And So the School Year Begins . . .

The Meyer Tech Desk is proud to offer our users an array of new services and equipment under our new checkout program for the school year.

The Tech Desk's Hottest New Toys

Projectors - We have Dell m409WX projectors for equipment checkout. They may be small and cute, but they pack a lot of punch too! Each projector comes with an AC power adapter and a VGA cable in a nifty carrying bag. These projectors also have an HDMI port and project in beautiful widescreen. Suitable for class presentations and dorm movie nights!

High-Definition Camcorders - We now stock Canon Vixia HV30 Camcorders which will record in stunning 1080i HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels). These are not for the faint of heart! With great quality comes great storage-eating capabilities. A project recorded in HD will take up four times as much disk space as regular DV footage, so beware. (One hour of HD footage will take about 50GB of space.) Most users only need our normal camcorders, so you must ask specifically for HD if you need it.

And finally, after Kenneth demonstrated this cute little device over a year ago. . .

Mini-Camcorders - We have Flip Video Ultra VGA Camcorders. They record at VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels), as compared with the 720x480 resolution you get with the standard miniDV camcorders we offer. However, These Flips are pocket-sized and can be directly plugged into the USB port of any computer for file transfer! How cool is that? Ask us for a demo.



The New Deal: The Meyer Tech Desk Checkout Policies 2008

Ever needed a camcorder for more than a day, but had to turn it in because of the one-day only checkout policy? We now offer Extended Checkouts!

Anything you checkout normally from the Tech Desk is still due back by closing time of the next business day. However, now if you want to rent it for longer, you can pay up front for an Extended Checkout. It's $10/day for each piece of equipment you need beyond the initial free day, so plan carefully! Overdues will be result in a $15 fee per day per item.

Example: Qianwen wants to checkout a Flip Video Camcorder for her ski trip to Lake Tahoe. She checks out the camcorder on Friday morning, and won't be back on campus until Monday. She gets one free day (Friday to Saturday) and then pays $20 up front for Sunday and Monday. If she did not pay for an Extended Checkout, she would be fined $15 per overdue day, resulting in $30 of fines by the time she returns the equipment.

Next week, we'll be introducing some new faces at the Meyer Tech Desk. Stay tuned!

Why is everything crashing?!

Every so often it happens that a visibly flustered patron comes up to desk and complains that the cluster Mac she's been using is extremely slow and programs are crashing on it left, right and center. In nine out of ten cases, this is because said patron's AFS space, i.e., the meager 200 megabytes of online storage Stanford provides to students (in 2008!), is full, which usually causes Macs to go completely haywire. So, if your Mac is going haywire because your AFS is full and you want to find out how to clean it up to recover space, follow the instructions below.

The Finder Way

The first step is to log on to a Mac, open a Finder window and click on your home folder in the sidebar (unless you're already there). Most Macs open Finder windows in Icon View by default and you will need to switch to Column View, either by using the keyboard shortcut Command-2 or by clicking the icon in the toolbar, in order to see where all the space is being taken up. After doing that, the Finder window should look something like this:

Of course, the problem here is that, since everything is a folder, all the file sizes come up as "--", so we still don't know where all the space is going! This is easily remedied by selecting Show View Options from the View menu and checking the "Calculate all sizes" box. Finder should now start calculating the size for each folder one by one. The last thing to do would be to sort the list by the Size column by clicking on it, so that you can quickly locate the culprit taking up the most space, like this:

Also, if you want to see what files within a certain folder are taking up the most space, instead of double-clicking on the folder, click on the arrow to the left of its name, which will open it up within the same view, like this:


The Terminal Way
As it turns out for a lot of tasks, there is often a faster way to do something if you use the command-line, so if you're comfortable using the Terminal on the Mac or SecureCRT on Windows, here's a command that lists all the files and folders inside the current folder with their total sizes: du -hs *

Using the du command, the output looks something like this on the same home folder you saw in examples above:


And just a quick reminder - checking AFS space on Macs is simple with Joe's App. Alternatively just open terminal and type in "fs lq."

Happy Spring Cleaning!