CyberCoyote - February 16, 2006

NEWS

If you weren't there yesterday, you missed the most important election of the day. :-) The Results? Our Nominating Committee's slate of officers was accepted. The officers are: Carol Butler - President; George Jester - Vice President; Steve Gray - Secretary; and Don Worthen - Treasurer. (Only Chuck Tomlinsion gets time off for good behavior.) We know they will be a great team.

Budget: We'll either have an enlarged Chaparral Room, or we'll move our weekly meeting to NC-2 next year. Either way will cost money. We also want to transition to Windows Vista. It looks as if we'll want to spend $3,000 - $4,000 next season. We can easily meet that (and other expenses) with our revenue plus our current cash position [$3,274].

CLASSES

Signup continues for the repeat of the 2-day "Windows Registry" class. It's scheduled for Feb. 27 and Mar. 1, from 1:00 - 3:00 PM in the Computer Room. $4 fee.
http://cybercoyote.org/classes/registry/index.html -- Class Notes

The last Windows XP class for the year is scheduled for March 20, 22, 24, 27 and 29, at 1:00 - 3:00 in the computer room. $10 fee.

TIPS and TOPICS

Gail King demonstrated how to set up a printer on a local network so that you can share it between computers. Windows XP is well suited to the task, but it takes perseverance to get it all set up. You also need a "router", which you'd have if you're already sharing your Internet connection. Each computer should have a firewall too. If you weren't at the meeting, or didn't get all the details, you can get instructions by going to "Start" > "Help and Support" > and searching for... "sharing printers".

COMPUTERS

It'll soon be time to stop looking for a Pentium chip inside your computer. If it's Intel based it will have something like an Intel 630 or Intel D 930. The 630 is a 3.0GHz single-core chip and the D930 is a dual-core 3.2GHz chip. (Personally, I'd look for a computer with an AMD Athlon or dual-core Opteron.) Not that it matters all that much -- any ole processor is good enough for most of us these days. :-)
http://tgdaily.com/2006/01/15/intel_drops_pentium_brand/
http://cybercoyote.org/url/162.html -- more about choosing a new computer

Newegg.com is my favorite technology supplier -- monitors, cameras, CPUs, DVD drives, cables, mice, motherboards, keyboards, printers, you-name-it -- Fry's on steroids. I don't think I've ever had a problem there. If you have a high-speed connection and are curious you'll enjoy a virtual tour of one of their big "order-fulfillment" warehouses.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2694
http://newegg.com/

SECURITY

If you've been meaning to do something better about online security, but it looks like the job is too big there are easier alternatives.
http://cybercoyote.org/security/intro.shtml#alt

"Be your own antivirus scanner!"
http://www.pcdoctor-guide.com/wordpress/?p=2288

DOWNLOADS

"Picasa is a must-have application for everyone who owns a digital camera. This wonderful piece of software offers simple photo management tools with various sorting options and photo labeling (meta data) capabilities, and provides simple yet powerful photo editing tools that even true beginners can use. You can launch slide shows, create collages, send photos to blogs and Web sites, order prints, and perform virtually any other photo-related task you can think of. I especially like the way the application blurs in the background when a dialog pops up, to ensure you're focused on the right thing."
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/google_pack.asp -- scroll 3/4 of the way down
http://www.winsupersite.com/ -- Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

PC Inspector's "File Recovery" is a nice program to have on hand when you inadvertently delete that file that you really wanted to keep:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

DIVERSION

A bolt from the blue (and more "bolts" of all sorts):
http://teslamania.delete.org/frames/longarc.htm#Pos-Lightning1

You can track the real-time progress of any airline flight at "FlightAware", but there are more interesting things at the site, for example, the All Flights Movie. 5,000 flights at once is a mind-boggling vista.
http://flightaware.com/
http://flightaware.com/analysis/allflights_movie.rvt