New meeting space for SFPCC
By Bob Wallace
Going out your front door for the March monthly meeting will find you
driving off in a slightly different direction to get to the meeting
location, we trust. This reminder that we’re no longer going to San
Carlos effective with the March meeting date. Larry Welling should have a
sign at the front door in San Carlos to serve as a reminder for those who
may forget.
One quick aside before going into the details of how to get to our new
location. Glance at your mailing label for this issue. Most of you will
find the expiration date for your annual dues on the top line of your
mailing label. This tells you when your membership lapses with the S.F.
Peninsula Computer Club by month and year. Memberships expiring this
month, for instance, would read:
"Membership expires: 03/02."
For those few who will find "Complimentary newsletter" printed at
the top of the mailing label, your membership lapsed some time ago. Your
complimentary issue is being sent to keep you advised of the change of
meeting location. To receive future newsletters via snail mail, submit
your annual dues via check to the Membership Chairman at the address noted
on the back page. Thanks!
On with the directions to our new meeting location in Burlingame. From
north of the Broadway off-ramp in Burlingame, take Broadway to the right
at that ramp. You’ll want the second traffic light on Broadway to make
your left turn at (the first traffic light at Rollins Road allows no left
turns). Turn left on Carolan and follow it (and the railroad tracks) to
the second stop sign, just beyond the high school. One block beyond the
stop sign is Burlingame Avenue. Turn left there and go one block to Myrtle
Road to find the Retirement Inn of Burlingame located at 250 Myrtle
Road.
Coming from the south, turn off at the Peninsula Avenue off-ramp, go up
and over the Bayshore Freeway and along Peninsula Avenue until you reach
Anita Road, just before you get to the railroad tracks. Turn right on
Anita and go to the "T" opposite Washington Park. That puts you at
Anita and Burlingame. Turn left at that intersection and go one block to
find the Retirement Inn of Burlingame on your left.
Parking is available under the building, across Burlingame Avenue
adjacent to the tennis courts, or you may find a spot on the street.
Parking under the Retirement Inn of Burlingame will most likely be
routinely available, but be advised that a few parking spaces under the
building are reserved for Retirement Inn staff, and are marked
appropriately. There may be a few restricted parking spaces in the lot
across Burlingame Avenue. Any such spaces should also be marked with
appropriate information to alert you to specific restrictions. On-street
parking may be somewhat limited, depending on the specific time of evening
you arrive looking for a spot.
CalTrain may be an alternate method of getting to the meetings,
with the Burlingame station being just one block from the Retirement Inn
of Burlingame location. Going toward San Francisco, Train 83 is scheduled
at Burlingame at 6:22 p.m., Train 87 at 7:00 p.m. Going toward San Jose,
Train 86 is due at the Burlingame station at 6:51 p.m. You can look for
other CalTrain information by visiting their web site at:
http://www.caltrain.com/caltrain/index.html
Links to a handful of choices are available at that URL Be aware that
CalTrain service later in the evening is somewhat sparse, meaning you may
have to time your departure from the meeting based on CalTrain’s
schedule.
Several changes to make you aware of regarding our use of the lounge at
the Retirement Inn of Burlingame since our February newsletter. Judy
Oliphant and Lee Hill met with Lily Rutherford on Thursday, February 28 to
work out a few more details for the club’s use of their facilities.
Among them, that we will be able to gain entrance to the lounge without
the need for going to the front door and ringing the bell. One of the
early arrivals each month will be asked to assist others arriving for the
monthly meeting by watching the door next to the patio.
Another change since the February newsletter is that we will have a
wheeled cart available for our coffee urns, making coffee available in the
lounge during the meeting, much as it has been available in the kitchen
area at San Carlos over the past years. Snacks will still be brought in as
well, and should be adjacent to the coffee cart location within the
room.
