President's Report

Board Meeting of April, 2002

Virus Etiquette by Michael Vincent

Create Multiple Shortcuts by Michael Vincent

General Meeting of May, 2002 by Marcia Zientek

Reading the news these days everybody seems to be playing the blame game. It gets to the point that you don't know who or what to believe. The same can be said about computer viruses. You get an e-mail from someone you know and trust, telling you about a new virus that is going around and what you should do to prevent your computer from catching it. Even with the best intentions this could be a hoax. If you are ever in doubt, and you should be check out the following web sites that could put your mind at ease.

www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax

Bruce Kosbab

I will check on the internet to see if we can find a good price for a spare projector bulb.

Terry Harvey, Secretary

If you receive an e-mail from a friend and after opening the email, your trusty virus software immediately springs into action to protect your system from a virus, follow the virus software's recommendations. After the initial disgust, delete the original e-mail, then send your friend an e-mail and let them know that they have a virus on their system. This helps avoid them making the same mistake to someone else that is not as protected as you.

submitted by terry harvey

submitted by Terry Harvey

General Meeting of May 2002 by Marcia Zientek

Check WAUCtalk for meeting changes in July because July 4^{th is on Thursday, Keeping Terry informed of your current e-mail address is important in order to get last-minute announcements. If anyone is not getting a WAUC Bulletin it is because Terry does not have your e-mail address. WAUC would like to purchase a bulb, LMP C120, for the overhead projector to have in the event we need a replacement. Bulbs range about $300. If anyone can get a better price, let Terry or another board member know.}

Problems/Questions: Bruce gets a C prompt when he boots up his computer; his backup disk doesn't work either. Rich Coplan said maybe reformatting the hard drive might be the last resort.

Indispensable WAUC award and a sweatshirt went to Nellie Gurrath as a faithful SIG minute taker.

Terry mentioned how difficult it is to get people to write SIG minutes; it's usually women taking the minutes. We need more men to volunteer for this job, since the majority of members and attendees at SIGs are men.

Investing: Ron Toro suggested that WAUC might look into buying CDs. Terry said this was considered some time ago; however, the money would not be liquid enough when we need to replace or buy an item, then we'd have to file income taxes on the interest we earned. The question again was brought up to apply for non-profit status. If there are any WAUC members with a legal background, perhaps he/she could assist in this task.

Mary Ann Panevska was our enthusiastic presenter of the Linux operating system. Mary Ann belongs to SEWWUG (Southeast Wisconsin Users Group) and accompanying her were Roger Jenkins and Jerry Davis from the Linux user group. She told us her impressive background before retiring, and now continues to be involved in computer activities.

SUCCESS^{!! Bob West now has a working IIGS. Experts, Doris and Jim, tried numerous system disks to get it up and running, with little luck. They then literally dismantled the system to determine why it kept freezing up. They removed an extra memory card—not needed, as Doris said there was already more memory than needed; and also removed a RAM disk keeper, which allowed for extra disks to be applied to it. Put back together, they had some success accessing the hard drive, with an exception. On turning the unit off for a bit, and then restarting to see if all was in operating order, it failed to save the slot. Doris and Jim feel that the battery is dead, which is what causes this to happen.}

We also had a problem removing a disk from the drive. But with a small paper clip, large paper clip, and four people with input, the disk finally came free. Doris thought this problem might be due to the drive being a little dry, not having been used in some time.

Jim also had the time to install "Shrink It" in "George", Sister Samuel's IIGS. This program allows shrinkage of a program that is too extensive to fit on one disk.

submitted by Terry Harvey

April 2002 Desktop Publishing SIG by Nellie M. Gurrath

In attendance at the April 11, 2002, Desktop Publishing SIG: Marie Bellin, Glen Ehnert, Chris Gardner, Nellie Gurrath, Terry Harvey, Marilyn Land, Tom Livermore, Dick Reinhard, Mel Scherbarth, Sig Sigkowski, Karen Vogel, and Dale Voit.

We commenced with a discussion about the location of our meeting at Corporate Technologies, 9733 W. Greenfield Ave., Suite 206. Attendance at this interest group has become crowded; it can be quite warm in summer and is occasionally cold in winter. It was originally planned that participants could use the computers here but not everyone worked at the same speed so this was not continued. Corporate Technologies has always been very accommodating.

Marie Bellin gave us a better understanding of scanning along with the software program, PC Copy Center. Tom Livermore provided additional thoughts and suggestions. There are lots of scanning programs but it is necessary to have the scanner on for any of them to work. Some scanners go on right away; some open with a dialogue box. The lamp must warm up on scanners that are not on all the time. There is no booklet for ScanJet by Hewlett Packard except for the hook-up; use their website or "HELP."

