[Chuck Reti]

OP says “unusable” not “unstable.” 🙂

If Microtek has not yet updated its drivers, VueScan, a “Swiss Army Knife” scanner utility, should work as well, and possibly better. Latest update is Leopard-compatible and the Microtek 5700 is suported, plus some 750 others. both old and recent. $39.95 for Standard Edition.
https://www.hamrick.com/vsm.html
—
Chuck Reti
Detroit MI

[Chuck Reti]

When you run the 10.4.11 update, a new version of Safari, v3, is also installed. Safari 3 will exhibit exactly the symptoms you describe if you have non-updated add-ons like AcidSearch, SAFT, etc. that use the SIMBL input manager. Check your main and user /Library/input Managers/SIMBL and slso main and user /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/(name of addon bundle). Move these items out of their folders and try Safari again. I know that AcidSearch has been updated and also installs new SIMBL. These do work OK. Don’t know about other Safari helpers.

Chuck Reti
Detroit MI

[Chuck Reti]

Frequently Asked, Frequently Answered (every other day or so):
MPEG Streamclip Great app, Free.

[Chuck Reti]

[Kathryn Gregorio] “How do you get an umlaut or a tilde using text? I’m trying to title someone with a spanish name and need the forward slash accent symbol. Thank you if anyone knows. “

Open System Preferences>international, select Input Menu tab.
Check “Character Palette” and “Keyboard Viewer” boxes.
Below these, check the “U.S.” box next to the US flag (assuming you’re using US OS X)
Down at the the bottom of the pane, Check “Show input menu in menu bar”

You will now see a tiny US flag in your top menu bar. Click/hold to reveal pulldown menu, which will offer to “show character palette” or “show keyboard viewer”
The keyboard viewer will show what happens when you press a modifier key, like Shift or Option, or Shift plus Option. For example, typing option-e then e gives you an accent e=

[Chuck Reti]

If you can play said files in Quicktime player (QT Pro), try exporting to a format that FCP can understand (NTSC DV, for example) and see if that works. From what I can see at the Metavid and C-span sites, the clips are small (320×240 or smaller), highly compressed, and will probably look nasty at normal video resolution.
I’m using the Perian codec to view these in QT player.

[Chuck Reti]

From Wikipedia
PFM
An abbreviation for Printer Font Metrics, part of a Type 1 font description used by the Microsoft Windows operating system.

PFB
Printer Font Binary, a binary PostScript font format created by Adobe, usually carrying “.PFB” file name extension. It contains a font’s glyph data

FAQ Info at http://www.postscript.org and Adobe tech documents date to 1998 and 1992 respectively so may not be of much help, as they refer to pre-OS X Mac issues.

Suggest finding exactly how your client was able to install and use these fonts on his Mac.

Remember also that FCP will only recognize and use TrueType fonts. Other titling apps and plugs (Boris, for one) are able to deal with Type 1 Postscript fonts.
FontBook should see an actual Postscript Type 1 font, but probably not the pfm or pfb descriptions.

[Chuck Reti]

To move a file from one drive to another without copying just hold down the “command” key while dragging the file to the target drive.
From the Apple.com/support document “OS X Keyboard Shortcuts”:

“Command-Drag Move to new location without copying”

[Chuck Reti]

Look into Linotype’s FontExplorer X. It’s free and quite powerful.

[Chuck Reti]

Just alternate the clips on V1 and V2 with 15fr offsets. Apply fades to the head and tail of V2 tracks (or rubberband opacity). As the other poster mentioned, the iMovie timeline (at least in earlier versions) will automatically adjust for dissolves between full-duration clips. If you’re just doing a simple assembly of selects that might be an easy solution.

[Chuck Reti]

The Mail app doesn’t just “pop up” in Safari or any browser unless you click on a ‘mailto” link.
Is there an alternative mail reader program (Thunderbird, Entourage, etc.) installed on your computer that you’d rather use? If so, open the Apple Mail application, go to Preferences>General, and use the “Default Email Mail Reader” pulldown to choose the one you want as your default.