SPAUG Newsletter May 2002

SPAUG Editor: John Buck, Co-Editor: Mildred Kohn
SPAUG Publisher/Business Manager: Susan Mueller & Yuko Maye
SPAUG Co-Webmasters: Stan Hutchings & John Sleeman

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Notes from the Prez by Jim Dinkey
  
  
• General Meeting Notes by Stan Hutchings
  
  
• Planning Meeting Notes by Stan Hutchings
  
  
• Managing images  by John Buck
  
  
• Discovering your Hard Drive  by Gene Barlow, User Group Relations
  
  
• Choosing An Image Editor by By Milt Kostner, SIG Leader DISIG
  
  
• Product Review  by By Robert Mitchell
  
  

Notes from the Prez

by Jim Dinkey

N.B. Jim says to keep out of trouble while he's gone. No official Notes this month, but his usual advice to BACKUP! Update your virus program! Install ZoneAlarm, if you haven't yet! Volunteer to help SPAUG!

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24 April General Meeting Notes

by Stan Hutchings

CrossTalk/Random Access

• The new Mid 2002 Club CD is now available. It features current revisions of the important applications like Netscape 4.79, Netscape 6.2, MS IE 6, MS Active X, etc. All files are unzipped and ready to use. Most application folders have a RTF file with a description of what the application does.
  N.B. the WoWN Networking information directory was not unzipped and properly intstalled. The WebSIG has fixed the problem. Anyone who wants a replacement should contact Jim Dinkey. You only need to do this if you have networking questions or problems; if you're not networking computers, you don't need this information; but if you are networking computers, this is an invaluable resource.
• Dick Delp has an ISDN Modem available to whoever wants it.
• To see an email's full header, click the "Blah Blah Blah" button. It has those three words, one above the other, and is located above the message area. If you can't find it, see www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/win_toolbar.html. Eudora is on the Club CD, and is relatively unaffected by the virus and trojan attacks on Microsoft applications. If you are reporting Spam to the FTC or SpamCop, or you want to investigate how the email got to you, you need the full header, accessed by the"Blah Blah Blah" button.
• The EarthLink CD can help connect to the Internet; if you are an EarthLink subscriber, and lose Internet connectivity, try it.
• A surge protector will protect you system at least once from a surge; but subsequent surges may not be stopped because often the surge protector is damaged. It would be best to put a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), such as is available from APC, which filters line power, stops spikes and provides backup power in a blackout.
• ZoneAlarm is recommended for use. Note if you block a site once, you need to unblock it before access will be allowed in the future. ZoneAlarm's help file will explain the procedure.
• If you want to trace an IP address or URL, use American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN.NET)'s WHOIS function at www.arin.net/whois/index.html.
• Milt Kostner talked about papers for use in printers. Try several types and grades, because different printers and inks give different results. Jim Dinkey recommends you go to Kelly Paper Store www.kellypaper.com 4227 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto 94303, near San Antonio Ave (650) 494-1408. They specialize in paper, and will give free samples for you to test. Also consider if you need long-lasting ink, or a cheap grade that might fade after a few years. DISIG meets the third Monday at Coco's Restaurant.
• Based on a report of a fire, it's recommended to turn off and perhaps even unplug (or use a power strip) computer accessories.
• Kudos to the CDOM Team: John Buck, John Sleeman, Jim Dinkey, Stan Hutchings, Robert Mitchell, Dick Delp.
• Backup your computer!

Presentation -- Jan Altman: "Creating Magic from Monotony in Word"

Jan started with a plain "vanilla" text document and showed how to format it into an interesting and engaging layout using Word's powerful formatting capabilities. Some of the techniques demonstrated include:

• customizing menus
• using styles effectively
• sections and columns
• borders and spacing
• bookmarks and hyperlinks
• adding pictures

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1 May Planning Meeting Notes

by Stan Hutchings

Attendees: Jim Dinkey, Dick Delp, John Sleeman, Bev Altman, John Buck, Kendrick Smith, Susan Mueller, Stan Hutchings, Mildred Kohn, Robert Mitchell, Nat Landes.

