Odds & Ends

USB keyboard Shift key glitch Carl Manaster noted an odd quirk with the USB keyboard that comes with iMacs and G3/BW Macs. I doubt most people will ever trip over it, but I can confirm that the quirk exists: Press and hold one of the two Shift keys. Next press and hold the other one. Finally, release the Shift key you first pressed. Now type a letter. It will be in lower case rather than the expected upper case.

Road Runner cable modem message board and login client Jim Lauren informed us of a message board for Mac Road Runner users and of an alternate Road Runner Login Client for the Macintosh from Xorsis.

Office 2000 files don't work in Word 98 for the Mac? Geoff Roden reports: "If a Windows user saves a file in the new Office 2000 (beta) file format, it won't open in Word 98 for Mac." In fact, on his Mac, it crashed the machine.

Update: Allen Carter claims that this is not normally the case: "In my experience (eight months of use), Office 2000 files behave just like Office 97 files when opened on a Mac. The problem may have to do with bad macro code, or even a macro virus, but it's certainly abnormal behavior."

VST floppy drive driver issue? Regarding VST's USB floppy drive, Sarah Roberts writes that there have been two iterations of the drive, requiring two different drivers. She received the Teac version of the drive and an appropriate driver for it (Teac USB FD 1.1). She then went to the VST Technology web site to check for any more recent versions. A file called USB Updater 1.2 was listed. It was the only file listed for this drive. However, Sarah claims that this updater is only for the the first iteration of the drive and will not work for the Teac drives. However, this was not indicated in the ReadMe file for the Updater.

OmniPage and HP scanners: another follow-up Regarding our series of posts on possible problems using OmniPage with HP scanners, readers continue to offer solutions. Charles Conway had success by downgrading to an older version of the scanner driver. Steve Reubart found that switching to ScanTastic was the answer.

Acrobat 4.0 and GlobalFax glitch? Chris Katz claims that PDF files opened with Acrobat 4.0 could not be faxed using his GlobalFax 2.6.5 software. He got a system freeze when hitting Save. Opening the same document in Acrobat Reader 3.01, and trying to fax again, succeeded.

AppleShare Get Info glitch? Todd Jensen states that when running AppleShare IP 6.x, if he puts more than 16 characters in the Get Info comments of a file and copies it to the server, all Get Info text is lost except for the first 16 characters. [Oops! Thomas Juntunen reminds me that we covered this issue last November. Further, according to a posting on the ASIP mailing list, it should be fixed in Mac OS 8.5.]

G*Rack is a "quick and easy 19" rackmount solution for the G3/BW. Simply remove the four corner handles, attach G*Rack, and rackmount the entire tower."

1984 Online Magazine is a monthly ezine devoted to the Mac.

No Wonder! answers tech support questions. They inform me that their turn-around is now down to about 30 minutes to 6 hours.

TIL articles on QuickTime 4.0 Apple has posted an assortment of new TIL articles on QuickTime 4.0 (see 4/30/99 listing). Most (if not all) of the troubleshooting-relevant info has already been covered in our MacFixIt Report on QuickTime 4.0.

QuickTime 4 version of Star Wars trailer There is now a QuickTime 4 version of the Phantom Menace movie trailer. But you'll probably need around a 300MHz G3 to have decent playback (although some users report success with "lesser" Macs). (Thanks, Fran Carroll.)