Notes of C&C Meeting 30 June 1998
The co-ordinator John Saxon welcomed 32 members. The meeting started
on time.
John announced that Derek Boyd had passed away last Sunday, aged 85.
Jim described his life's work. Derek joined the army in the UK in
1939 and afterwards went to South Africa . He put himself through
Medicine and practiced there and in Australia. He was a keen radio
ham. He had a great sense of humour and desperately wanted to leave
hospital and get back to his family and his computer friends.
Jim gave the ode. A period of silence followed in remembrance for
Derek. His kindly nature and remarkable enthusiasm will not be
forgotten by all who knew him at coffee and chat.
John welcomed new members, Margaret Docker and Bill Parish.
Margaret worked in Canberra Hospital and is new to computing. She is
keen to learn about word processing and the internet. She wishes to
communicate with friends and relatives in Canada.
Bill is interested in Genealogy and visual basic programming.
John said that he had an e-mail from VISE . Any one who is
interested in helping those in the bush to use computers to for
educational and other purposes should contact John Saxon. Gloria is
beginning a course with VISE soon so that she can teach others to do
this valuable work.
1.. Hard Disk purchase for Coffee and Chat.
By a majority show of hands it was agreed that CnC would buy a
removable hard disk for use in the club rooms to enable easier
demonstrations of software. Emil is to look after the hard disk. The
cost is expected to be below $250.. As C&C Treasurer Wolf indicated we
had the funds available for the purchase.
2 Photo editing.
Wolf showed us all his scanned photos and enhanced copies of a very
attractive subject. His equipment was an older Epson printer and a
HP scanner. The paper cost was about $1.50 per sheet for excellent
results in colour. A source of paper is " Debos" at 61 Kembla street
Fyshwick
3.. Modem problem
Tony has a problem with his modem which won't work at the suburb of
Spence although it works ok at another suburb! John suggested it was
a telephone line problem. Ted mentioned that Maestro company had
server phone number which will test the line between Maestro and your
phone. Just dial into using a terminal communication program and
type the command
AT131400
to get the free service. The result you get with newer
modems are as follows.
A LL (line length) of less than 40 is ok. The range is 28 to117
A SQ (signal quality) of 20 is a quiet volume and 30 is loud. The
range is 3 to 117
If you are able to alter the script of Twinsock then you can test of
the line every time you dial in.
At least that is possible in Win 3.1.operating system.
4. Neville mentioned a news item about ACTEW offering a
competitive internet service
sometime real soon.
5. Peter mentioned a program which made it easy to type special
characters like accents and degree symbols and send them over the
internet. Owen said that there was a replacement for "Notepad" which
had similar. features.
6. Norton's Utilities and Internet Banking
Jeff said that an upgrade for Norton's Utilities was 4 megabytes
larger than the original.He
had a problem installing it. He also said that the Microsoft
Communique magazine had W98 at the special price of $149. Others
quoted Chandlers price of $139 and The Sun Herald at $105 in an
advertisement.
Jeff also mentioned the Westpac banking program took a long time to
load. Owen said that the ANZ program had been very slow but it had a
128 byte encryption. security code built in. The cost was 10c per
transaction.
7. Internet book purchase
Mike showed a book( 'Bible') about the Flight Simulator program which
he bought on the internet from http://www.mazon.com. The saving was
about A$30 and it took 5 weeks to arrive . It was all too easy to
order two copies with their "one click ordering" system unless you
were careful. It found it difficult to undo his order to get only one
copy. But he succeeded.
8 Guest talked about refilling computer bubble jet cartridges.
John introduced Steve from the Cartridge factory at 49 Wentworth
Ave Kingston ACT . Phone 239 5259. He offers a 10% discount to PCUG
members.
Steve gave an interesting and valuable talk about refilling jet
printer cartridges. He had nine years experience and had developed
special sources of reliable ink for the various types of cartridges..
Epson were easy to refill. The Cannon brand were fairly easy to do
and HP were the most difficult.
The blue colour in HP colour cartridges migrated to alter the colour
appearance of the printed page.This problem could be avoided by
keeping the cartridge upright. Black & White HP cartridges were much
easier to refill. Lexmark printer cartridges were very difficult and
he would not refill them. Steve doesn't sell kits to replace ink.
Many general tips were given including the importance of the air hole
size A big hole led to high flow of ink and vice versa. A hair like
thin hole or one the same as originally present was best. So drill as
small a hole as possible when refilling cartridges on your own. Often
one only filled cartridges half full. A set of scales will tell you if
a cartridge is full or not.
An almost empty cartridge has remnant ink which will set hard if it
was allowed to dry. This meant that they couldn't be refilled . He
suggested wrapping the spent cartridge in "Glad Wrap" and not to
delay more than a day or so before refilling them One should never
put sticky tape over the jet head.
A blocked jet could be cleaned by careful application of a tissue to
the jet head to pull ink out of the cartridge.
The Cannon 7000 printer had very permanent ink. He tested all inks
over a long period of time by dunking the printed sheet in water,
allowing it to dry and noting any change.
One CnC member had seen a message that 'Superior' brand ink pad
ink could be used and that it was permanent although she had never
tried it.
:9 . A new driver for the Iomega disk drive
Jim passed to me for inclusion the following information on Iomega
Zip Drives as time prevented it being provided at the meeting: There
is a new software driver for the Iomega Zip drive version 5.03 for
W95/98.(A great improvement)
This is available at their site of www.iomega.com.
In addition they provide technical information about the problems
that some printers can cause to zip drives with a shared parallel
port. A list of printers and solutions are provided. Jim told me a
clean separate dedicated parallel port provided the best solution and
was relatively cheap to have installed.
Photos of the midwinter lunch were distributed .
The meeting ended at 11.38 am.
EBM & JH. 1 July 1998
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