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STOP: read this first! Common Mac issues...

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    STOP: read this first! Common Mac issues...

    We have grouped some useful information about Macs in this post. This avoids you to search for it the FAQ section. If you have any problem, you should first look here for help.

    Supported Mac OS & browser combinations.

    Mac OS X :
    • Safari 1.2 or higher
    • Opera 7.54 or higher
    • Firefox 1.0 or higher
    • Netscape 7.2 or higher


    Mac OS 9.2.2 :
    • Mozilla 1.2.1


    Important : Other browsers under Mac OS 9 will NOT work! OS versions below 9.2.2 are NOT supported. For your convenience we have provided a copy of Mozilla for download.

    How about Microsoft Internet Explorer?

    Internet Explorer for Macs has not been supported by either Apple or Microsoft for many years. It has therefore not been upgraded while new developments in web technology have advanced. As our site uses cutting edge technology in some of its design, IE for Macs no longer cuts the mustard.

    To view our site correctly, you need a modern browser. We recommend Safari or Firefox, some have suggested Camino and Opera. They are free to download, and are much better browsers than IE in all ways, including increased security, greater usability, and they are constantly kept up to date with newer web developments. You will not regret this change.

    About log on and identification

    To be able to log on to our site your browser must be set to accept cookies because the identification system is cookie based.
    Javascript must be enabled.

    These settings can be accessed by your browser's Preferences menu and are normally located in the "advanced" or "security" part of the dialog.

    Videos, streaming, file format.

    When you click on a video link in Safari, expecting the video to playback on Quicktime 7, and instead you get a question mark and nothing seems to happen, that's a bug in the early QT 7 versions (till 7.0.1 included), in the latest release QuickTime 7.0.2 the problem is solved and the videos play fine within Safari and all other browsers (tested).

    Anyway, streaming our videos is not recommended, as we do not use proper streaming servers, they are file servers only. We suggest always downloading the videos and watch them locally. Downloading the video files is very easy, just ctrl-click on the link and select "Save linked file..." from the pop-up menu.

    Actually our videos are MPEG-1 encoded. They play fine with QuickTime player, and any other media player like Qpict, iView, and others.

    The videos are available also in the Windows WMV format. To play these videos, you'll need Windows Media Player 9 for Mac, available for free download at the Microsoft website. Unfortunately only the Mac OS X version is able to play our WMV videos.

    If you prefer to stay with your QuickTime Player, you may use the Flip4Mac plug-in that is available for free.

    Download manager.

    If you are having problems maintaining extended downloads, or if you are on dial-up and you want to download our larger files overnight, for example, then you are wise to use a Download Manager.

    These are applications that provide a feature called Keep-Alive, which should maintain an open connection and continuous download that overrides any unexpected interruption, and also can resume interrupted downloads should you be disconnected midway through (some can even re-dial your ISP if the connection drops out).

    When you set up your DLM, please note these points:
    • First, you MUST log into the site and check the "remember me" box - without this, the required cookie will not be set.
    • Your download manager needs to be configured to accept cookies from your default web browser (they may do this by default)
    • Your web browser may need to be set to explicitly allow cookies from us (more info on this on our cookies help page.


    Download Deputy, Speed Download & iGetter are not bad, apparently, and each seem to be pretty similar to each other. They all have many useful features and attractive logical interfaces.

    About zip files.

    A zip file is a collection of (in this case) picture files, in one convenient-to-download package. So, if you prefer to look at pictures on your own computer in your own time (we recommend this), you might find downloading 200 pics at a time easier than saving each individual image, one by one.

    These zip archives need to be unpacked to get access to the contents. On Mac OS 9 you'll need a small application like Stuffit Expander to unpack your archive. The zip unpack function is a built-in feature in Mac OS X.

    By the way, all the images you see in the galleries are included in the zip files.

    Lxm

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