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 ********************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, including archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable. ***********************************************************
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