As has been the practice at San Carlos, at least one of us will make
every effort to be at the Retirement Inn of Burlingame by about 7:00 p.m.
to get the room ready for each meeting. At the conclusion of each evening’s
meeting, anyone with a couple of minutes to spare for cleaning up the
space will help in getting everyone out and on their way home in a timely
manner, and we thank you for your assistance.
StarOffice -- a major secret?
By Bob Wallace
Every so often your editor goes out in search of a new program to
install on his OS/2 Warp 4-based computer, a program that may make his
computing time a bit more useful. One such program was located just
several weeks ago on the Hobbes web site for OS/2 Warp users
(http://hobbes.nmsu.edu). This addition to the programs available here had
better be a very good one, given that it took just over 17 hours to
download via the dial-up connect. One of the problems with finding
archives that total 65 megabytes!
In fact, knowing about this program came about by the occasional visit
to one or another of the local bookstores to check on books for other
programs. Finally, a visit to the Sun web site (www.sun.com/StarOffice)
found a reasonably good demo for their current version available for Sun,
Windows and Linux platforms (StarOffice 5.2), and information on that same
site that details Beta 6, which is currently going through testing prior
to being released to the general computer user.
Given the details provided by Sun’s demo program, given the time
spent getting the archive downloaded over that very long telephone
connection of several weeks ago, time had to be made available for
installing and looking over this quite large piece of software. As part of
the install function, StarOffice asks about only a couple of issues, one
of these being your e-mail setup if you choose to use StarOffice as your
default mail program, and whether to set up StarOffice as the default
browser on your computer. This after the usual questions about which hard
drive to install to (the C: partition, of course), and whether to make the
directory, since it didn’t exist prior to installing the program
(default: C:\office51).
Once the basics are out of the way, StarOffice goes through the unpack
routines until all the subdirectories have been made, and all the files
have been placed into their appropriate locations. Adjust the config.sys
file, if necessary (it usually is), make the icon for your desktop, then
tell you to reboot the computer so that any changes that may have taken
place during the installation will be available to the program when you
run it.
With the installation routines finished, the first step here is usually
to go into the main program directory to check on the number of EXE files,
the number of DLL files, how many subdirectories might have been created
for this program, all the little details. In this instance, StarOffice’s
install routine created 18 subdirectories beneath its own C:\Office51,
placed one EXE file (34kb) in the main file area, and 56 DLL files (32Mb).
A number of additional files are dispersed across the remaining
subdirectories. This on an 8.4Mb hard drive partitioned into four sections
under OS/2 Warp 4, with the C: formatted to accept the HPFS file
system.
Once you click on the icon to start the program, then click on the
program icon, this computer starts its work of reading in the various
files needed to make StarOffice work. Running on an older AMD K5-133 CPU
means that it takes just about 90 seconds to get up to being ready for
use. One very good reason for doing some serious thinking about upgrading
to a newer CPU with lots more speed. Another reason is that it takes about
45-50 seconds to close down this program.
First impressions can make or break a program, so looking at the screen
when StarOffice gets ready to work finds a "Start" button on the lower
left corner of this OS/2-based computer, one "button" never before
seen on this monitor since installing Warp 4 several years ago. Clicking
on that Start button brings up a display very much like what one would
expect to find on a Windows-based computer, meaning that anyone familiar
with Windows would probably feel right at home with this program, so long
as you’re at ease around a "shell" program.
Getting to the point of being ready to use StarOffice brings up a
screen that displays eight icons within it: New Text Document, New
Spreadsheet, New Presentation, New Drawing, New HTML Document, New Mail,
Tasks and Events. Clicking twice on any of these will bring up the
appropriate task. This is your StarOffice desktop, found in the top
portion of your monitor. Just below that is the "tip" window that will
start up each time you start the program until such time as you click on
the box within that window to tell it not to start each time. A pull-down
menu allows you to turn it off by clicking on the item within that
pull-down menu. On the other hand, if you choose to use it again at some
future time for whatever reason, you can go in and turn off that option,
starting the tip window once again. To give you a full-screen view of what
you’re doing, click on the "X" in the tip window to close it for
now.
