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ATPM 4.12
December 1998

Color Management

I just picked up the upgrade for Photoshop 5.0. A lot of what I am reading says that dealing with the setup of the ICC profiles can be a pain in the neck. I have an EPSON 700 printer and work mainly with photos for family and friends. Is there something special I need to know or do, and what profile would you recommend?

David Pentz
dpentz@d211.org

The best profile to set in such cases is the actual profile of the specific model of the color printer bought (usually the software comes along with the printer). For even better color management make sure the below points are set.

1—ColorSync System Profile (found in system control panels) set according to your monitor.

2—Profile setup (found in Photoshop settings) set according to the zoomed panel on the left.

3—Print Window (opens when print command is executed) set the space profile according to your printer model.

4—RGB Setup (found in Photoshop settings) set as Apple RGB.
—Jamal Ghandour

Magic Bullets

Magic Bullets is a great system extension that works like some of the FKEYs you describe. (“FKEYs,” ATPM 4.11) I think it’s by the same author as Demogod. It is incredibly useful. What it does is reformat text in the clipboard according to a settings dialog invoked when you press cmd+shift+c. In particular it will remove quotes etc. from e-mail text and reformat according to your wishes. It will also go through text and remove leading spaces and other formatting rubbish that often ends up in the clipboard when you copy text out of a web page. Well worth checking out in my opinion. Let me know if you agree!

Rodney Tamblyn
rtamblyn@xtra.co.nz

FKEYs

I read your article in the recent ATPM (4.11) and was rather impressed with your list of FKEYs.

The Font Suitcase trick is one of my favorites, but sometimes has problems with font manipulating programs, such as ATM, etc.

I would like to add that most resource-loading utilities, such as “SuitCase” and “CarpetBag” have similar abilities to load FKEYs, keyboard layouts, sounds; in short, anything that can be pasted into the System File.

Also, I have a few FKEYs that you didn’t mention.

“The Ripper”, an FKEY that ‘rips’ (to the sound of a sheet of paper being torn in half) your frontmost window in half with a realistically uneven tear line. (Good for concealing the lower part of any window when someone leans over your shoulder to see what you’ve been typing...)

“Flush all volumes” an FKEY that flushes the disk cache, so that the contents are written out to disk immediately, rather than when the volume is unmounted, or the disk cache becomes filled with other items. (Helps to save all changes to disk if you crash later, thereby avoiding the missing-files-that-you-had- saved,
but-weren’t-actually-written-out-of-the-cache-to-disk syndrome—especially useful for ‘completed’ AOL downloads—)

The usual “MacsBug” FKEY, drops you into MacsBug.

An improved MacsBug FKEY, which checks for MacsBug before it executes, and doesn’t execute if MacsBug is not loaded. (I suspect this one of causing some obscure crashes, so removed it)

“Refresher” FKEY, causes your whole screen to be refreshed (for those non-Mac- like applications that stupidly cannot detect _Update events properly, usually ports from Windoze.)

Also (unbeknownst to Apple—Shhh, don’t tell them!), I copied the System 6 Screen shot FKEY into my System 7.5 file, which causes a silent screen dump into a B&W MacPaint file (named ‘Screen X’, where ‘X’ is a number starting at zero up to 9) as a sometime alternative to the usual one. (Sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes the file ends up on a different disk, usually the one that the foreground application is on.)

Note: Most of these I have used for such a long time, I have either forgotten where I got them, or lost the associated documentation that came with the original file(s).

DrTekNik
DrTekNik@aol.com

Using Apple’s Disk Copy

I have read your two most recent postings, and congrats on an excellent source of information. I have a few things to add to some user comments...

I am employed by a large school district with plenty of Macs (about 90 percent) and we are a good ways into installing a District-Wide Network. We have one facility live (the main facility) with two other schools coming online shortly.

The main facility is one of the High Schools and Administration buildings. There are a mix of Wintel and Mac machines (mostly Mac) and we use two products to install software.

On the Wintel side we use Ghost, an excellent hard drive cloning program that allows imaging a hard drive to another local partition/hard drive or save as an Image on a network or other volume.

On the Mac side we use Apple Disk Copy, which makes re-imaging a computer a snap. Here are the details on how I make it work for me.

1. Install software on a machine and configure as needed, test all software and make sure everything works and think through things.

2. Run Disk Copy from either a network volume or Jaz drive.

3. Drag and drop the HD icon onto Disk Copy and save the resulting image onto large HD or network volume as Read-Only/Compressed. Using the Compressed option takes an HFS 1 GB volume and saves it as a 350-400 MB image file but takes some time especially over the network.

Now most people stop here, and if you need to re-image a volume, you boot from a CD, or Jaz drive, mount the image, format the HD and copy the stuff over—but Apple makes a better solution called Apple Software Restore (ASR).

ASR can take several images and allow you to pick and choose which one you want to use. The image files must first be scanned with a Disk Copy Script (provided with ASR) to manipulate the Checksums and CRC to work with ASR; a standard Image file will not work.

I do the following:

1. I created a Jaz drive with an OS 8.1 universal system folder making sure to have the Disk Setup utility and Disk First Aid.

2. I put the ASR folder with a Image file on the Jaz cart and left an alias of the installer out for easy access.

3. I optimize the Jaz cart and as long as the total is under 650 MB I burn a CD (bootable of course).

Now I have a bootable emergency CD. If any computer is messed up I simply boot from the CD, then double click on the alias and I am in ASR with a few options.

I can format the Drive in a variety of ways, I use what format the Image is in. I can choose not to format and copy the system folder only over, everything else, or both.

By leaving it set for formatting and having only one image file I can simply click on Ok, and poof, my HD is formatted and in a few minutes (about 15-20 depending on CD speed and computer speed) I have a fresh HD and can re-boot and re-set up my customized settings in TCP/IP, File Sharing etc.

Although the process of creating the image, optimizing the Jaz drive, and burning a CD (did I mention that I save a CD image from Toast as well, so I can burn more CD’s whenever I need?) take some time, the resulting CD saves a ton of time in the field. Also the resulting saved files for a few images can snag up HD space real quick (at the moment I have about 10 GB worth for 10 or so images) so make sure you have a pretty big HD somewhere. I use a server. Of course once you burn the CD you can always just keep an archive of the CD handy to re-burn as needed so if HD space is an issue, then keep a 2nd freshly burned CD somewhere safe as a backup.

Keep up the good work!!

Michael Perbix
perbix@LMSD.org

We’d love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise at editor@atpm.com. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement about the Macintosh platform in general, that’s ok too.

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