Wellington Meeting, 20 December, 2006

The final meeting of the year promises to be a fascinating one. As well as the refreshments one has come to expect at this time of year, members will be asked to log on to their favourite websites and show others why they admire those particular sites. It should be a lot of fun.

Hutt Meeting for 11 December 2006

While there is nothing specifically planned for this final meeting of the year, there will be Christmas cake and non-alcoholic beverages as befits the festive season so, as always, all members are welcome to come along and join in at the Moera Community House.

Wellington and Hutt Meetings for November,2006

Firstly, please note that the Hutt meeting has been postponed for a week, so that it will now take place on the 20th of this month.

Nathan Mercer, from Microsoft New Zealand, is going to talk to both meetings this month about Windows Vista, the operating system that is going to replace XP and which should be available very shortly.

This is an opportunity to find out the very latest on what many feel is going to be Microsoft’s finest operating system. Nathan will be only too happy to answer all your questions, so if you can’t make one of the meetings, be sure you are free to attend the other.

Meeting at St Giles on 18th October, 2006

Jim Oliver is going to discuss the problems involved in video editing. Jim’s knowledge in this area is held in high regard, so do come along and learn the secrets involved in what can often appear to be a rather complicated operation.

Wellington Meeting for Wednesday, 20th September

This month’s meeting is what we tend to call a Brainstrust evening. That means that Roger Currier will preside and will attempt to provide answers to your current computer problems, and perhaps succeed in solving them when others have failed.
No problem will be considered too difficult, whether it be software or hardware related, so come along to St Giles and get those anwers you’ve been searching for.

Hutt Meeting for September, 2006

If you missed NZPCA member Ken Chandler’s talk on the voice recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking, given at St Giles last month, or would simply like to hear it again, Ken will be addressing the Hutt meeting at Moera on the same topic this coming Monday evening.
This is quite amazing software so we shall hope to see you at the Moera Community House at around 7:30 p.m.

Hutt SIG Meeting at Moera for 14th August

The Hutt SIG meeting on Monday will be really interesting.

There will be a presentation and discussion about Megabyte on TiddlyWiki, including a demonstration of the document running from CDROM. This is a very impressive way of publishing non-linear documents.

Also covered: using portable applications (these are applications that can run from USB keys) and why you might want to do this, with particular emphasis on Firefox web browser and some of the things that this is capable of. We'll try and cover some of the important Firefox extensions.

Extra: a video of Jeff Han demonstrating multi-touch computer input at TED earlier this year. This is a different video to the one shown at Wellington recently so don't miss this.

MegabyteTW on CDROM downloads

I have uploaded a zip file containing the files required to make a copy of MegabyteTW running on CDROM. You can download from here (it is ~9MB):

http://rss.openomy.com/download/get/1254

or use the link to the right (megabyteTW20060810.zip).

The file is also available at http://www.box.net/public/077rvqesry if you have trouble downloading from openomy; you will have to sign in to box.net, but this is an interesting service anyway and well worth a visit.

Just unzip the archive to a temporary directory (preserve path information), and write the files to the root directory of your CDR - autorun.inf has to be there or it won't work.

You can also try this out without burning a CDR by running startmobilefirefox.exe from the temporary directory.

You should see a splash screen then MegabyteTW launches full screen - you can toggle between this view and a normal window using F11.

This all works for me on the systems I've been able to try this on, but I'd appreciate feedback about how it works for you.

Megabyte Online

There is a rough concept version of Megabyte in TiddlyWiki at http://tiddlyspot.com/megabyte - if you have a modern browser (Internet Explorer 6 or newer, Firefox, Opera etc) and javascript enabled, have a look. I'd appreciate any feedback you can offer. Be aware that this web page is large, so you'll need to be patient if you are on dialup, however once the page has loaded navigation is extremely fast. You can save the page locally to your hard drive if you wish (use this link http://tiddlyspot.com/?action=download&site=megabyte) to avoid the delay next time you access it - since the page is self contained, it makes absolutely no difference whether you access the page locally or on the web server.

You can explore the document's features, in particular be sure to try the search and browsing by tags. You might also be interested in editing - just create a new tiddler or double click on any existing article to edit it. Articles for 2003 and 2006 have been added, with some articles for 1991 and 2004 partially added at this stage. If you'd like to help with adding content, let me know.

Hutt Meeting for Monday, 10th July

Perce Harpham will talk about his "Travellers Mandarin" webpages that have been set up to help teach the language to interested people. He will also discuss the problems of marketing on the Internet and ask for people’s opinions on how to both make business contacts and improve the sales potential of software.
This should be a most interesting evening and one with a difference so come to the Moera Community House, Moera (behind the library) where the presentation will begin shortly after 7:30 pm.

Wellington Meeting for June, 2006.

In May the Hutt SIG was privileged to hear Maarten Kleintjes, National Director of the E-Crimes section of NZ Police, discuss all manner of illegal electronic activity whether it be associated with the Internet, ATMs or any other particularly where money is concerned.

It is now Wellington’s turn to hear how devious some people can be, so don’t miss this meeting on the 21st at St Giles as it is in everyone’s interest to know how to protect themselves when on-line or at a money machine.

