SPAUG Newsletter May 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Notes from the Prez
by Jim Dinkey
All too often the assumption is that because you don't have very sensitive data on your computer that you don't need to assure that your wireless is encrypted.
Unfortunately, that is just not the case in the modern world.
While it has yet to be tested in court, your computer could:
- Become a host for a zombie and participate in a Denial of Service (DOS) attack.
- Allow remote programs to look for credit card numbers or social security numbers on your computer.
- Generally let anyone within range just use your connection to the Internet and have everything that happens appear that it being originated by you.
All of these things can happen if you are not using the “G” option of the wireless versions or if you have not updated your wireless to the WAP2 version of the encryption algorithm.
But you might say, “I have WEP going, I am invulnerable.”
Think again.
Neither WEP nor dynamic WEP can be relied upon. WEP can be cracked with standard tools in minutes or seconds. Dynamic WEP can be cracked almost as fast.
WPA2, which comes with any “G” version, seems to be holding up quite well. All the others need to have downloadable patches to all “B” or other non “G ”wireless equipment.
So the message for the month is to review the status of your wireless setup and act accordingly.
Since 60% of the present wireless users do not have any encryption at all, the outlook is quite bleak, but at least you are savvy enough to know to take care of the problem. The manufacturers want to avoid having support calls because the wireless device they sold doesn't work. That is fair enough, but the manufacturers seem to bury very deeply in their instructions how to enable encryption. For this I fault them greatly. So if you get into a court hassle, still blame it on the manufacturer.
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General Meeting Notes
by Stan Hutchings
Administrivia
- The Saturday morning clinic will not be available until 11 June. The technical support volunteers are still being trained, and Jim has some conflicts.
- The CD SIG is looking for volunteers to put together the next club CD. It involves some selection, some testing, downloading and documenting the selections, burning CDs and creating the "cover art". Roger Finke was volunteered.
- Planning Meeting next Wednesday will be at Jim Dinkey's
CrossTalk/Random Access
- Problem: AOL seems to be selling mortgages - a member has seen many ads recently, and they are annoying.
Recommendation: ditch AOL
- C|Net's courses are a mixed bag - some are very basic, and geared toward beginners, some are for experts. Jim' current course on firewalls is really tough; the wireless one was kind of light. Try the ones that interest you. A course on Outlook (not Outlook Express) 2003 is starting in a few days.
- Problem: receiving hundreds of junk email every day, it's overwhelming.
Recommendation: first, find out where your email address is by Googling your email address. Ask the owners of the sources (usually webmasters of the web page it's on) to remove or hide your email address. Use Mail Washer; if that doesn't help, start using the filters to remove countries, especially the ones that are major sources of spam.
- Problem: a computer that is old and only used to play Free Cell has started crashing. Should I get another computer?
Recommendation: you probably don't need a new computer, just reformat and reinstall Windows (which includes Free Cell); if you don't load any other software and keep it off the Internet, it should be perfectly satisfactory. One other option is to buy the Free Cell game in a portable unit that you can take anywhere and play anytime.
- Problem: the computer seems busy (the hourglass cursor is shown) even when I'm not doing anything.
Recommendation: First, go here and follow the procedure. Then, use HiJackThis to take a snapshot of the computer applications and processes that are running on your computer; submit the resultant report to Help2Go Detective, which will tell you what to clean off your computer. After your comupter is malware-free, look at the January newsletter, how to set up your computer and how to keep it running well.
- Question: how many are making a backup of their system to another partition or hard drive? Answer: the majority of members raised hands.
- Problem: I have a computer with the original PC-Cillin, and tried to upgrade it. There were problems, and the tech support people could not help get the old version removed and the upgrade installed.
Advice: It is a good idea to uninstall a previous version of any program before installing the upgrade unless the documentation says specifically it is not required. This is especially true for security programs - antivirus, antimalware, antispam, etc. You should also shut down the security programs before installing a new program. You may be able to re-install the original PC-Cillin and then run its removal program, or Windows software removal. Sometimes the uninstall file gets corrupted or lost, and then neither the application nor Windows can uninstall it correctly. As a last resort, you may have to restore the original Windows load from the recovery program See your documentation for instructions. Note that recovery or restore often means you lose all changes and updates since you bought the computer, so may involve considerable reconstruction. Be sure to save any email, addresses, documents, etc. before doing the recovery!
- Problem: Word is using one-third of the visible page for something else. How can I get rid of the unwanted portion?
