and with more bite than otherwise. What I think is happening is that the yeast culture processes the sugars which are picked up from the plant along with its medicinal constituents. This means less sugar in the resulting tincture, more acid, and, hopefully, longer shelf life. This year we had an incredible bounty of St. John's Wort to harvest. It grows natively in our back pasture. Normally I would not waste SJW for dying because it takes so much to dye a pound of wool, but since I had so much, I did some experimenting. I was able to get a beautiful golden-yellow using alum as a mordant, a decent green using iron-after-alum, and a deep red with just vinegar and salt (may not be colorfast). [As usual, I am not a doctor and I am not offering this information to treat any specific condition. Let the reader beware.]

It is really more like, "Thou shalt not MURDER." There are quite a few cases in the Old Testament where specific types of killings were not "murder," including self-defense. They even had a variation on Castle Doctrine for home defense: if you killed an unarmed intruder in your home in broad daylight then you could be charged with murder, but if the intruder entered your home at night then it was to be considered self defense (you cannot be expected to determine whether the intruder is armed or dangerous when woken up in the middle of the night and in the dark). But regardless, taking a life is always a serious undertaking with grave consequences. God says in Genesis that "There will be an accounting..." of all blood that is spilled. I consider this even when killing livestock for meat: we share the same breath of life and that life must be treated with great respect. As far as "mercy killing" goes specifically, there is evil to be weighed on both sides: if we act and end a life which God created for WHATEVER REASON, we take that blood on our own hands and it is much more than a question of mere legality or what the State can do to you. But, if we really "love our neighbor", then sometimes love might require acting in ways that risk not only our lives but our very souls. We have to keep in mind that we will stand for that in the end and let God judge our actions--- and that we might just be in the wrong. So, to me, it is pointless to make euthanasia legal. If the act is really necessary and it is really done for the right reasons, then someone (the doctor, the family, a friend) will act regardless of what the law says and the earthly consequences will mean little or nothing to them. The jury may hear the case and decide to acquit or the judge may suspend sentence if they believe this to be true and the act to be just, but everyone considering euthanasia should be prepared to face consequences. Fear of those consequences may stop the people who may act for the wrong reasons and NO ONE should ever act to end life without careful thought and total commitment. If there were a law (as in England) against using violence to defend a victim of a crime, say someone being raped, the law would not stop me from doing what is right. I would hope that the judge or jury would act appropriately and take exception to the law, but I would not count on it. In the US, it is generally legal to defend yourself or someone else facing a real threat of physical harm, and it should be, but self (or other) defense is typically a much more clear-cut issue than euthanasia where every case is unique. Even if there are rare cases where it might be moral, I do not think it should ever be legal and the State should never get in the habit of deciding who it is OK to euthanize and who it is not: madness lies that way. That is one of the reasons I am leery of current health "reform" proposals. The proposals do not explicitly say: "We are going to euthanize the elderly (or the permanently disabled, such as myself) because they don't contribute to society," but they give very broad discretion to the government to decide "standards of care" and "end-of-life" procedures. There is no way to word such powers in a way which does not allow, effectively, selective euthanasia or even bureaucratic murder by simply withholding critical treatment at a critical time. Such murder could easily be covered in mounds of paperwork as "bureaucratic error" or "processing delays". We have that possibility now with Medicaid/Medicare, but it is currently still possible for individuals to sidestep these bureaucracies by seeking private treatment and charity contributions toward those treatments. As we get closer to some people's goal of a "single-payer" system, those outlets become harder to find. US politics is dirty in ways which seem unique to our nation. We have some of the best and worst aspects of government in one people. And, yes, I believe we have bureaucrats who are just petty enough to take advantage of any power given them to strike out at enemies or even those who just irritate them. Look at how government power (FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, etc.) was misused against Martin Luther King, Jr. (among many other activists) and tell me it would not happen here. Events in the 60's are WHY we had very strict laws put into place to reign in the authorities from targeting people politically. We have mostly stripped those laws in the past few years and are now preparing to give them even more ammunition to use against Americans. I think this is a very bad idea.

