Minutes of the Meeting held 11 September 2001
Posted for MaureenJ
1) Long picture Ted M,
Topic 1a A long picture
A set of three Canon 7100 colour printer photographs
glued to make a single 81 cm photo was shown. It was of a 360 degree view
of a room.
It originally consisted of about 9 photographs that were taken with a Canon
Ixus digital camera and 'stitched' together to make one photograph with
software that came with the camera.
It was pointed out that a digital camera was not needed to make such
a picture as any camera would do. Several software programs were available
called 'Quickstitch', Photostitch' and 'Photostudio' which would do the
same job. It was necessary to overlap the photos by about 10% to allow the
program to correctly stitch the photos together. Rick made suggestions on
how to join photos. i.e make one of the joined edge irregular, stick
together with 'magic tape. JS suggested that you could preposition the
photos with
removable tape at the back. Jeff suggested using an Exacto type knife and a
steel ruler to cut the edges cleanly.
b Compacting the registry
ebm had an error code panel which regularly occurred on
starting windows 98. The error panel said that the registry checker had
found an
error and offered to restart the computer and repair the registry. If the
window was
moved out of the way instead of obeying the offer, the computer worked ok.
An answer was seen in a magazine saying that the registry needed compacting
with the windows program 'regedit.exe'. The question asked was had anyone
had that problem and had anyone compacted their windows registry. The answer
was no.
c There are 250,000 images available at a new Google site.
There is a good site for
images. the site was mentioned in the TRS-80 club magazine recently. It is
associated with the search engine 'Google' . The web address
is http://images.google.com/
ebm
2) Biscuits, received the following from Anne,
I sought for a volunteer to provide biscuits for the meeting on 25
September as I would be in Sydney seeing a specialist. John Saxon
volunteered.
I also enquired why the version of "Omnipage" used on my Hewlet Packard
scanner could not cope with columns of text and seemed to be working very
poorly. I was advised that I was not using my software properly as
"Omnipage" should be opened before I attempted to scan anything, and the
material scanned then imported into the program. Greg also mentioned that
to scan columns effectively I needed "Omnipage 9" which was available at
the markets for $50.
3) Various items, the following imput is from John S
.
A. I described trying 3 different programs that I tried to send pictures
with associated thumbnails as web pages. My Album - is a great program - but
I always seem to run into problems with generated HTML code - this time the
thumbnails seemed to be too small and offset nearly out of sight to the
right of the frame. Then tried Irfanview - this has a feature to save the
thumbnails with associated HTML code - but again ran into some difficulties
and the code needed lots of modification - but it does show promise. Finally
used "Thumbsplus" which again needed much code modification and used lower
case no spaces file naming convention - Irfanview used the reverse
convention - so as all pictures had been FTP'd for Irfanview - 44 files
needed their names changed on TIP. One day I'll find a painless process. It
was mentioned that FrontPage 2000 has a good facility for this process -
will try it one day.
B. I also mentioned a method of making simple emergency boot floppies for
WinME which does not use RAM Disk like the normal emergency disks - so it is
much quicker and less confusing than a Win 98 recovery disk. The process is
detailed at
www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/software/windows/winme/startup/print.html These
disks will allow you to boot to DOS - this capability has been removed from
WinME (and presumably from WinXP) so if you need to run an old DOS "real
mode" program - you need one of these disks. MervC has a "special" emergency
boot disk with multiple CDROM drivers in case your CDROM cannot use the
"generic" MS Oak driver.
C. Of course I also put in another word for the great VISE concert on 20th
Oct - I still have a few tickets left!
4) Transact Cable G.Mc
5) DPI Lasers G.Mc
6) Emails MJ
Requested information on how to send and receive emails when away from home.
John S gave me the address of www.thatweb.com and TedM the address of
www.mail2.com . Other members, also explained that it was also possible to
keep an address book with them. Have tried both services at my local
library and have been delighted with the results.
7) Regular PCUG Committee Report John A
8) BBQ Alan M
It was agreed to have another BBQ in Edison Park, Phillip, the date to
be arranged later. Anne and Gloria will co-opt members to help with
the catering.
9) Database Packages Simon
.
