Disk

At our family reunion we exchanged many old family photos, which I scanned into my computer and planned to copy onto 3.5-inch disks for each member. Some of my family members have Macs. Can they use the same disks as my Dell with Microsoft programs? The answer is a blissful yes. Almost all Macs in service can read Windows-formatted disks. So all you have to do is save those pictures as JPEG format files on that Dell and pass them out to your Mac relatives. You should know, however, that this is a one-way street, because Microsoft has never deigned to reciprocate by building Mac compatibility into its floppy disk formats.

Surveyors need them, but hikers crave them. Bench marks, those 3-inch metal disks embedded in the rocky tops of many mountain summits, are the second thing many hikers seek when they reach the top (after they take in the view). When accompanied by the obligatory thumbs-up summit photo, the bench mark proves a hiker's mettle while also supplying pertinent information: longitude, latitude and altitude. No one has a precise count on the number of bench marks in this country. The best guess is more than 3 million, hammered into rocks, buildings and bridge abutments by a number of federal, state and local agencies.

Hard disks are about to transform music in the same way they're beginning to remake television - by giving us total control. The most important piece of new personal technology introduced last year, in my less-than- humble opinion, was the personal video recorder, or PVR. Using hard disks nearly identical to those found inside personal computers, PVRs perform several incredible tricks - such as "pausing" live broadcasts and recording one show while playing...

How can I transfer someone's desktop background to my computer desktop background? Your short question requires a longish answer, but you'll soon be able to dress up your desktop with an endless variety of images. You can use a floppy disk to move the picture on somebody else's PC desktop onto your machine. First, find the picture. With the cursor on the desktop of your friend's machine, right-click the mouse and choose Properties. A box will come up with the name of whatever file is being used as the background picture highlighted.

Did you hear the one about the stressed-out fellow who rang tech support looking for the "Any" key because his computer ordered him to "Hit any key?" How about the seamstress who set up her new PC with the mouse under the desk because she thought it was a foot pedal? Or the caffeine addict who called to complain that his cup holder was broken. You know, the one that slides out of your computer-- If these sound like urban legends of the Digital Age, spend an evening with James Copeland, an 18-year-old tech support staffer at Absolute Quality Inc. in Hunt Valley.

PHILADELPHIA -- Forget andro. Mark McGwire's real secret might be acupuncture."Sometimes, Eastern medicine is better than Western medicine," the philosopher/slugger said last night, smiling.McGwire sat out the St. Louis Cardinals' game against the Philadelphia Phillies with tightness in his lower back, and has now gone a week since his last home run.He said he will receive acupuncture from a chiropractor in St. Louis today, with the Cardinals off after playing seven straight road games on artificial turf.

When Mac users consider software they absolutely must have, a disk repair utility should top everyone's list.A disk repair utility is a program that diagnoses, and ideally, fixes your computer's hard drive when it starts doing odd things on a regular basis. The symptoms -- icons disappearing, persistent crashes and freezes, disk drives that refuse to mount, error messages you've never seen before.Unlike some other Mac software categories, disk repair utilities offer users a choice.For many basic problems, Apple's Disk First Aid will do the job. Certainly the price is right-- Disk First Aid has long been included with the Mac OS, so you should have it on your hard drive.

If you think black history is just about slavery and Martin Luther King Jr., think again.Microsoft's Encarta Afri-cana puts the software giant's popular electronic encyclopedia format to outstanding use in a comprehensive, fascinating volume on Africa and people of African descent.It offers more than 3,000 articles and 2,000 photos, videos, maps and charts. Video clips include several 360-degree views, and there is a text-to-speech reader for the visually impaired.The two-CD volume was edited by Harvard University professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Orioles pitcher Scott Kamieniecki had surgery yesterday morning to remove a herniated cervical disk in his neck and part of the sixth vertebra in his spine. The 90-minute procedure was done by Dr. Henry Bohlman at University Hospital of Cleveland.Once the disk was removed, Bohlman took a bone graft from Kamieniecki's left pelvic area and tapped it into the vertebra.Kamieniecki, who went on the disabled list for a third time Aug. 22, could return to his home in Flint, Mich., as early as today.

International Business Machines Corp. plans to announce today that it has developed an ultra-small, 1-inch disk drive aimed at the explosively growing market for hand-held computers and consumer appliances such as digital cameras and digital cellular telephones.The drive, which will not be available commercially until mid-1999, is particularly striking because it is intended to fit into the same flash memory chip slots that are now standard in digital cameras and other consumer devices.The new drive will store about 5 billion bits of information a square inch, weigh about half as much as a golf ball and store as much as 340 megabytes of information -- the equivalent of about 300 hefty novels.