We bought an HP 6500 wireless printer a couple of months ago and now have some decent experience working with it, so I thought I would share our experiences. It seems to have some very nice features and a few interesting warts but overall works well, especially for the low price tag. (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/) Reasons We Purchased Why did we get this printer now? I think a review is pointless if you don't know what the purchaser was looking for or expected. The same machine may work well for one person or horribly for another depending on what they expect to use it for. We were looking for a replacement for our bulky HP color laserjet. We wanted something smaller, but especially we wanted something that took less power. We are in the middle of converting our home to an off-grid power system with DC circuits and a whole-house inverter. UPS (Uninteruptible Power Supply) and inverter systems all say they do not support laser printers. Laser printers cause serious power surges when starting up and will throw spikes back down the line, damaging sensitive equipment such as inverters and power monitor panels. So we were looking for low wattage both when printing and especially on standby, but we run a small business, so we still needed good color output, low cost-per page, and network support. The cost-per-page requirement meant we were looking for something with decent-sized toner or ink cartridges and separate cartridges for black and color so they need only be changed when completely empty. We use Macintosh computers, a desktop Mac-Mini and an older MacBook. We may be setting up an additional Linux box as a server. We occasionally have people come over who may have a Windows laptop and might want to print something, so decent support for multiple operating systems was also important. The HP 6500 Wireless We started looking at the HP 6500 OfficeJet All-In-One Wireless because of its small desktop footprint and very low power usage. In addition to printing, it had copying, scanning, and fax. We digitize receipts and records on a regular basis (using a digital camera in document mode), and a flatbed scanner would make that task easier. In addition, in our handcraft business, we often need to scan pages from books while researching traditional craft techniques so that we can document historical reproductions (e.g. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Copying was also of some use to use, but faxing, given that we have no land-line phone service (the lines out here are terrible, so we use cell phones for home and business), was of no use to us whatsoever. More importantly, however, the 6500 Wireless had 4 ink cartridges for black, cyan, magenta, and yellow, and had an option of buying longer-lasting "XL" cartridges for more economical printing. Unlike the slightly less expensive OfficeJet 6500, the 6500 Wireless had, not surprisingly, wireless network support, but also had two-sided printing and support for scanning from a 35-page document-feeder. The two-sided printing would allow us to save paper and make it much easier to print fliers, brochures and similar sales-materials in house. It printed faster and took up less space than the slightly more expensive 8500 Pro Wireless. It supported Windows and Macintosh with no major problems uncovered by a Windows search. It also looked like Linux drivers were available for Ghostscript. We were able to find this in several stores, including Office Depot, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy where we were able to look at the the machine and check out its printing ability. The 6500 Wireless ranged from economical high-speed black printing on normal paper to stunning color on glossy or photo paper. It also would print T-shirt transfers. Ink cartridges were also in stock at quite a few stores and were easy to recycle and exchange. Oddly enough, Best Buy had a much lower price than Wal-Mart. Office Depot started a trade-in rebate for a laser printer to an ink jet the day after we bought at Best Buy (anyone want a used laser printer?). Getting It Home/Setting It Up The printer came in a number of pieces and some assembly was required. HP carefully labeled and color-coded all of the pieces so that you can assemble it correctly without too much trauma. I did lose one of the small parts in the box for a bit, however, and the instructions for preparing the ink cartridges for insertion were frighteningly vague: they did not make it clear that turning the small lever on the bottom was supposed to cause it to break off. This caused a bit of consternation until I was able to get the printer working and convince myself that I had not broken anything! The AC adapter is external. Many people get annoyed at having a separate power brick, but this was an important feature to us: we can potentially use a transformer to feed DC directly to the printer without going through an inverter. We [will] have solar and wind going into a battery bank, direct DC circuits for things that will run that way, and then an AC circuit for those things which must run off of AC. We have a DC adapter for the Mac-Mini and the Macbook, for instance, and there is no reason we cannot do this with the printer. Inverters are not 100% efficient, and you lose power going from DC battery to AC inverter to AC adapter to DC printer. It is much simpler and more efficient to just use DC all the way. Software installation was quick and painless. The printer spent a good bit of time initializing the first time and it took a few minutes to configure it for wireless use (we plugged it in via USB initially) but it appeared on the network and appeared to work perfectly. A test document popped out and I was reasonably satisfied. The Software The 6500 Wireless needs the included special drivers to support double-sided printing and its other special options as well as to support scanning. Two printers appear in your printer-selection dialog, one for normal printing and one for faxing (which we do not use). Scanning can be done by sticking a piece of paper on the machine and selecting "Start New Scan" from the HP printer support app. It is supposed to be possible to select SCAN on the printer front panel and select a machine to send it to, but I have not yet gotten that working. The HP drivers allow you to see supply levels and information more easily than past HP printers on Mac OS X and the print dialog allows access to quite a few options to control output quality and color matching. A "Hewlett Packard" folder is created under Applications with a bunch of small utilities, including photo stitching and printing. Much of this duplicates functionality in iPhoto but allows some interesting options, including more versatile printing of photo albums that allows us to do better looking and organized product portfolios for instance. We have not done much with these utilities yet, but there are definitely some features to explore. Overall, the software seems much more polished and stable than previous HP printers for Mac OS X. We use Mac OS 10.5.8 on both local machines. Scanning has been excellent and painless. When you start a new scan (from the Scanner icon in the standard Macintosh Printer Status dialog), it will do a quick pre-scan to show you what it sees and select reasonable default settings, then let you override them if you choose. Output has been quite good with no tweaking, even when scanning identity documents for government/banking purposes. I have not tried OCR yet, but it is supposed to be able to save scans to text files. There is a very irritating SNAFU with the wireless network support, however. If the printer is inactive for a few minutes, it will go into sleep mode to save power. It is supposed to continue monitoring the network and wake up when something tries to connect, but it rarely does so. If you force it to wake up from the front panel, it will seldom pick up and start printing any jobs you have already tried to submit. You often end up going through a little dance of pausing the print queue on the Macintosh, powering off the printer, powering the printer back on, and then resuming the print queue on the Macintosh. This pretty much always solves the problem, but part of the point of a network printer is to be able to print to it from across the home/office, print several documents without having to mess with the printer, and then pick them all up at once. That really does not work well in this case. It is possible that tweaking settings will fix the issue, but I have not figured it out (yet). The Hardware - Printer Output/Economy The 6500 wireless prints very quickly, especially in economy ("fast draft") mode, even if you are used to mid-range laser printers. The limited size of the paper feeder makes it unsuitable for bulk jobs, however, and the 8500 is a better bet for that. The larger "XL" ink cartridges last a decent amount of time for an ink jet, but as I am used to a color laser printer, they seem to go very quickly to me. We keep spare cartridges on hand so that we do not run out just before a big event. Office Depot will issue credit for used cartridges returned for recycling, so we go in every so often to exchange them and this is much easier (and more reliable) than refilling the cartridges by hand. There are no 3rd party cartridges for this beast that we have found. Double-sided printing either works perfectly or not at all, seemingly dependent on the document. The driver seems to depend on an even-odd numbering in the document that it can understand. If your document uses an odd numbering (e.g. Circus and Ponies Notebook http://www.circusponies.com/ can number pages by section: 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-1, etc.), the printer will just print the front sides of the pages. With a bit of tweaking, you can sometimes save a printed document as PDF and then open it in Adobe or another program to tweak the page numbering, then send it to a printer. This is worthwhile in large documents but obviously not for everyday circumstances. The upside of this is that if you have a PDF which contains several documents stitched together (using Combine PDFs http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml or similar utility), the printer likes to start a new document on a new page which is usually what you want. When it does decide to print double-sided, the first side will be printed, come half-way to the output tray, get gripped by a set of claws, then be retracted into the double-sided feeder to print the other side. The printer pauses to let the first side dry before retracting the page so that the ink does not smear. This greatly slows down printing but improves the output quality considerably. It seems to know to adjust the pause time according to paper settings in the print dialog, so be sure to set these if using special paper (e.g. glossy presentation paper). This is kind of cool to watch the first few times. As mentioned above, output is crisp and clear. especially with quality paper and the quality ink settings. We use it to print double-sided business cards that are quite a bit better than what we were able to get with the color-laser printer. The color saturation is much better and more professional looking. I was surprised at this. True to advertising, the printing is generally quite resistant to water and smearing, depending on choice of paper. - The Front Display/Hardware Features The front display is well-organized, letting you have access to the major features without having to deal with deeply-nested menus and three-little buttons on other printers. You can copy, print, fax, and scan from the front panel (if I could get scanning to work that way), as well as printing photos directly off of a memory card (there are two slots in the bottom-right for memory cards). There is a bottom paper tray, an extensible output tray (I keep flipping the end tab down accidentally and it spews paper onto the floor...), and a separate document feeder for fax or scanning. The scanner is a full-page flatbed scanner. The top of the printer flips up for interior access and swapping cartridges is very easy. The print head is a removable component. As this is a common point of failure for ink jets, this makes the printer more durable and potentially longer lasting. The printer has external ports for USB, 10/100 ethernet, and the memory card slots. The wireless is 802.11b/g and works well with the Macintosh. I have no idea how much RAM it has, but fairly large documents transfer smoothly and quickly, once you get the bloody thing to wake up from sleep. The printer is lightweight, compact, but seems reasonably durable (I am not going to drop it to find out just how durable...). Paper loading seems reliable and jams are uncommon. Conclusion/Summary Overall, we are quite pleased with our purchase. The network/sleep problem is the biggest negative issue, followed by quirkiness with the double-sided printing. But good-quality output at relatively economical per-page cost lets us do quite a bit we would normally have professionally printed. We have even experimented with printing elegant gift boxes for Cathi's jewelry (she makes lamp-work beads) and specialty soap out of card stock. When we do get something professionally printed, we can experiment with it ourselves first and know exactly what we want when we go to the printer (with good CMYK color matching). The fantastically low-power consumption and DC option makes it perfect for a rural farm/off-grid situation. Copying and scanning is just added gravy. I would definitely recommend this machine to others looking for a versatile small business device.

