Slowing Down the Mac Mouse
Luke. Rome, NY

Q: I recently bought a Powerbook. Having used Windows for the last 10 years, I am very used to not having mouse acceleration. With OS X I find myself constantly overshooting/undershooting my target. The mouse acceleration seem to be in overdrive. When I get close to my target, I tend to slow down and OS X transforms this into a major slowdown. Is there anyway to disable mouse acceleration on OS X? I’ve tried Mousezoom by Ben Hines. While this let me speed up the cursor, it didn’t touch the acceleration problem.

Gosh, I haven’t felt the need for any additional control of the Mac mouse. Ben Hines pref pane is a good edition at http://homepage.mac.com/bhines/mousezoom.html , or you might want to look at the Apple beta driver at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12198.

Designing Desktop Themes
Chuck. Kahnawake Mohawk Territory

Q: I was hoping you could help me, as all of your software recommendations to date have all been winners. I’m running XP at the office and 2000 at home and am looking for an application which would allow me to create new custom desktop themes using culturally relevant icons, audio files, wallpaper images, etc… I’m a multimedia technician, so creating the image and audio files is no problem, I’m mostly interested in finding a template that I could load them into and then package them use amongst my friends and family. My hope is to create desktop themes that I can create and modify to reflect the local cultural calander (harvest time, planting season, mid-winter, etc..)

I would visit ThemeXP.org and check out the "make your own" page. They link to software you’ll find very useful. You might also want to check out the more sophisticated capabilities of Windows Blinds, too. For other enhancement programs, take a look at http://stardock.com/

Capturing Date and Time from DV Cameras
Miguel. La Mirada, CA

Q: Is there a good DVD capture software that allows you to capture date and time stamps when capturing video and audio from a Mini DV tape? Pinnacle, Sonic, and Unlead software don’t seem to have this capability. Please help!

It’s not a software issue. Your camera has to send out the information - many don’t. You should check the options carefully (see below for the steps on a Sony). You may have to use the analog outputs of your digicam. Or use the software to put time code into your video.

On a Sony TRV460:
Set "DATA CODE" menu item to "DATE/TIME"
Set "DISPLAY" menu item to "V-OUT/PANEL"
Exit the menu.
Press "DISPLAY" button on remote control to make all the extraneous camera information disappear.