Advice: You may be seeing the Document Map; on the menu, click View - Document Map. If it goes away, that's the problem; if not, turn off the document map by the same procedure. If there is a little button in the upper right hand corner that, when you cursor over it says "Hide", click it. Another possibility is a disconnect between window size and document zoom factor - there should be a little window on the tool bar that has a number percent, and a drop-down arrow next to it (if not, add it by View - Toolbars - Customize - on the Commands tab click View, and click the Zoom: option). Click the arrow and choose either Page Width or Text Width. You can also zoom in or out to different magnifications by typing a number directly into the box and pressing Enter. Much more information on controlling your Word documents can be found by clicking Help - Microsoft Word Help from the menu, click the Index tab, type view, and press Enter. Also, check out the Contents tab.
- Problem: Excel cells and characters are too big, is there a way to make them normal sized?
Advice: in the lower left, in the system tray, there is a magnification control button. Your default font may have been set too large; reset it to 12 or 14 points. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the General tab. In the Standard font box, click a font. In the Size box, enter a font size. Much more information on controlling your Excel spreadsheets can be found by clicking Help - Microsoft Excel Help from the menu, click the Index tab, type default, and press Enter. Also, check out the Contents tab.
- Problem: An Excel file sent by email opens, but although the data can be seen, it cannot be printed, the print area cannot be reset.
Advice: Ask the sender to re-save the Excel file as an earlier version. Or, use the club CD Excel reader to open it.
- Windows Task Scheduler keeps resetting the schedule to check for Windows Update. Is there any way to keep the setting? This is Win98.
Advice: upgrade to WinXP.
- Problem: After working on the computer for a while, suddenly numerous instances of Windows Explorer start opening. It acts like a virus or malware, but House Call, Norton Ad Aware don't detect it.
Advice: See above advice on using HiJack This and Help2Go. It will tell you what is good and what is marginal and bad. Get rid of anything you don't recognize (some reputable companies use techniques, such as cookies, to make your browsing their site easier).
- Problem: I cannot get scheduled tasks to run routinely with WinXP Home.
Advice: you must have a password on the Administrator account. You'll have to reinstall using the password. There is a way to avoid having to enter a password every time (useful only if you're the only one using the computer) Windows Annoyances 2003 for XP.
- Problem: I'm thinking about trying out a program that might put malware on my computer. How should I go about that?
Advice: make a whole system backup (Acronis 8.0 makes it very easy), do the download and install, use it to your heart's content. If it causes trouble, or you even suspect it, restore the backup. It just takes minutes, and the peace of mind is well worth it.
Presentation
Gary Sasaki gave a fascinating presentation on six themes in the consumer electronics world. He showed how "s-curves" explain and predict how industries evolve through different phases. The PC industry has gone through the "three gears" already. The introduction of the DVD started the Home Media industry in 1995, and the industry is now in (or almost in) "second gear". This means there is still a lot of "vapor ware" and hype, and prices are still relatively high (though lower than they were in "first gear"), but various products are actually on the market, and are being bought by "early adopters". In "third gear", you get high volume and good profit; but in "overdrive", there is high volume but low profit, and manufacturers start merging or shifting to other markets.
High Definition Television (HDTV) has not been available in "native resolution" until this year. The Digital Media Adapter (DMA) allows you to connect other appliances to each other (digital camera to TV, for example). It was supposed to be the "next big thing", but really hasn't caught on; this leaves a lot of early adopters rather dissatisfied. Implications of "second gear" are, the "big guys" have staked out the good territory, and there is a huge "entry fee" to get a product developed to compete with them.
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) will function with the new high-speed ADSL Two Plus (~20 Mb per second) to pipe media to you over the Internet. Bill Gates and SBC demonstrated the technology, but it is not yet available. They will add video phone capablility to the TV capability. You will be able to download, record and/or watch four programs simultaneously. Interactive TV will become feasible, and along with it, video on demand. You will be able to switch among several different feeds for sports events. These capabilites will be touted as "must have" features to attract market share from competitors.
There are two forms of HDTV, 1080X1920 pixels and 720X1280. It would be safer to get a 1080X1920 pixel model, and finally this year Samsung, Sharp, Philips and others will finally offer models. They will be expensive, though. High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is something else to look for. It has encryption built-in, and will future-proof your TV. HDMI is showing up in other accessories, too. You also want to be able to record HDTV; the standards are still being finalized, and there may be a "Betamax-VCR" kind of shake-out, so don't be an early adopter.
The implications of these developments are the public will find out HDTV-ready is "bait-and-switch", becasue it does not include the HDTV tuner. Remember, to be true HDTV, you need a native resolution of 1080X1920 pixels or 720X1280, and preferably the former. Other resolutions will degrade quality or result in an inferior display. Enhanced Definition Television (EDTV) is the progressive version of the current interlaced 480X720 display. Get 1080X1920 pixels in native resolution if you can afford it.