As we did with the MS-Word text file for the January-February
newsletter, a small text file was created within StarOffice, saved to the
hard drive in default format, then checked for overall size by opening an
OS/2 window, changing into the appropriate directory and typing the DIR
command. In this case, tiny.sdw checked in with 10752 bytes, indicating
that StarOffice is very much like MS-Word and WordPerfect, in that font,
display and printer information is being stored inside each file in
default mode, while saving it using the "Save As" function to make a
Plain Text file will cut that filesize down significantly. In this
instance, tiny.txt takes up 35 bytes of the 512-byte allocation made by
OS/2 Warp 4.
With only a week into this program since installing it (this is
being written on March 7), what its other capabilities might be is still
to be noted. The e-mail portion of the program does work once it’s been
set up correctly to send and receive messages, and using the program as
one’s Internet browser also works quite well, saving time by not having
to get out of one program, click on another to get the browser going. If
your computer is fast enough, and you have the Internet available via
dial-up or cable, you could easily have two windows going at the same
time, doing whatever you like in one, having the Internet handy in the
other.
A likely next step may be to browse the computer section in one of the
local book stores to locate a copy of Everything you need to know about
Star-Office for OS/2, if one is still available at Barnes & Noble,
Borders or Tower.
Despite having a help file available within the program, and finding a "newsletter"
that details several options available to the computer user, having a
handy reference book of commands, functions and options sitting on the
shelf is usually a good thing.
Speaking of the newsletter attached to this program, ye auld editor
will make a mental note to bring along the printed version to give some
idea of what this program’s capabilities are. Whether the newsletter
capability of StarOffice is sufficient to retire the WordPerfect editor
remains to be seen. For the moment, my preference is for the newsletter
form used by WordPerfect.
Dragon worth talking?
By Judy Oliphant
Talking to your computer isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you
have never taken a typing class in your life, have problems typing or want
to give your hands a break from the keyboard, then you might consider
Dragon Natural Speaking 6.
From personal experience, I have had several friends of mine use Dragon
Natural Speaking and found that it does the job nicely for them, and my
father uses Voice Express and finds it a very useful addition to his
software library.
Dragon and Voice Express joined forces back in December. After you have
finished the required 5-minute training, you’re ready to start. You’ll
have to train the program to recognize your voice with everyday words.
This can also be rather funny if another family member happens to walk in
on you while you are saying dog, cat, bird, shopping, etc., to the
computer. It’s important for this to happen. Accuracy is very important
throughout this process and throughout the program. If you sneeze or use a
slang word, it may not understand what you are saying.
If that is the case, it will put a ? by the word and give you a few
suggestions. Example was when my Dad was using Voice Express and said "Oliphant,"
the computer put up a question mark and then showed him Elephant instead
of typing in Oliphant. In this case, you have to go back and re-train it
so it knows the word "Oliphant" and put that into the program.
The new version of Dragon Natural will filter out hmms and ahs and
eeks. You can add contact names from Lotus Notes and Outlook Express and
create your own custom commands plus make on-the-fly corrections as in the
case of the word Elephant, not Oliphant.
To use Dragon or any other voice software you need at least 128 megs of
Ram. You must be reminded this will not replace the keyboard and it is not
as fast as typing on one, it is just another option you have.
FREE Stuff on the Web
By Judy Oliphant.
Don't you love it when you hear the word "FREE"? I know
I do. Think all the goodies are gone, there is no more FREE stuff out
there on the web. Well, think again. There is a lot of FREE stuff out
there. Some of it I bet you have not even given a second thought about, or
knew it was out there. But it is!
Okay, admit it, you looked at the title of this article and said, "Yeah,
there is no FREE stuff, Judy, on the web and even if there was you'll get
spam like you have not seen before in your e-mail if you even do take a
peak at it. Not even close to spam and your not putting your
computer at risk of some dangerous virus it's FREE STUFF for the
taking.
If you think the only thing FREE on the net is all the fall of the
dot.com on the net, think again. You can still get something for nothing
and I am going to show you how and where.
