Odds & Ends: Ultra drives and G3/BW Macs; Serial Port Monitor crash fix?; Canvas 7

Cinema Display sold out The Apple Store reveals that, while there is now only a predicted 7 day wait for iMacs and G4 Macs, the G4 Mac and Cinema Display combination has been suspended until January!

Ultra ATA drives and G3/BW Macs: a conflict? Jeff Lucia was unable to get Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA ST320430A drives to work in G3/BW Macs. The problem did not occur with the same drives and the same formatting software when the drives were attached to AGP G4 Macs. As a result, Jeff believes there is some hardware conflict between the drives and G3/BW Macs. FWB Tech Support confirmed this conclusion.

Update: Rob Huigsloot adds: "I've had this drive installed on a G3/BW as a master and a Maxtor/66 as slave. No problems. The trick if you're using a slave is to format the disk with Hard Disk SpeedTools and to lower the UDMA setting to 1 instead of 2. If there's no slave involved, it should work with Drive Setup or FWB's HDT at UDMA mode 2 without any problems."

Another reader adds: "We've been installing a few of the ST320430A 'Cudas invarious machines, and while we can report complete success with most, we do have one rev. B G3/BW Mac that has been returning errors."

Serial Port Monitor and Keyspan USB adapter crash fix? Regarding our previous report of crashes "linked to the Serial Port Monitor of Palm Desktop software that might only occur if you were using the Keyspan USB PDA adapter," George Tiffin describes a work-around for a similar symptom with his Keyspan USB Twin Serial Adapter: "I reinstalled the Keyspan software and checked the configurations in the Keyspan USB-28X Manager control panel. I then disabled this control panel and restarted (leaving 'Keyspan USB-28X Serial Assistant' untouched in Control Panels and 'KeyUSA28XDrvr' untouched in Extensions). So far everything works fine."

Canvas 7.0 has been announced. From a Deneba press release: "SpriteEffects technology tops a list of over 150 new features and enhancements contained in this major upgrade. For the first time, graphics software users have the ability to apply unlimited image editing filters to any combination of objects &emdash; text, vectors or bitmaps&emdash; while retaining full edibility of the original object. In addition, the new version provides cutting-edge web capabilities..."

MoniSwitchUSB is now shipping. It is a KVM (keyboard, video, and mouse) switch that allows the use of a monitor and USB peripherals with multiple USB capable computers including Macs and PCs.