The display is the business end of the TV, and will come in a huge variety of sizes and technologies. This year the rage was LCD, which is best for smaller size screens, e.g., $800 for 30"; last years rage for plasma has receded. Sharp makes a 65", but it's really for commercial uses (bars, hotesl, etc.). Genoa has added more colors to their LCD (magenta, yellow and cyan) to improve color presentation. There are other display technologies being developed; some will be very expensive, others (like SED, GXL, etc.) will allow great manufacturing cost savings, but only if the technology can be successfully developed. LCDs are generally reliable except for "infant mortality" problems. Sony's Blackscreen technology, with special coating to reflect only red, green and blue, will improve projection TV displays by rejecting ambient light. Projection bulbs are quite expensive ($400-500), and will limit the popularity.
Digital Cinema is beginning to evolve; all aspects of the system are digital. Star Wars Three will be best seen at Century 22 in San Jose; it is one of the few to have Digital Cinema at 1080X1920 pixels. Even higher resolution is coming for Digital Cinema.
The Media Center PC concept is developing and evolving. Network Attached Storage (NAS) will be developed to store your digital media. Many functions are being added to non-pc appliances - record to DVD, internal hard drive, TiVo in high definition, will be in competition with the PC. Cat-5 coax cable will be used most often for a while to distribute the media around a house. Other options exist, but are not as economical or simple.
The iPod will be copied extensively, and there will be added features to the point that they will be difficult to operate. Cell phones will start offering the same capability. Buying a ring tone can be more expensive than buying the whole song (so selling ringtones is more profitable than selling songs), so phones will also undergo "feature creep", and consequently become more difficult to operate, and battery life will become a limiting factor to its use. Quick-charge batteries (~ 1 minute to fully charge) may alleviate that problem.
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Planning Meeting Notes
by Stan Hutchings and Maurice Green
- The meeting was held at Jim Dinkey's house; attendees: Jim Dinkey, Dick Delp, Maurice Green, John Sleeman, John Buck, Stan Hutchings, Nat Landes, Richard Sweet. The attendees enjoyed the refreshments served.
- Review of finances - Nat reported $9,120 in the bank. Jim reported we just spent $50 to join the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG).
- Review of topic vs. attendance -
interesting topics result in better attendance. We'll try to schedule speakers with good draw.
- WebSIG activities and schedules - next Tuesday 7:30 at Stan's. Some proposed topics: images, AOC article post (if Jim can bring the server, user and password information), the email archive on MNC (perhaps we want to download and burn to CD before it's deleted?).
Linux interest - there will be a demonstration at the next General Meeting of interesting and useful applications by Dick Delp.
- Status of SPAUG CD - we now have 3 volunteers to assist in club CD production (Roger Finke, Ron Nicholas and Peter Barba). John Buck will mentor the group. There is a new printer that is designed to print labels on any CD (or DVD presumably); Jim is considering one for the club CD. It does not require a special "finish", as Jim's current CD label printer does, and supposedly does a very good job at covering the area.
- The group received an evaluation package of Digital Image Suite from Microsoft. Maury Green will do the evaluation and then present a short summary report at a future SPAUG meeting and a full evaluation report at a DISIG meeting.
- Future speakers & pre-meeting dinner location -
8 Jun - Nancy Blachman/Google, , pre-meeting dinner at Celia's
13 Jul - Tom Tuttle will discuss digital photograpy and editing, pre-meeting dinner at Cibo Bar and Grill, 3398 El Camino Real, Palo Alto
10 Aug - Jan Altman will make a presentation on Excel, pre-meeting dinner at Crowne Plaza Cabaña, 4290 El Camino Real.
14 Sep - Hank Skawinski, pre-meeting dinner at (tbd)
12 Oct - Les Laky, pre-meeting dinner at (tbd)
9 Nov - Seth Shostak, pre-meeting dinner at (tbd)
14 Dec - Paula Simpson, Palo Alto Library Director has been invited to speak.
Possibilities for next year - Acronis, Dan Gillmor, Mike Langberg, Electronic Freedom Foundation, a presentation on genealogy, a creator of Firefox at Stanford
- Clinic activities and changes - the Saturday Clinic will be offered on a twice monthly basis until the new tech assistants acquire more training and experience. Next Clinic date is June 11. Acronis is the preferred backup program, and Trend Micro is the antivirus program, and it includes a firewall and antispyware capability. Multiple copies of each are on hand for instant use when a buggy computer comes in.
