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| Volume 21 | March, 2003 | Issue No. 03 |
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Regular Meeting
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Wednesday, March 19th. at 7:00 PM Caseyville Township Bldg. |
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Board |
Wednesday, April 2ed Ryan's Steakhouse Everyone is welcome |
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Part 3. "Advanced Digital Photography" Things to do with your digital camera and
photo. Managing your photos Note there is a chance that there may be a last minute substitute Demo. We will not know for sure until Wednesday evening......
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Next
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I don't know what the next demo will be. That will be decided
at the April 2ed Board Meeting. If you have any suggestions,
send Mike an email.... Maybe a session of fixing
or build or upgrading a PC. After all most of us brought
stuff at the show to make a bigger better something. And I'll
bet some of it does not work.
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Hello From The
Pres... |
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BE
GENTLE I wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be out of town the night
of the next general meeting. I’ll be flying back from
Phoenix, AZ. Jim Tomlinson, our vice president, will be filling
in for me so be gentle. It’s not his first time, but he
hasn’t done it for a while… I’m sure if everyone helps
out, he’ll do just fine… COMPUTER
SHOW WAS A SUCCESS Another show has come and gone. The good news is that we had another successful show. We added approximately 20-25 new members and we helped out hundreds of people that needed our help. I would like to thank everyone that helped out at the booth. Without you, we couldn’t do what we do… That goes for everyone that handed out GCC info to the people who answered technical questions and fixed computers. We needed all of you and we appreciate your willingness to spend the weekend helping others and the club. Thanks… BY-LAWS… We
reviewed the by-laws and constitution that J.C. had created and
tweaked them a little at the February board meeting. They were
very close to what we are looking for and we will have a
revised version put together very soon. After we get them
looking good, we’ll have to have a vote and officially adopt
them as our new by-laws and constitution. DIGITAL
PHOTOGRAPHY DEMO CONTINUED AGAIN Leonard
Hill our newsletter editor is going to finish up his digital
photography series of demonstrations and make sure that
everyone is a professional before the end of the night. This is
his third demo on digital photography and the first two were
very well received. Don’t miss this one… PRIZES
PRIZES PRIZES I
still have a bunch of good prizes for the 50-50 drawing so make
sure get to the meeting and take a chance on the great prizes. I won’t see you at the meeting, but please go anyway… Mike |
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The Treasurer's
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The Secretary's Report |
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Mike explained that the computer show will be the 7th, 8th & 9th of March at the Collinsville convention center. He clarified some of the changes that were being made. He outlined the procedures we have to follow, including the use of our badges. He also explained that we might be in the selling area instead of our usual location in the Center's lobby.
The following 25 minutes were devoted to a Q & A period which culminated with our usual door prizes. Carlos |
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The Membership
Chairman |
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| Number of Members in attendance last month | 65 (estimated) |
| Total Membership Before last month's meeting | 159 |
| Number Of Members joined last meeting | 009 |
| Number of members dropped | 000 |
| Current Total Membership | 168 |
| Number of Members in Good Standing | 134 |
| Number of Members With Late Dues | 034 |
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The Web Master |
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DC to DC converter Several of you have asked about the DC
to DC converters I talked about at the last meeting. DC to DC converters convert low voltage DC [typically 12 volts] to a higher DC voltage. The idea is you can run your laptop from your car directly from the DC to DC converter instead of using a DC to AC inverter then using your laptop's power supply to convert the AC back to DC. DC to AC back to DC is very wasteful [so you'll drain your car battery quicker] and will require an expensive DC to AC inverter. DC to DC converters are much cheaper, don't get nearly as hot and are much more efficient.
