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G4 ibook motherboard fault.
Apparently there is a problem with some G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or so in some machines. After being on for a few minutes, they get a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. This article describes the problem and how to fix it.
This hint is not strictly Macintosh, but it’s so good I have to write it up. Did you know you can get what they call a Continuous inking system (CIS) for most big name inkjet printers? It continually feeds the ink into the printer so you don’t have to change the cartridges! You can see the big containers of ink in the photo above - they sit next to the printer.
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If you’ve got an Aluminium Powerbook, they are a great machine, my personal favourite laptop, but after a few years the hinge can get a little loose. Thankfully this is not like the old Titanium powerbooks where the hinge was broken, it is just a matter of a few screws that need to be tightened! Here’s how to do it.
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I’ve been playing round with getting good quality compressed speech.
Here’s what I’ve found.
1. SMALLEST FILE SIZE ACCEPTABLE QUALITY.
For very small file size (4MB for 20 minutes) and acceptable quality,
use the LAME encoder (the the separate article on Itunes songs to find out about the LAME encoder) with the following arguments in the ‘Encoding options’ Box:
-V 9 –vbr-new -mm -h -q 0
2. An even better option than above but slightly more complicated is:
Firstly convert the file to 22khz sample rate and mono, (eg in Audacity)
then use the following LAME settings:
-V 8 –vbr-new -h -q 0
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Last year I bought 5 non-working ipods from ebay and fixed up 4 of them. It was not to hard, but there was a couple of tricks. I’ve finally found some time to write up the hard bits, just in case anyone is interested, so here goes. This is not for you to try at home, lest you break your ipod! Continue Reading…