I have been trying to get set up with a decent PayPal alternative. I don't think we will ditch PayPal, especially since we still use ebay now and then (though less than we used to), but I want to offer customers more choices. There are some odd things that PayPal forbids, like buying anything associated with guns and ammunition (legal or otherwise). Many of the rural customers we do business with do buy ammunition online (through, say, Gun Broker http://www.gunbroker.com/ auctions) and that tends to mean that they use something other than PayPal. If you have livestock, I don't care what your moral viewpoint is, guns are simply a reality. It is my responsibility to protect my animals. So, we got started with e-gold http://blog.e-gold.com/ a couple of years ago. Given the volatility of the dollar and the increase of people using junk silver (see http://thestatesmen.org/index.php/food-androunds-in-trade), etc., for local trade, it had some appeal to be able to price transactions in terms of silver and know that the money stored in the system was backed by a stable commodity. I also liked the fact that it was much harder for a cranky customer to get your account frozen or get charge-backs just because you won't give them something for nothing. PayPal, on the other hand, vendors can get sucked into very messy disputes over just about nothing. I do not mind refunding a customer's money for legitimate problems, but I expect them to go through the motions of working things out before they escalate the issue. Anyway, e-gold got shut down temporarily about the time we started using them because of legal problems. The US government claimed they were a 'bank' and should be regulated as one. There were claims that people were misusing the system to launder money. So, we set e-gold on the back burner and waited for that to get sorted out. Finally they started doing business again but had much stiffer requirements for getting and activating the account. We started putting the paperwork together to go through their hoops and kept getting it rejected for one reason or another: the scan of this was not clear enough; they did not like the document I sent for verification of address; etc. Since it was not a priority, we would try and fail, wait several months, try again, fail, and so forth. Often new requirements would be added between attempts and we'd have to start over. Well, finally this last month we got through verifying our identity, our address, and our business with them and got our account activated. Yay! Now they cannot operate in Missouri (where we are) because of another legal snafu. Their site security is very stringent (flagging when you try to connect from different IPs, for instance) but not necessarily smart. We have satellite Internet, and their security flags our connection almost every time because where our connection comes from changes quite often. So we need to receive a PIN by email, feed that into the web site and jump through hoops on EVERY login. Yet, they do not use simpler security methods such as client-side certificates which could bypass the whole mess. The newest thing is that they reserve the right to change their verification methods at any time and, if you are not quick enough to suit them in complying (perhaps because it is only a secondary payment system for you and you do not login every day), they can freeze your account and charge exorbitant fees. So, anyway, it has come down to the point where I finally have their account set up (but they won't let me use it) and the payment method setup on my website and I just don't know that it is worth it. I very much like the concept of e-gold and want to like their service, but between some bad choices on their part and a lot of idiocy on the part of our government, it just is not worth the effort. So now I am back to shopping around for a good alternative system. But, because of the same legal issues that e-gold faced, many of the good alternatives do not operate in the US. I am exploring LibertyReserve http://www.libertyreserve.com/index.html right now and trying to figure out what it would take to buy and sell using it. A less-regulated, low-fee, "digital currency" is what our more independent, homestead-minded, customers want. They don't trust big companies whose service agreements say that your money can be seized by them if they feel that, maybe, you might have broken a rule on page 231, sub-paragraph B of the user agreement they changed last week (and who have direct access to your bank account to charge against), We will probably also explore another online payment system similar to PayPal with built-in dispute resolution, and simply charge a touch more for it, maybe back it by a separate bank account to restrict the hanky-panky which could go on. What do people feel about alternate payment systems of that kind? Which ones are the least bother to set up, have the most reasonable service agreements, and that customers use?