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The Computer
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See you at the meeting. Enjoy.....JT |
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Mitch's Corner |
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SPECIALFEATURE: SPAM SPAM SPAM..WONDERFUL SPAM.... OK... so the Monty Python song is about the meat (??) product. At least it got your attention. At any rate as horrible as Spam the food (???) is, at least you could keep your dog alive on it. The other spam doesn't do anyone any good. So here is a free, open source, easy to use app, that learns what you consider spam and throws it away automatically. This is built on a new intelligent Bayesian filter. Not only that, but it will file any other types or groups of email into any folder you choose. "POPFile is an automatic mail classification tool. Once properly set up and trained, it will work in the background of your computer, scanning mail as it arrives and filing it however you wish. You can give it a simple job, like separating out junk e-mail, or a complicated one - like filing mail into a specific folders. Think of it as a personal assistant for your inbox." About POPFILE http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ Download POPFILE; http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=63137 NOTE: For those of you using,
or considering, MOZILLA . "Mozilla 1.3 is now available for download. First there was image blocking,GET IT HERE!!!! http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3/mozilla-win32-1.3-installer.exe |
| Check out this months great links...... |
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Later,
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The
Librarian |
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I am sorry I missed last months meeting, but I was in no condition to drive to the meeting. The flu had me down for several weeks. I even missed the computer show. So you know I was sick. I will be at this meeting. We have two new CD's this month. The first is the actual demo from last month: "Intermediate Digital Photography". The second is the video of the demo. Both will be available at the meeting. New club members should check out our library collection on the website. I will also have the CD catalogs available at the table. They contain more information about each CD. You may pickup one and browse it during the meeting. Needless to say, they must be returned. Remember, the CD's cost only a dollar. We're doing this to make everyone a better more productive computer users, not to raise money. The dollar covers our production cost. Club CD's are only sold to club members. Please do not buy them for your friends or relative who are not members. |
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The Editor |
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Another busy month has almost concluded. Lots of new members
joined last month, and many members renewed their
membership. That meant making new badges and repairing
several of the damaged badges. The badges had to be completed in
time for the show. Then there was three very busy days and nights at the
computer show. The newsletter had to be finish, and the
postcards had to be sent. The CD on intermediate
digital Photography had to be completed and sent for
duplication. Then the final demo on digital photography had to
be pulled together. I'm glad this month is over. Things will lighten up after I finish the final demo.
I haven't even had enough time to play with some of the new play toys I got at the show. You will see one of them below. Check out the computer show pictures. I still have a new machine to build and several HD to setup. If any member does not want to continue receiving post card reminders of the club meeting, please send me an email. Please use the icon above in the box by my name. I have made some changes to the mailing list that now make it easy to omit mailing to any member that does not want to receive a postcard. I still plan to send email reminders. If you are interested in a FREE calendar program, I have one that I highly recommend. While it is not fancy, it can display the days of any month and year you want. It will even let you create event reminders that will popup when the date is reached. Click the image to see it full sized. The file is 339 K so it will not take a long time to download. To use the program, just put it some place convent and click on it. It does not install anything on your system.
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Miscellaneous |
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Michigan Man Uses Junk FAX Law to Sue Sears Over Spam
Under the Junk Fax law it is unlawful for any person within the United States to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine. And a person may bring action against anyone who violates this law, in a state court, if permitted, to recover the greater of actual monetary loss or $500.00 in damages for each violation. CLICK HERE To read the entire article. Here is your chance to become a millionaire. PS, I expect a cut....
Windowing OS for really old systems New life for your old Commodore 64, Apple, and Trash 80 computers. The Contiki desktop environment is a highly portable, modern, open source, Internet-enabled operating system and desktop environment for very small systems written by Adam Dunkels.
Contiki was originally written for the Commodore 64 system (1 MHz 8-bit 6510 CPU, 64 k RAM) but ports to a lot of systems are currently being developed by a bunch of developers: 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment system, PCEngine, Gameboy, Atari 8-bit, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Apple ][, VIC-20, CBM PET, Plus/4, Tandy CoCo, Sharp Wizard, Casio PocketViewer, Sega DreamCast and the Sony Playstation.
The computer show was a lot of fun and a whole lot of work. Just ask anyone who worked the booth. We fixed a lot of computers, and signed up xx new members in the process thanks to Beverly Krieb's great efforts. Click on the above link and visit the show. We have a bunch of stills and two video clips. NOTE...the video clips require you to have Windows Media player installed on your machine. Don't worry, you probably have it.
Cute, unusually, and why would you want one STUFF Every wonder what you can do with the USB port on your computer. Well we found these interesting and unusual thing. Several of the items are only available in Japan. Don't worry, you don't need to read Japanese to understand these web pages. The pictures fully explain everything.
This site features the latest technology. Some of this could be a life saver if things go very wrong. Remember technology is relative.
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The Lighter
Side |
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This one seems most appropriate.
Especially since the computer show just ended.
Now here some advice on what you can do with that old computer you
just replaced.
We saw and worked on several of these at the computer show.
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If
you have something you want to share, just send it to me
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