Experiences from others who had used various packages to run membership
databases suggested that, while Microsoft Access seemed the obvious package,
for a small flat file type (with no relational tables) it may be simpler to
use Excel or, if money (subscriptions, etc) is involved, even a package like
MYOB may be better as it supports banking.
10) Networking Bob S
11) Colour print demo. Following is a message from Jeff
I would like to help members to optimise the quality of the colour pictures
they print from scanned images or digital photographs. I have submitted an
article to 16 Bits describing an optimisation procedure but there is
probably much
in the procedure that would be better understood with a demonstration.
Accordingly I am happy to provide a demonstration at my O'Connor home at a
mutually convenient time and invite anyone interested to give me their name
and e-mail address (jmcolw@pcug.org.au) so that I can arrange something.
12) Influenza New Info John A
Flu analysis software.
The following sites cover the story of the research with regard to the 1918
flu pandemic. There is no discussion of the software. I will consider
writing an article for 16 Bits or give an illustrated talk if there is
sufficient interest.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0109/08/review/review10.html
http://www.msnbc.com/news/624982.asp
http://asia.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/09/06/aust.health.influenza.re
ut/
http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0109070364sep07.story?coll=c
hi-printnews-hed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54901-2001Sep6.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/
13) Battery Pack RobS
14) Printing Photos from John K
14a - Colour Prints refer item 11 as well -
What I did was to scan at 300 DPI, print on to photo paper and I could not
tell the difference.
My set up is a Epson Perfection 610 Scanner and Canon BJC7100 printer. Scan
using Presto Page manager and Epson Twain (supplied with scanner). Printer
driver recently upgraded from Canon web site. Everybody owning a Canon
printer should do this. Printer was first run on plain paper with a
standard three colour cartridge and then with a six colour photo cartridge.
The photo cartridge gave slightly brighter colours and appeared to give
greater depth to the print a more vivid / realistic image but if both prints
had not been side by side would have accepted the three colour print as very
good quality. When printed on photo paper I could not tell the difference
between original Australian Geographic Cover and the printed image, even at
300 dpi scan there was no visible grain when printed and all the fine detail
of the original image was there. The only settings that were adjusted were
the application of smoothing in the printer driver settings ie 'Quality tab'
image optimiser and photo optimiser set on as recommended by Canon for
scanned images 'Colour tab' Output Styles set to Auto. All other settings
were as per the standard default "super photo" printing setting for glossy
photo paper. The slight difference was that my print had a very very pale
colour wash to the white at top and bottom of image which Jeff did not have
on his.
Another example was shown using Adobe Photo Deluxe personal edition (again
supplied with scanner) to remove unwanted detail from a photo and replace
with cloned images. Again could not see where the image had been changed.
This was an emailed image of a photo from "Photo Express" quality was again
very acceptable but if looked at closely not quite as sharp, probably as
these are scanned at 150dpi. Yet have to check against the actual print.
Nevertheless better quality than you would get from the cameras that most
people have. My daughter has an Canon SLR with a quality lens.
Item 14b
The second meeting of the Daytime Investment Sig (2nd Wednesday at PCUG
centre all welcome) was held on Wednesday with a good turn out - coordinator
is Dieter Amelung (I was standing in for Dieter who was spending some of
last years trading profits in Cairns). There was some discussion on format
of meeting and while I will have to talk to Dieter the consensus view was we
should cover a spread of Technical and Fundamental Analysis. I indicated I
am prepared to give a regular talk on an aspect of Technical Analysis and do
it in the form of a structured training approach if that is what members
want. We will need somebody or some people to talk on fundamentals as that
is neither Dieter's or my area of expertise, and somebody to research
particular shares. When Dieter gets back I will discuss with him and we
should finalise at next meeting. Discussed in some detail the potential
effects of the latest news and looked at the last 100 years of the Dow, a
range of shares, Market indicators local and overseas, a brief discussion on
options and structured trading.
Item14c
The address for mailwasher is www.mailwasher.net a New Zealand freeware
program that enables you to review your email before you download it - you
can delete any from the server before downloading and it can send a message
indicating that your email address does not exist, good unwanted repeat bulk
mailers. Program seems to be good but I have had a couple of system crashes
when using it (complexities of my system I think) but only of minor
annoyance.
15) National Ballet School set up Web page Geoff Hunter
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