I am one of those authors people think words come easy for, but I go through the same process of revision that you do. I have a paper I wrote a bit ago that ended up at 31 drafts for about four pages. And yes, sometimes even the final draft has mistakes, but one of the useful tricks is just to have someone else read it over before you submit. After you have been staring at the same text for a few hours, you cannot see the mistakes anymore, no matter how good you are with spelling, grammar, or style. Someone else looking at it often sees those mistakes right away just because their mind is fresh. When writing a tutorial in particular, it is critical to make sure someone other than you can understand the directions. That is the whole point, isn't it? So, ask your spouse, girl or boyfriend, roommate, or alien overlord to look over your shoulder or email it to someone for comment before submitting a major work. With tutorials, another test is to let it sit until the next time you have to do the same task. Then take it out and follow it exactly as you wrote it. Does it still make sense to you? Your mind may be fresh enough at this point that the mistakes will jump out at you. Another often overlooked thing is that you can also edit *after* you submit. Xisto lets you edit your own posts, so, after you have rewritten the piece twelve times and it still has one last typo, you *can* still correct it. Quite a few sites have this feature now. Just don't try to use it to game the point system or I think Opaque might get a bit testy. Anyway, I don't think we should shoot people who have typos in their posts or occasional bad grammarâ no one is perfect. But good writing is something worth striving for and continually improving.