• Note: The next planning meeting will be at Jim Dinkey's house
• Dick Delp or Milt Kostner, members of both SVCS and SPAUG, will forward email of interest from SVCS to SPAUG, and vice versa. The website will have a link to the SVCS home page (in addition to the link to DISIG).
• Jim Dinkey will try to get Marvin Kraft's contact list, if possible. Marvin did a great job getting us publicized in local newspapers.
• Jim Dinkey needs more help setting up for the General Meeting. Volunteers should plan to start about 7:05 PM.
  John Sleeman and Stan Hutchings will set up the projector, screen, amplifier and laptop.
  Dick Delp and Gene Duncan will escort the speaker/guest.
  Mildred Kohn and Yuko Maye will set up coffee and refreshments.
  Bev Altman and Robert Page will handle membership, sign-in, lottery tickets/door prizes, CD and other sales.
• Bev Altman said there are very few doorprizes left. Robert Mitchell volunteered to talk to Lamont Shadowens about getting some more. Lamont has some, and might be able to get more from Larry Magid.
• According to Nat Landes, our financial situation is stable, and we have a comfortable surplus. The cost of the new laptop was balanced by recent CD sales and membership renewals.
• Mildred Kohn and Bev Altman are our mail pickup team. Mildred is primary, and will let Bev know when to fill in. Our level of mail is low, so every week of so is often enough to check.
• Susan Mueller said 100 copies of PrintScreen are printed, and currently sent to about 85 people. The rest go to Jim Dinkey, who distributes them until the General Meeting, at which time they become available for guests. It might be good to print another 10 or so. John Buck says our Newsletter is pretty full, with the meeting minutes and president's words. Several attendees commented that some of the redundant information could be condensed to make more room. Specific suggestions should be made at the next meeting.
• We got a license to put the whole WOWN website www.wown.info/j_helmig/Contact.htm onto our CD; but when Jim installed it, it didn't work right from the CD. Thus the club CD's published so far are "defective". The CD needs to have the Networking information from WOWN reformatted for the CD. This will be a WebSIG project. Various ways of handling the already-sold CDs were discussed. Probably the best place for such a large file is a CD, so people don't have the long download times, and that's the whole purpose of the CD: to save people download or connect time. The several alternatives proposed included: put the fixed version on our website, fix the CD version and replace the disks sold, create a new CD with the fixed program. Kendric said we couldn't put very much more on our [free] site. So unless someone volunteers a "home", that leaves CD fixes: replace the ones already sold with a fixed WOWN (perhaps by request, because many people aren't interested in networks and the problem becomes moot), or else publish an "addendum" CD with just WOWN on it (again, perhaps only by request). We could link to the original website from the CD, but people would have to be connected to the Internet, and links to the website are plauged by extreme slowdowns.
• Susan Mueller suggested we send our presenters a thank you note. Currently, they are treated to dinner, given a verbal thanks, and given a copy of the club CD.
• Dick Delp announced that Milt Kostner is looking for presenters for DISIG, people to give a short presentation or demo.
• Dick Delp suggested we should expand the RTF "readme" files on the CD. Some of the RTF files are too brief. Reviews of the product, or full installation instructions and advice would be nice. Volunteers are requested to contact Jim Dinkey or Dick Delp to help out with this activity.
• It was suggested that one General meeting, perhaps August, which doesn't yet have a speaker scheduled, could be a series of short presentations or a moderated panel discussion. Possible short topics suggested are: demonstration of the club website; philanthropic uses of your computer (Seti at Home, Stanford Protein Folding); how to choose paper for your print job; [N.B. how to transfer your LP records and tapes to CD; new capabilities of the club laptop].
• A generic General Meeting schedule was discussed, and will depend on whether the speaker wants to go before or after the break:
  • Schedule A - Speaker after Break.
  • 7:05 - volunteers set up equipment, tables and refreshments
  • 7:15 - Startup: registration
  • 7:30 - Call to order; administrivia: announcements, SIG news, introduce guests, etc.
  • 7:35 - (or so, after administrivia) demo of apps on club CD
  • 7:55 - CrossTalk/Random Access Q&A session
  • 8:15 - Break
  • 8:30 - Speaker presentation
  • 9:15 (or so) - Raffle
  • 9:30 (or so) - Shutdown
    
    
  • Schedule B - Speaker before Break.
  • 7:05 - volunteers set up equipment and refreshments
  • 7:15 - Startup: administrivia: announcements, SIG news, introduce guests, etc.
  • 7:30 - Speaker presentation and questions
  • 8:30 - Break
  • 8:45 - demo of apps on club CD
  • 9:00 - CrossTalk/Random Access Q&A session
  • 9:15 (or so) - Raffle
  • 9:30 (or so) - Shutdown
    
    
• We will sometimes have a problem spacing the break evenly between start and end of meeting. We want to maintain flexibility, but have a general program to guide our speakers. The President will get to make the call which discussion(s) to let continue and which to cut short (Administrivia, CrossTalk, Speaker, or Demos). [N.B. I guess we can encourage use of the listserv by announcing further questions should be posted to it when we close CrossTalk.]

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Managing images

by John Buck

I've been looking for a way to manage the many image files (jpg, jpe, gif, bmp etc.) on my PC -- especially to preview them.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a Quick Viewer already on my PC. My OS is Win98SE. This viewer allows me preview single instances of jpg, jpe, and bmp files (and perhaps other types -- but apparently not gif files).