IPhoto Plus was opened by going to File, Acquire, View, Photo Properties. An unlaminated family picture was pre-scanned. The scanned picture was then sent to iPhoto. By going to Selection, Magic wand, Control, Copy and Control Paste, then to Paint. We were shown how to use the Cloning tool to remove a spot on a face that resembled a scar. Hold the shift key down and left click where color change is wanted.

Now, you can run Paint or another graphics program and press Ctrl + V to paste the picture into the paint program. Or, if you're currently working on your newsletter, you can just paste the picture directly into your word processor. Then, as usual, do a "save as..."

submitted by Bruce Schneider

If you are running out of disk space, then you have several options to help clear the clutter quickly.

Before doing anything drastic, take these easy steps:

Delete any Readme files that you don't need.

Delete Help files that you don't need.

Delete old Internet Temporary Files.

Archive or delete old documents.

Check your Internet mail. If you have old mail you no longer need, delete it.

Remove old games you don't play anymore.

submitted by Sandy Karlovich

Internet SIG of the Meeting of May 16, 2002 by John Schoenfeld

John Schoenfeld asked for help in reading e-mail that was in his INBOX. He had downloaded his email from Earthlink and had read half of his mail. He then shut down his computer and logged back on later in the day. When he went back to his email he only saw a blank screen. All the unread emails had disappeared. A call to Earthlink's technical support offered no solution. We attempted to read his email from email reading programs at the following sites:

http://www.mailstart.com, http://www.web2mail.com, http://www.ureach.com,  http://www.earthlink.com,   http://www.webmail.com.

These are programs that allow you to read your email from any location. John didn't know his password to his email account so we were not able to retrieve his mail. We then went to Delphi forums at http://www.delphiforums.com/WAUC and posted a message there in hopes of finding a solution from other WAUC members.

Lucille Stahl asked whether she should upgrade her Norton Anti-virus from 2000 to 2002. The answer was "No." It's not necessary  unless it offers some feature she didn't have on her current version. She also mentioned that Norton was showing that Outlook Express was not protected but Outlook was protected.

We tried to find a website that Di Vukovich had emailed to Terry Harvey about a picture of the World Trade Center Twin Towers that is visible when a $20 bill is folded in a certain way. The site is: http://www.allbrevard.com/20bill.html.

A Google search engine was used to find the going price for an antique cast iron toy Ford Model T sedan that Ham Bailey wanted to know the value of. Sites we visited were http://www/kfritz.homestead.com  and http://www.bestfarmboys.com. We found Ham's toy to be selling for $550. We then tried Excite, Metacrawler, and Yahoo search engines with less success. The consensus of this group was that Google is the preferred search engine.

We also searched for CAST IRON "DECKER' MEAT" PIGGY BANK. We came up with many Black & Decker sites so we typed in CAST IRON "DECKER" PIGGY BANK BLACK & DECKER. By using the minus sign before the words Black & Decker, we were able to eliminate all those sites that didn't pertain to our search. We also substituted the word PIG instead of PIGGY and were more successful.

Les Saint suggested looking at a great genealogy site: http://www.rootsweb.com. There we typed some surnames, then clicked on WORLD CONNECT to locate family members.

To change your home page in Netscape, go to EDIT, PREFERENCES, NAVIGATOR, and type in the new web page address in the LOCATION box.

Next month we will look at movie trailers and learn how to use QuickTime Media Player. If Tom Livermore isn't working he will teach us how to use Yahoo Groups.

One place to pick up a lot of unwanted spam is in a newsgroup. Therefore, when you participate in a newsgroup, you should mask your e-maii address. For example, if your e-mail address is jane@wherever.com, enter it in the newsgroup as jane@delete_wherever.com.

With your e-mail address entered this way, people who need to send you e-mail. can see that they have to delete the "delete_" part of the address. Computer programs that troll for e-mail addresses aren't that smart.

submitted by Doris Regner

Before the demonstration at the May 1, 2002, PC SIG, there were a few questions. The first concerned the legality of sharing Print Artist Users Club graphics. The company is no longer in business, therefore we do not know of a legal means of purchasing the graphics. I mentioned that in the Apple II days, when major companies stopped supporting and distributing Apple II programs, the copyrights reverted to the individual programmers. If the same holds true for these graphics, who are we to contact for permission? No one has any idea at this point.

The other questions pertained to the topic at hand. Can you record music on any type of CD? Yes. Can you copy CD-Rs to CD-Rs? Yes. Orders were taken for CD-Rs.