I am using Apple Mail on a Macintosh, but the problem is reproducible by just telnetting to the port. The problem is that many ISPs block port 25 which is supposed to be for internetwork mail. SASL (authenticated mail) is supposed to run on 587 which is not typically blocked. My current dialup provider blocks port 25, but my broadband provider does not (yet). I am concerned that my broadband provider will block the port in the future. I guess I will blow up that bridge when I come to it.

Update: It looks like it works fine on port 25, but port 587 is not open on delta. Can this be fixed? I have had problems with port 25 and my ISP. Thanks.

I just upgraded mistymanor.astahost.com to a paid account. Since the upgrade, outgoing mail is not working.Specifically, for mistymanor.astahost.com, using mail.mistymanor.astahost.com with eric@mistymanor.astahost.com as the username, 587 for the port number, and the appropriate password, sending mail from Apple Mail on OS X 10.4.8 fails. This account worked prior to the changeover. Incoming mail still works.I have tried using "mistymanor.astahost.com" (dropping the "mail.") as the mail server. I have tried with/without SSL. I have tried sending the message with SquirrelMail from cpanel (no errors, but message never arrives). I have tried using "eric+mistymanor.astahost.com" as the username as well.No other function on the site seems to be affected (Great job, folks; if this is the only problem after changing servers, I'm happy).

I have used JEdit for a long time. It is a Java-based editor with good platform customization and a lot of useful plugins (you can extend it with either Java or scripts of various types). It works on any machine (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc), so it made it easy to switch back and forth. The HTML, XML, CSS, etc., plugins do syntax highlighting, it has a preview option, completion, and so forth. It also has plugins for just about any other language so it is a one-size-fits-all editor. The editor I use most of the time is AquaEmacs, which is a Mac-specific version of GNU emacs. GNU emacs also runs on every platform. Emacs, like JEdit, has a number of "modes" for editing different types of files. It is very powerful, but not necessarily for the faint of heart. There are a number of books about using emacs both fro beginners and emacs. It is one of the oldest and most improved editors in existence.

For a basic web app? Depending on how much data, I might recommend Postgres. It has some higher end features than MySQL, including better parallel query support, data constraints, stored procedures, failover and replication. Oracle has a lot of administration overhead to say nothing of the cost. You have to make sure that price is worth it. Just MySQL can handle quite a bit.

It's also an exploit for a flaw which has already been fixed. Half the reason that OS X is safeer is that the turn-around time for patches is very fast. Linux distributions tend to be in the same boat. When I was administering a bunch of RedHat machines, the CERT warnings for a vulnerability usually had a link to the patch for RedHat Linux while MS or Sun would take weeks or months to make the same fix. The other thing is that I have had one issue with an OS X point upgrade since 10.1.x, whereas MS' patches often break apps and cause general havoc. This tends to be true of the RedHat Fedora Core updates as well, although I do not understand why: there is no systematic integration tetsing for point releases. Anyway, the point is that nothing is completely safe, but little differences in process make a huge difference to security. I get tired of people jumping on every flaw as if it made OS X the same as Windows.

In my experience, it is really tough to edit CSS with a WYSIWYG editor. The whole point of CSS is t separate data and display. You have to go back and forth with specifying ids in the html and the styles in the CSS. Most WYSIWYG editors will just change the style in the html. Besides, how does the editor know whether to change the style for that instance, all instances of its class, type, or whatever? JEdit has good support for highlighting and syntax checking of CSS and it has a preview function to show you what it looks like in the browser. It is Java based and cross-platform. The CSS support is in a downloadable module.