To use the Quick Viewer, select the file in Windows Explorer, then right-click on it. If Quick View has been enabled for that type, your pop-up window should have a "Quick View" line in it -- probably near the top.

To enable quick viewing (starting in Windows Explorer),

1. Select View/Folder Options.../File types.
2. Scroll down the list to find the file type you want to preview.
3. Select that item and click Edit...
4. Select Enable Quick View
5. Repeat as necessary for other file types, clicking OK as necessary, until you're done.

Getting this far was cool, but I wanted more; I wanted a way to preview my gif files, too, so I --

1. Google-searched for < gif viewer >
2. Decided to visit the Computers - Software - Shareware - Windows - Graphics - Viewers and Conversions category at the top of the list
3. Looking at the choices I was being given, I refined my search within that category to be < free gif -trial >; I wanted something free and not a trial version.

Of the three choices I was presented, AhaView seemed the best. I checked out user comments on C|NET and decided to go for the free Version 1.1. There's also a $20 Version 2.0. The program is downloaded as a self-extracting 750 kB exe file; it took about 3 minutes on a dial-up line.

In general, I'm very happy having and using AhaView 1.1. The one disappointment I have with it so far is that it doesn't handle jpe files (although it does handle jpg files - and it does handle gifs).

AhaView displays its information in a two-column three-pane window. The upper-left pane shows a Windows Explorer-type listing of the folders on your selected disk. The right pane shows thumbnails of the file types AhaView handles that it finds in the directory you select. The lower-left pane displays a preview image of the thumbnail you select. By adjusting the dividers between the window's panes, you can create a fairly large preview pane. AhaView can do more than I've described here, but this is enough for me. To read more about it and download it, go to www.aha-soft.com/ahaview/.

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Discovering your Hard Drive

by Gene Barlow, User Group Relations

This is a short article on the steps to organizing your hard drive. It will also introduce you to a new tool that is now available to help you learn more about your hard drive. I hope you will find it interesting.

The heart of your computer system is your hard drive. The operating system that controls your computer lives on your hard drive. All of the application programs that you run to do productive work with your computer also reside on your hard drive. Even your very important data files are stored on your hard drive. Your hard drive is the single most important component of your computer system.

Fortunately, your hard drive has the ability to be set up to meet your individual needs. It is the only part of your computer that you can tailor to your specifications. Unfortunately, most of us do not know how to change our hard drives or what are the best ways to tailor a hard drive to our individual needs. This article will show you the basis steps you need to take to really take advantage of your computer's hard drive.

1. Learn about your hard drive and what possibilities you have in setting up your hard drive.
2. Develop a plan about how you want your hard drive to serve you and what steps you need to take to accomplish this plan.
3. Make a thorough backup of your current hard drive before you start to make any changes to it.
4. Start to change your hard drive according to the steps outlined in your plan.

If you follow these four steps and not try to bypass any one of them, then you will succeed at tailoring your hard drive to meet your personal needs. If you try to skip over any of the first three steps in order to rush to the fourth step, you may well run into problems that will prevent you from tailoring your hard drive and may even damage your current system. Let's explore the first of these basic steps to tailoring your hard drive in a bit more detail.

Learn About your Hard Drive

We've all heard the expression, if all else fails, read the manual. With your hard drive this is especially important to follow. While your hard drive is not impossible to learn about, it is complicated enough to require some study before you attempt to tailor it in any way. Unfortunately, information about your hard drive is not easy to find.

A few years ago, the PartitionMagic manual contained some good general information about hard drives. Today, most of this information has been removed from the manual leaving only the reference information on how to use the partitioning utility. However, some of the early information on hard drives has been saved on the PartitionMagic CD.

To retrieve this general information on hard drives, put the PartitionMagic CD in your CD reader and when the automatic first screen comes up you will see one of the items listed as "Documentation". Select this item and you will see a list of the various documents stored on the CD in pdf format. The two you should print and read are "Basic Concepts" (29 pages) and "Installing a Second Operating System" (17 pages). These papers are a bit technical to read and they do not offer any recommendations as to what are the best ways to organize your hard drive, but they are a good starting point in learning about your hard drive.