So get your pens and paper ready as here we go.
One of the best search engines in my humble most option is Google I
think in part to the name and I have great success with it.. Well, there
are a lot of search engines out there: Yahoo, Excite, Google,
Dogpile and many more that I have not even named here. By now you all
should know what a search engine is for. So we will skip the
what is a search engine part and go to the good stuff.
Well, there is a new search engine out there called Ilor (www.ilor.com)
build on top of the Google search engine so you get the same excellent
service that you would if you used Google. Ilor gives you 4 options of
view options to choose from. Place the cursor over one the links on the
result page and you can add to a custom link, later you can view that
custom list. Which is great if you are searching for several topics like I
was the other night. I was looking or
things on Seattle, but I also wanted things in down town Seattle to do,
and easy walking distance and parking and public transportation. And I was
able to track all the relevant results. You can also E-mail a friend the
result of the search another good tool. You can open up the link into a
new window and avoid having to hit the back button to return to your
results. How nice is that folks?
If you need a cure for the information overload blues, try Infogate
(www.infogate.com) a terrific tool that will cut through the mass of news
on the net to zero in on the stories that you are most interested in the
most that you want to read. The 790Kb Infogate download produces a toolbar
with a live feed of headlines which updates as
long as you're connected. It will categorize by topics you choose. Click
the personalized button and type in key words to get the breaking news
from sources such as CNN and Reuters. You can set the tool bar to alert
you when the latest SF Giants baseball score is in or the SF 49ers. when
they are playing. To read full stories click on the headline while your on
line and a window will pop up with links to that story. It also has a
follow me feature will it will follow you to a cell phone or to a
pager.
Squelch those ads, you say. If only I could. This can be done with what
is called Web washer (you can find this by going to:
find.pcworld.com/1996)
this is a took for eliminating bandwidth hogging online ads. This 1.2Mb
program blocks cookies and web bugs that let companies monitor your online
wanderings. You can specify which cookies you want to block, allowing only
those that ease your web movements. Most important without
those annoying pop up jumbo size ads.. How many of you have gotten the one
about the little camera. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have had
that ad pop up or the net casino one. And I am not into Sex on line or
finding my long lost high school friend.
Leisure Time Digital made the Radio Star. Got a longing for some oldie
but goodies all the 60's and 80's music, while your surfing the net?
RadioTower ( www.radiotower.com) links to over 1300 online radio stations
from 80 countries including CNN news to sports, to money manners simply
down load real player or windows
media player and the way you go. and browse the station by the name or the
country or the music type. With free radio like this no wonder fee net
music has not taken on as fast.
You’re sitting at home and its's cold and wet outside and you want a
break from doing your taxes you wish you had a new Jigsaw puzzle to
do but you have done them over and over again and tired of them.
Well log on to (www.jigzone.com) here at the house we just
finished one of California street with lights and a cool frame that I got
as a Christmas present from Bites and Pieces. These are cool as well.
Jigzone has over 800 photos and 32 puzzles shames to choose from. Pick a
categories like art and architecture and travel and culture then choose
the number of pieces and their shape such as 91 pieces shale like lizards
of 247 triangular-shaped pieces. And a timer tracks how long it takes you
to solve the puzzle. If you get frustrated, click on solve button to
see the pieces fall into place. If you rather do a good cross word puzzle,
go to puzzlechoice.com
This is just a list of the FREE Stuff that is out there on the net to
choose from.. If any of you know of any others please write and tell us
about some of your finds. We want to hear from you.
Summer fun!
By Judy Oliphant
Here it is the middle of March and my mind is already thinking about
getting away for a few days. That is right, I am talking
Vacation! This year, like most, this writer in the mist of hosting
a
Summer conference for Active Worlds, my third on-line community in Seattle
Washington, the Emerald City.