Bill Regner demonstrated recording from cassette, vinyl, or radio to CD-Rs. He did mention that you should be able to plug RCA jacks into you stereo, but he hasn't had any luck, so he has made his own gizmo to plug "line in." He uses Audio Cleaning Lab by Magix, which he found on sale for $20. You start by clicking on "Record," and you can see the UV meter on screen (sound level). You can record from stereo or micro-phone or both (in case you want to add your voice to an instrumental track). Create the file to the folder of the group you are recording, click "Record" to record to the HD. Recording this way is not as memory-intensive as one would think, but cleaning up the track does get extremely memory-intensive. Bill's main interest is getting old vinyl transferred to CDs to archive them.

He used the radio to demo the program. Since a radio plays continuously, no tracks are set during the original recording. Bill added track markers, then when it came time to save in .WAV format, he chose to record each track as a separate file. This way, commercials and DJ chatter could be deleted, as well as the song tracks being separate. He could then drag the tracks together to eliminate pause between tracks. Audio Cleaning Lab has declicker, decrackler, denoiser, and dehisser, to clean up tracks. There are also Stereo FX, Compressor, Equalizer, and Direct X features. Bill sets the Equalizer for "Brightness," one of the preset means of enhancing the sound.

He was asked if you can record and edit an MP3 file? Yes. Once you set the parameters, you can burn a CD on the fly. You can also have tracks fade in and out. The program is simple to use. You do need to export an MP3 file as .WAV in order to edit it. Tom Livermore had a phone cable he let us use to get on the Internet; you do have to have Media Player open to download an MP3 file from the Internet. Then you can convert MP3 to CDA (CD Audio, .WAV music). Question: Will it loop? Yes. When you burn your CD, burn on Maximum speed, if you have trouble on high speed, slow it down, but if it can handle high speed, the quality is not affected.

Not all CD's recorded off a computer will play on a CD player, especially if the CD player is older; newer ones state whether or not they will play CD-R, CD-RW, or MP3's. The CD burned during the demo did play the converted MP3 and 2 radio tracks. There are other programs out to burn CD- ROMs. Nero has a drag and drop format to burn as an Audio CD, the software converted the files as they burned (this version of Nero did not have cleanup features, however). If you do not want the files converted to Audio CD, instead of saving, go to Export Audio, and choose the type. Make sure you are in Multi-session, if you want to add stuff to the CD later, do not select "Compile," as that will close the CD. CD Creator 5 is a more popular program than Nero, because most people found it easier to use (less confusing). CD Creator is Direct CD. You can also burn CD's from Media Player.

You can adjust volume in Audio Cleaning Lab, to get the volume of different songs in the same range. Audio Cleaning Lab has a cleanup wizard to help you. It runs on Windows ME, and should also run on Windows 98. You can save each track of a cassette as a separate file if you give it a different name. Bill recorded from the cassette to demonstrate how instantly the dehisser and denoiser work.

Eight members attended the SIG on May 9, 2002 at Corporate Technologies.

Terry was the presenter for this SIG and began with showing how to use the ACDSee program. This program can be downloaded on a trial basis from http://www.acdsystems.com. At this sight you may also sign up for a free subscription to their newsletter. ACDSee is advertised as a picture viewer, graphic converter and digital image management too! giving you the tools to acquire, view, organize, enhance, print and share images. The latest version is 4.0 at a cost of $49.95.

Chris Gardner allowed us to examine a number of boxes she had constructed. Chris first designs and stamps her paper for the project. From these papers she cuts a 7 inch square within which she marks off a 3¼ inch square (rotated 45 degrees), which forms the bottom of the box. Four slits are cut on the large square to the corners of the small square. These "wings" are then punched at the top and folded in on the sides about 1/4 inch. A ribbon is threaded through the holes and the sides drawn up to form a cute little box. Chris had made small cakes of scented soap to put in each box. These boxes could be used to present any number of small items.

Since this was a SIG on Print Artist we used the program to design a template for a pad of "Things To Do". We wanted 3 sheets per 8½ by 11 paper so we changed the program to "Landscape" and created a rectangle on the first third of the paper, allowing % in. margins where the printer will not print. Terry colored the shape yellow to make it easier to see. To make the lines she clicked on text and underscore and put one underline mark at the beginning of each line. By stretching she was able to drag all the lines to the end of the box. Next step was to create the little check off box. You can get. this shape in either Graphic Grabber or Basic Shapes; the difficulty was getting the little box to line up at the end of the line. By using Control D (duplicate), Terry was able to copy the first rectangle to the other two positions on the paper. We then removed the yellow fill and chose a different graphic for the top of each rectangle. Our project was complete ready to print, cut and assemble into pads of "Things To Do".

A member inquired about changing file associations. Terry went to Windows Explorer then to the file she wished to change and hi-lighted it. She then held down the shift key and using the right mouse button, clicked on the file and a drop down window opened. Here she clicked on "Open With" and the program she wanted to use to view the file. NOTE: be sure to check the box "always use this program" if you wish to make this a permanent change.