I want to copy a voice cassette tape recording on to a CD. How do I do it? Dolly, Pok Fu Lam DQ: If you have a lot of tapes or old records that you want to preserve you might want to consider running a system. First, connect your tape player to your computer. There are cables meant for this, so be sure to get the model numbers of your computer and tape recorder (take digital pictures of the ports to the store). After that, you need soft-ware to grab the audio. Audacity, which you can download for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net , works on most systems. Visit www.polderbits.com/cassette-to-cd.html for more tips. On my Windows-based computer, I use Microsoft Word to write messages and then copy and paste them to my e-mail. But when I open them on my Mac, I get two carriage returns at the end of every paragraph, which looks odd and takes up space. How can I fix this? Name and address supplied DQ: You have touched upon one of the oldest computing problems: how should we end a line of text? In the old teletype days, machines needed to be told to create a new line and then they had to be told to go to the far left of the page. This is referred to as a carriage return (CR) and a line feed (LF), which vaguely resemble what happens when you use a typewriter. Computers inherited this action. While the Unix operating system saw that an end-of-line could be just the LF character, the Mac system decided CR was enough. MS-DOS, however, uses both CR and LF. Microsoft Word on the Mac uses LF twice at the end of a paragraph. The way to fix that would be to copy the text into a program such as TextWrangler (free at www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler ), save it with Unix LF, (which is displayed at the bottom of the window), copy it again and then paste it into your e-mail message. But is it worth it? It might be if the text is very long. Whichever way you look at it, it seems like a lot of work is needed to kill a few empty lines.