Going back to Seattle, Washington will bring back some fond memories
for me as I was there in 1962 for the Worlds Fair with my Grandmother who
has since passed away. And I went camping with my Family back in 87
in Bellingham, Washington and learned how to stay up on water skies. A
task that only a father could share. Picking black berries along the coast
line of Oregon and Washington and then baking black berries cobblers with
Mom in a 7-foot motor home in a state park in Bellingham, Washington. Oh,
how fun is that it was a good family time. Sleeping on the dinning table
that doubled as a bed with a sleeping bag and a dog that thought he was
more person then dog that liked to snuggle inside of the sleeping bag with
you until you kicked him out he found the drivers seat was an A-OK bed as
well. The family dog even would pack his own dog dish & blanket and
drag then off to the motor home before we took off in the motor home
he was not about to leave them behind.
The family traveled all the way up to Vancouver & Victoria on this
trip and the dog did great. Why won't he is a part of my family. If
any of you are wondering what kind of dog this was.. It was a 80-pound
Male Standard German Schnauzer that had more sense then some people do you
only pick the ripe pears, and strawberries and vanilla ice cream is no fun
when others are enjoying strawberry & cream. And sour dough
french bread is a jewel of SF. So going back to Seattle will be fun
for me..It will bring back all of these memories and make more of them to
share. And I will find lots of photo opportunities I am sure.
So how have I planned this conference using the computer and the
Internet? Very Easy!
I have been doing all the work for the conference via the Internet, and
used the search engines as my guide. I found the hotel site and sent off
E-mail to the convention and visitors bureau,
contacted the hotel that got the bid , and found a lot of information on
what to see and do in Seattle, and requested more information. Has only
had to
pick up the phone once, folks, to actually talk to someone from any of the
sightseeing vendors or the hotel because my dial up Internet provider took
a dump on me and I had a new e-mail address to give to her. That's
the only time so far that I have had to do any voice calling to
Seattle.
As far as sightseeing goes, we will be taking an underground tour of
Seattle, having lunch at Pikes Brewery, at Pikes Market Place, and some
time at the Space Needle, ride the monorail
and take a 4-hour cruise on Lake Union out to Blake Island to the Tillicum
Village where a whole Chinook Salmon dinner will be prepared for us with
live Native American Music and Dancing will be performed this evening.
Friends as far as Holland, England will travel over again this year for
this conference.
Got any summer plans of your own that you would like to share with us
please write we want to hear from you.
Final bytes
By Bob Wallace
Getting this newsletter out the door is being anticipated due to the
arrival this past Thursday of five CD disks of new updates from IBM for
their OS/2 Warp 4 software. Actually, two of the disks are directly
related to the operating system and add-ons, three for adding various and
sundry utilities to the hard drive. Nothing gets changed on this computer
while the newsletter is being edited. I guarantee it!
Several reminders keep popping up in my head every so often. First, should
you hear a noise coming from your desktop computer, you may want to
investigate the cooling fan on the CPU chip inside your case. This one
doesn’t pop up all that frequently, but when it does it typically
catches the computer user by surprise, with the thought going on about
what the noise might be, is it serious. No, in fact it’s reasonably easy
to fix. Turn off the computer, pull the plug from the wall or at least
turn off the on/off switch on your outlet strip. Remove the cover and
locate the CPU and its fan. Replace the old CPU fan with a new one
available from most computer stores, then replace the cover on your case
and go back to work. No more than 15 or 20 minutes should be necessary for
this fix, and almost anyone can easily do it.
Another thing for you to consider, that being the battery in your
motherboard that keeps your CMOS data going when the computer is shut
down. That battery may have a shelf life of five years, but how long had
it been in your computer before you purchased that system and took it
home? Find out which specific battery you need for your computer, go
to the local supply store and fetch one, then swap out the old battery for
the new one. Just be sure to make a copy of all your CMOS data before you
change out the battery, as that’s the thing that keeps your data intact.
You may have to re-enter all that information after changing the
battery.
Schedule
March 14: Genealogy update with Chris Havnar
April 11: Hank Skawinski on almost everything related to
computers.
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