Past Meetings
March 17, 2008
Attending: Bob S, Jerry L, Nancy C, Joe Y, Tom B and Bob G.
Topic: CD/DVD - Burning Questions
Most of the meeting revolved around a technical presentation
by Jerry, about the designing and manufacturing of a CD disc. In years past,
Jerry was the mastering engineer for Kodak, in charge of putting in the master/stamper
manufacturing facility, making the stampers for CD-Rs, and was very involved
in the design, testing and specification of the Kodak CD-Rs. He more than answered
our questions about CD, DVD and Blu-Ray. Before Jerry gave his presentation
on disc creation, most of us knew very little about CDs, other than they are
flat, round and shiny. After the presentation, we knew there was a whole lot
more. See some of Jerry's slides here.
He filled in a lot of the blanks around the technical information on the slides.
Most of us could identify with the blank spaces fairly well. : ) Jerry cut a
CD with a knife so that we could all see and touch how extremely thin is the
reflective layer on the clear disc. Amazingly, it is the clear part of the plastic
disc that is altered in stamping / burning rather than the shiny reflective
layer. One serious point of discussion that arose was, in terms of durability,
just how much of our precious memories and history do we want to commit to discs
and formats that may not be retrievable by future hardware. One solution might
be to start converting your most precious historical and family records into
printed hardcover books that can be retrieved by your two hands
and eyeballs. The price is more affordable everyday as digital software makes
professional publishing ever less expensive. (See Apple
Books, Lulu, and Blurb.
MUG meeting recorded using Audacity - While Jerry gave his excellent
presentation on CD construction, Tom demonstrated how easy it is to make an
audio recording of a live meeting, using the free software Audacity
in his old iBook G3 with its built-in mic. At the end of the 1 1/2 hour-meeting,
Tom then showed how easy it is to accidentally erase the whole thing if one's
attention is distracted to another conversation. What did we learn? Save first,
talk second.
Additional ways to burn a CD
Using Disk Utility
to burn a Disc Image
Using the Finder
to burn Data Files
Using iTunes
to burn an MP3 CD
Other Discoveries
Nancy recently experienced the spinning beachball of
death on her G4 iBook as she attempted to send a large file via email
(Entourage). The system got stuck in mid-send and became unresponsive. Forcing
a power down (control+command+power)
and rebooting would restore the system until Entourage was launched, whereby
the Beachball reactivated. The solution was to reboot, then with system restored,
hold down the SHIFT key while launching Entourage. This action
cancels the original 'send email' command so that you can go to the outbox and
delete the stubborn file. This works with Mac Mail as well, and possible other
applications that hang.
To view more highlights of Past Meetings, link to H'PORTMUG homepage .
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