Jim Dinkey is looking for volunteers to test (hopefully free) programs for remote PC program control (similar to PC Anywhere or GoToMyPC), and for system migration (similar to Aloha Bob). Anyone with information or interested in participating, contact Jim. Suggestions were made to investigate VCom, Acronis, and Gene Barlow.
- Publicity - Richard Sweet - I'm having trouble getting the Sunnyvale Sun to list our meetings. Other newpapers seem to be fine.
- Individual reports and suggestions -
John Sleeman reported that the SPAUG post office box rental has been renewed, and he was reimbursed for the fee.
John B. mentioned that he has received newsletters from other organizations where the fold side is at the bottom and they are never damaged because the bottom edge, which is passing thru the sorting machine, is stiffer and not subject to catching on something the way a loose corner might when the fold is at the top. In any case, apparently the USPS doesn't seem to really care if it goes through "their way", but he will check and/or talk to Susan about it. The other suggestion which was made was that as long as we don't exceed our total weight allowance, we could use a heavier weight paper (24 lb. instead of 20 lb.) for the 'cover' sheet so that it would be a little stiffer and less subject to damage. John Buck will run a trial of reversing the fold side of the newsletter to see if this will prevent damage to newsletters in mailing. He will coordinate with Susan Mueller.
Maury Green reported that the SVCS website has been updated and the latest issue of the SVCS Journal (March 2005) is now available here online. The SPAUG website will link to it from the ToC.
- Other items that came before the Committee -
Suggested date for the annual Christmas party is Tuesday December 20. It will be at the Elks Lodge, dinner will be served, and we will consider entertainment. Perhaps the Silicon Valley Fiddlers, or something similar to what we had last year.
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DVD Burner Evaluation
by Robert Mitchell
I just installed a Pioneer A09XL DVD burner on my machine and it works great. It is a 16x DVD Burner with dual layer burning. I have made slide shows with the ULEAD Software that came with it, and made a fews disks. I have been using 8x Memorex disks and the DVD software wrote them at 12x. All the disks worked fine in the standard DVD player.
I think the CPU minimum requirement is at least 800MHz P3 chip with 256 MB of RAM, but the P4 that I have is more reasonable, and of course the faster the machine and the more memory it has, the better.
I have a 2 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB of RAM and two 60 GB Hard Drives, WinXP SP2. Plenty of Free Hard Drive Space.
I haven't tried out the Dual Layer disks yet, since they are still pricey. A package of 3 for $20 to $25 a set. The only brands that I saw so far, are Vebatum. Fuji and one other (can't remember).
I am using the Ulead software that came with drive and works very well. 12x speed is a transfer rate of about 16.6 Megabytes per second. When making a disk, it is the encoding steps that take the longest. The actual burn of the last disk took about 10 minutes.
[N.B.- everyone knows that for more reviews, hardware minimum requirements and online purchase you just type the keywords Pioneer A09XL DVD into Google, right? SAH]
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Homebrew Movies on the Internet
by Robert Mitchell
The other day in a San Francisco Chronical Article dated Monday May, 9 2005 (the Technology Section E), I found a link to a homebrew Star Wars movie at Panic Struck Productions called Star Wars Revelations. George Lucas actually doesn't mind people doing that as long as they don't sell it. He is happy that fans have fun with it and apply their own ideas to it.
I downloaded the *.wmv version of the movie by DSL (it took about 25 minutes to download and was around 260 MB), put the file on a DVD disk and used my computer to burn a watchable DVD. I used Ulead's Movie Factory Software 3.5 to create a DVD portion of the program). I then did the DVD rendering that took 8.48 minutes before burning the disk. Actual burn with my Pioneer A09XL using Memorex 8x (I've been consistently getting 12x out of these disks) took only about 8 minutes.The end result is quite spectacular. Lots of high level special effects that pretty much rival anything that Industrial Lights and Magic can do, but using standard off the self Animations software like Bryce and so on.
The creators used a high end Sony DV Video Camera of about $4500, a G5 Macintosh, Final Cut Pro Express +, and also some work on a Windows Machine. The entire budget for the movie was $20,000. Actors, and other work was part of that. The graphics in the movie are very realistic and the live action is good, though a little on the dark side. This show's what amateurs can do with a little money, as compared to George Lucas with 100's of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and software.
I wonder if the club might be interested in this, since it did involve the use of Animation/Graphics software and computers, Mac/Windows, etc. and video editing software. The movie is 47 minutes longs, including credits, though there is also a Trailer of about 5 minutes or so.
I have also used a free program to extract video from other non-copy-protected DVDs from our Mexico cruise. I put the file on the computer, used Microsoft's Move Maker 2 software to re-edit it to take out sections, add some pictures, and change the original movie titles.
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