A better way to learn about your hard drive is an educational CD entitled "Discovering your Hard Drive" that I recently published. This CD is divided into the following seven topic sections:

• Understanding your Hard Drive is an easy to follow look at the internal workings of a physical hard drive. It is a great place to start to learn about your hard drive.
• Upgrading your Hard Drive will help you to determine if your current hard drives are adequate and how you can upgrade them if they are not up to snuff.
• Organizing your Hard Drive helps you with the basic organization techniques to set up your hard drive. These are the concepts that the rest of the CD is based on.
• Managing your Operating Systems will show you how to run more than one operating system on your hard drive. This is a key concept that you should master.
• Moving to a New Operating System will help you understand how to move to a new release of Windows, like Windows XP. This topic is especially important today.
• Backing Up your Hard Drive is the first thing you should do before you start to organize your hard drive and is the last thing you should do once you get your hard drive set up as you want it.
• Securing your Hard Drive will show you how to secure your private information from hackers and identify thieves. This is the way of the future that we need to understand now.

Each topic shows you a series of presentation slides and you hear my voice describing the points you need to learn. It's an easy way to sit back and watch and listen to the information being presented. In a short time, you will understand your hard drive much better and will know how you can modify it to meet your personal needs.

The Discovering your Hard Drive CD can be ordered from our web site at www.ugr.com/order. Use the special order code of UGNL0402. The user group discounted price for the CD is only $20 plus a small shipping fee. This is the ideal way to get started to setting up your hard drive to meet your personal needs. Your copy of the CD is available now and can be at your door in less than a week. Order it today.

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Choosing An Image Editor

by By Milt Kostner, SIG Leader DISIG

An idea grew in my mind of starting a Special Interest Group (SIG) to help others who have bought these fancy digital cameras and scanners and who didn't have a clue how to use them more effectively. Sort of like the early days of PC's. One of the challenges faced was what image editor would be used to bind the discussions together.

I had used Paint Shop Pro and Ulead's image editor, as well as some easy-does-it types, such as PhotoSuite. PhotoShop (hereafter PS) was the best available but the $600 cost probably wouldn't attract too many amateur camera users (not me at least). I played with the trial version of PS and yearned for its capability. Paint Shop Pro at $100 was as close as I had gotten to PS.

Just when I was all set to purchase PS Lite, a new editor from Adobe came to the market: PS Elements. Elements replaced PS Lite (except for hardware freebies). I was able to pick up Elements for a net cost of $44 after introductory rebate.

Elements incorporates the majority of the tools and features of the big daddy PS for a fraction of the cost (now $66 after rebate). I figured that anyone that spends $300 to $1500 for a new digital camera ought not to flinch at the current price.

Elements fully supports the amateur user who either prints out images on a PC printer or who loads them up onto a web site. It does not support an author who needs to produce a high-quality four-color image on a printing press (without major help from the printer's software).

Elements handles images in the RGB format (red, green, blue); not the CYMK (cyan, yellow, magenta and black) world of the press. Elements will not support color separations and alpha channel manipulations. The tools in Elements are adequate but lack the most eloquent manipulative tools of PS (curves, paths, masks, etc.) But you most probably don't need them.

It may be that some of you don't even need Elements! That's why we review the quickie image editors and viewers as part of our meeting. However, the more you use your digital camera or scanner, the more frequently you'll come up with an image that would be perfect if only you could get rid of that blemish or could sharpen that out-of-focus, or eliminate that scratch on that old picture. That's when PS, Elements and Paint Shop Pro, etc are necessary. Edit out that image defect and feel like a god!

Come join us at the next DISIG meeting for a good time and to see what you might be missing. See www.svcs.org/SVCSImaging.html for details.

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Product Review

by By Robert Mitchell

Product: Audio Cleaning Lab
Company: Magix, Made in Germany
Price: $39.95

Recently, I have become interested in transferring old recordings from LP's, 45's, and cassettes as well as mixing different songs from various CDs. I have several old LP's and cassettes that would benefit from putting them onto CD, since CDs sound better then the original recording and it also would protect the original out of print albums. I know the recording industry doesn't like us to do these things with music that we already own. I prefer CD's anyway. I have transferred several cassettes to CD already and I'm wanting to put several records onto CD as well. Records have a lot of crackles and pops on them, so I need a software package to clean them up and make the recording sound better. I looked at several on the web, tried some demos, but finally settled on one called

With this program I can set up different settings to clean up hiss, pops and crackles with slide handles and also there are files with different recordings of this to help eliminate these. I can also record the music directly into the program at different frequencies such as CD quality and so on. I can also convert to and from MP3, wav, wmp etc. When I record both sides of a cassette into the program, the program will automatically divide the recording into different tracks to put onto CD, so the user doesn't have to, but can be done manually if needed. The waveform can edited manually or done automatically by the program. The program can burn to CD right from the program itself, but haven't figured it out yet. I have exported the recordings out to Microsoft Media Player to make the disk and that works well. The user interface does take getting used to , but is not bad.

The program does take getting used to using. I just got the program, so I haven't mastered it yet, but will work with it and over time I will figure out many of different features it has.

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