Useful backup links (from Hutt SIG meeting)

For those unable to attend the Hutt SIG meeting last monday, the following links may be useful:

Cobian Backup: http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

Karen's Replicator: http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

Xxcopy: http://www.xxcopy.com/index.htm

SyncBack Freeware: http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware

FullSync: http://fullsync.sourceforge.net/index.php

LifeHacker Guide: http://www.lifehacker.com

Hardware: http://www.ascent.co.nz/ProductSpecification.aspx?ItemID=337133

Other links at: http://del.icio.us/hindesite/backup and http://del.icio.us/tag/backup

Hutt Meeting for June 2006.

This coming Monday (12th), John Foster is going to host an evening involving backup programs, with special emphasis on the freeware variety.
If you have any special backup program that you would like to share with others, and possibly even discuss, bring it along and John will load it into the club’s Acer laptop, along with the others he hopes to download as a result of suggestions from members.
It should prove to be a most interesting evening as there are bound to be differences of opinion as to which is the best program for the job, and an important job it is.
We do all back up our software, don’t we?

Hardware SIG Saturday meetings.

The Hardware SIGs meeting for the Saturday 4th June has been moved to Saturday the 11th June.
This is to allow the Hardware SIG members to attend John Hand's 70th birthday.
John.
Many happy returns for the big 70. May all your troubles be small ones.

Wellington Meeting at St Giles, 17th May, 2006

This month's meeting will cover web publishing for non-professionals, and will include a quick look at GooglePages, Blogger, other places to create and publish your content online; a quick tour of some popular blogs, and what RSS has to do with all of this.

There will be frequent breaks to view interesting videos, and a 95% chance that you won't see any html code at any stage of the meeting.

Free blogs given away at the end of the evening, come along and get one!

May Megabyte online now

Latest Megabyte is online, see it in colour on your monitor today.

http://www.openomy.com/download/nzpca/MegabyteMay2006.pdf

Previous Megabyte issues are available online, see the column on the right of this page.

Hutt meeting for 8th May

We have Maarten Kleintjes, National Manager E-Crime Laboratory of the New Zealand Police coming to talk to us on Monday 8th May 2006 at 7:30 p.m.
This should prove to be a very interesting evening.

Wellington Meeting at St Giles, 19th April, 2006

Whilst on one of his overseas trips, our President procured a splendid piece of architectural software entitled "Chief Architect" and he is going to demonstrate many of its features.

Budding builders or those simply interested in carrying out relatively moderate extensions to their homes should not miss this opportunity to find out just how good this sort of software can be, so come along to St Giles this coming Wednesday.

7:30pm for an 8.00pm start. See you there!

Hutt SIG Meeting at Moera for 10th April

Jim Oliver is bringing along a number of his "Video Guide" DVDs to show us on Monday night. These contain numerous "How to" topics, such as Setting up a Wireless Network, Formatting Excel, Setting up Tables in Word, Video Conversion and Bit Rate – to mention just a few. Jim has half a dozen such discs and will try and select topics that are of general interest.

This promises to be a fascinating evening, so mark it in your calendar.

NZPCA Meetings 13th and 15th March at Moera and St Giles, respectively

David Edwards is going to talk to both meetings this month about a topic he feels strongly about: Internet security. A visit in 1999 to the SHIELDS UP section at the Gibson Research Centre gave David cause to be concerned about his own computer settings and it presented him with much food for thought. Learning from the experience, he will explain some simple ways to make Internet exposure safer for everyone, so make sure you receive this worthwhile advice by attending at least one of these meetings.

First Meetings for theyear in February at Moera and St Giles

Firstly, may I wish all NZPCA members, and others, who read this a Happy New Year. Jim Oliver is going to address both groups next month. At the Hutt, on the 13th, he is going to discuss the various graphics formats that we are familiar with – like BMP, GIF and JPG -- and perhaps a few that we don’t use so often! In contrast, the meeting in Wellington two days later will replicate the talk on Bit Torrent that he gave at Moera in November. This topic requires a broadband connection to the Internet to be effective and one using Whoosh wireless technology will be used for the occasion. Robin Hinde checked that technology out at the Christmas party and found the reception at St Giles to be perfectly satisfactory.

Both meetings should be full of interest and we all know that Jim is an excellent speaker, so we hope to see you all at one or the other --- or both!

Megabyte PDFs

As an experiment, the last three Megabyte issues are available as pdf files, by clicking on the links in the right hand column of this weblog.

These links will automatically update themselves as new issues of Megabyte are put onto the server at Openomy, but will only show the lastest three issues. We can arrange for the full backlog of isssues to be made available if people particularly want this, and they can be automatically updated on another page on this weblog.

For those that are interested, this is all done by the use of RSS - Openomy is a new, experimental service that offers 1GB of free online storage, with an open API designed so that others can write applications to manage and view the files stored there. The system allows people to apply tags to files they store there. One of the first applications written gives the ability to pull out files as an RSS feed, which then populates the list you see on the right.

Comments and questions or suggestions welcome.