I don't go to the BBS very often these days, once a
fortnight to post these notes. However others do and it was a surprise
to read from Leon Buker, who had replied to some of the queries from
the last lot of notes. We haven't seen Leon for some time, and all
wish him well in his Uni course.

          The first of Leon's comments was to do with the Adobe
electronic printing system. As it was, Darrell Burkey had brought
along a print from netscape of a magazine page done on Wolf's Lieske
720dpi printer. It was an eye opener, and all those that saw it were
extremely impressed. We all look forward to the main meeting at the
end of the month to see what other tricks Adobe can do.

          Darrell Burkey related a story of a long lost musical album
which had now drifted into the collectors category and way past his
budget. Then he found http://www.cdnow.com which he described as
possibly one of the best shopping places on the internet, and by the
way, found a cd version of his album. Other sites were mentioned,
http://www.amazon.com for books, and http://wwwgky.com.au for computer
hardware.

          This led to a discussion on credit card fraud, for those
that want to know, apparently you can get this information off the
internet, it's bundled with other enlightening Howtos, like how to
make your own bomb!

          Jim Hume had a glossy brochure from Australia On Line, but
very careful reading showed nowhere, the $5.00 an charge. 

         The skite of the week came from Gordon Urquhart who had built
himself a 133MHz Pentium with 32 Meg of RAM, 8Speed CD, 2 meg video
card and other bells and whistles for about $2000. He gave a run down
of his problems, but did not find the experience too daunting for a
person like himself with limited technical knowledge. Well done
Gordon.

          Valerie Sturesteps had a problem, she wanted to measure the
physical characters of a cat and thought she would print a picture of
a cat out on her 9 pin dot matrix printer and do the measuring there.
All attempts to print it failed. It was either squashed up or
elongated, and even from DOS, couldn't get a print. Quite a lot of
interesting, if complicated solutions were offered, the most promising
being to screen capture it and drop it into Paintbrush. Valerie will
no doubt tell us how she got on, but her immediate problem was solved
by doing the measuring off the screen.

          Mike Dinn had a query about Quick Tax, but several others
had been there and done that, if you have a 1995 version of Quick tax,
they automatically send you for free, the 1996 upgrade, however if you
wish to print it out, then you must pay and get the print program.

          Charli Rann gave us a report of his visit to ADFA,, under
the aegis of the Institute of Engineers, where a demonstration of the
WWW was presented. Charlie is now getting interested in the other
aspects of the Internet.

          Ken Meadows is still thinking of buying a colour printer
(color for youse yanks out there). Wondered what the cost
effectiveness of replacing the jets with each refill cartridge(as
required by the HP 820) Considerable discussion, but I am not sure if
any conclusion was made. This tied in nicely with Gordon Urquhart's
colour paper investigations, he had brought along several prints from
various machines and  on different paper. It's interesting to note the
variations, and the lesson I would suggest is to really spend your
time evaluating printers, associated costs and performance. Wolf's
colour dot matrix printer seems to be the best of all, what is it
Wolf?????

          Keith Sayers had a problem with Windows, it couldn't find a
file like win20.386. He was given plenty of advice, so no doubt he
will tell us next time if it worked.

          At the last main meeting, the demo showed how to set up the
Word Processor to convert capitals to lower case and vice versa. Peter
Hodge has been trying to emulate this feat for a week, but with out
success. Again, lots of friendly advise. 

         Lots of coffee was drunk, Derrick Boyd turned up using only
one walking stick, Geoff Mierisch was there, Cliff Manley was
introduced as the Editor in Chief of August's Sixteen Bits, Jim Ingram
was a new PCUG member, and C&C member. Haven't seen Neville Anderson
for a month, so hope he is ok, maybe he will make the next meeting
which is 20 Aug 1996.

          Oh, don't forget the virtual C&C next Tuesday, see
http://www.pcug.org.au/~ejoseph/ for the details

Cheers

Owen

          


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