Getting set up

Yesterday I purchased a Logitech 9000 webcam for my Macintosh Powerbook laptop. Although on the package, it listed only the windows operating system, it worked great on my Mac, but beware..your operating system should be Tiger or higher. Check the following website to see which webcam will work for you. http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/ and download Macam. Macam contains drivers for various supported webcams on the Mac. Restart your computer, plug in the USB and the video will start within seconds! It is amazing to talk to people that you can see and for free too!

This morning Dariusz, our grad assistant, Joanie and I tried to get Skype and the webcam to work on a 500 megahertz mac laptop. This is the speed of the processor and this old laptop is really slow! The results were pretty bad with interrupted speech and pixelating images. You really need to have at least an 800 Mhz machine to get Skype to work effectively.

We launched my new website today. Visit it at http://webspace.ship.edu/jrruby
Joanie put a tremendous amount of work into the development of this site. I am so pleased with the results!

Less than three weeks remain until I start my journey to Taiwan. I am definitely getting overwhelmed with stuff that must be done before I leave...

Informaion on Skype

The information for downloading Skype is on the left of this writing. This morning Joanie and I Skyped her boyfriend, Jim. The video was totally cool and we could see a sleepy Jim plus a shot of Joanie and me sitting in my office. If you are working on a Mac the video camera on the new machines is built in. If you want to purchase one, you will find that the webcams at Staples or Office Max may not say that they are compatible with the Mac, but many are. Suggested webcams include Apple iSight, Philips SPC900NC, or Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000. A list of webcams, drivers and more are included in the Skype Mac site. Video and call quality may vary greatly in environments with conditions below these recommendations.

The minimum system requirements for Skype 2.5 for Mac or later are a Mac OS X v10.3.9 Panther or newer, G4 800 Mhz and above, any G5 or any Intel processor, 512MB RAM, 40 MB free disk space on your hard drive and a microphone. IBM based systems require 1000 Mhz or 1 GIG of Mhz to run correctly.

Click on the Skype downlaod link on the blog. Make sure to drag the Skype application into the Applications folder on the dialog box window (not into the system application folder) and Skype will distribute the files where they go for you.

If you have trouble there is a huge help line and the tech support will respond quickly to specific questions.
Good luck and see you online!
Prof Ruby