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Veteran's Memorial Hospital
Room 1613A
Corner of Robie Street and Jubilee Road
Halifax, N.S.
Next General Meeting -
7 January 1995, 7:00 pm
Feature Event -
Our Fourth Annual Swap Meet
Commencing in January 1996 the regular monthly meetings of the Society will be held in Room 1613A of the Veteran's Memorial Hospital (VMH) at the corner of Robie Street and Jubilee Road, Halifax. The planning meetings will be held in a different room in the same building. These facilities are provided at no cost to the Society.
There is underground parking available at the VMH at a cost of $1.10 /hour. For anyone who wishes to use it, the elevator from the parking area takes you directly to the lobby. The parking bill is paid to the concessionaire in the lobby when you go to return to your car. There is also parking available on the nearby streets. Both Robie Street and Summer Street have parking meters, and at our meeting time on Sunday evening they are most likely to be uncontested by others.
Veteran's Memorial Hospital, Room 1613A
Corner of Robie and Jubilee Road, Halifax, N.S.
This document is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within the past three months. Yearly membership dues are $15.00. The text of the newsletter is available on Chebucto Community Net and local bulletin boards.
We would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
This month's Newsletter is a bit different than the usual. We felt it was important to advertise our meeting location change. This issue was also sent out to anyone who has been to a member in the past two years and to non-members who have attended a meeting since September 1994.
The next meeting will be our first at the Veteran's Hospital. It is our annual swap meet. The end of January meeting will feature a demonstration of how to use modem for various tasks. In February we will look at assorted Tax programs, seeing as it is that time of year.
We also decided to continue our sponsorship of a line at the Chebucto Community Net for another year.
P.O. Box 185, Stn. Main
Dartmouth, N.S.
B2Y 3Y3
Commencing in January 1996 the regular monthly meetings of the Society will be held in Room 1613A of the Veteran's Memorial Hospital (VMH) at the corner of Robie Street and Jubilee Road, Halifax. The planning meetings will be held in a different room in the same building. These facilities are provided at no cost to the Society.
We owe our thanks to Diane Smith who negotiated the details on behalf of the Club. Reservations for the desired space have been made until the end of June 1996.
There is underground parking available at the VMH at a cost of $1.10 /hour. For anyone who wishes to use it, the elevator from the parking area takes you directly to the lobby. The parking bill is paid to the concessionaire in the lobby when you go to return to your car. There is also parking available on the nearby streets. Both Robie Street and Summer Street have parking meters, and at our meeting time on Sunday evening they are most likely to be uncontested by others.
Further information may be obtained from Dave Hackett at 835-3894, CIS:71650,2646 or from Carey Rolfe at 462 4551 or e-mail - rolfe@ra.isisnet.com.
5 1/4 Floppy Drive in prime condition. $40.00 obo
Call 465-5729 (evenings please)
An ad will normally only appear once but let me know if you need it repeated. Ads can be given to me at meetings or give me a call two weeks to ten days before the next general meeting (newsletter deadline).
The joys of a bigger display
After labouring at the keyboard of a 386/33 running Windows 3.1 and DOS for the last four years I have acquired a new machine. Aside from the fact that it will run Windows 95 and OS/2, and things seem to go a lot more quickly, the most pleasing feature to me is the 17 inch monitor. The useable area is almost twice that of my old 13 inch monitor. The new Windows programs like to leave open windows scattered all over the screen, and now there is room to place them all so that at least a corner of each can be found when I want to look at one of them. Anyone considering a new machine today should definitely stretch the budget a few more dollars and get a larger screen. The 17 inch monitor today costs about the same as a VGA monitor did when they first came out. Machrone's law (Machrone of PC Magazine) states "The computer you really want always costs $5000."
by John Howard Oxley
This time I am actually going to get around to commenting on some utility programs, but with a slightly different focus -- by reviewing how I handle a typical CD-ROM full of shareware from the Public (software) Library. Every month I receive one of these disks in the mail, with about 1,000 programs and files on it. Many of the programs simply are not of any interest to me (like the seemingly interminable number of BBD door add-ons), some are for OS/2, and some are simply text or graphic files (possibly useful, but not part of the current discussion). The review platform at the time was a dual P-90 with 32Mb memory and a 1 Gb hard disk running WINDOWS NT, with some reference to a 486DX/66 running WfWg 3.11 in the case of compatibility issues. Of all these programs, just over two dozen made it to my hard disk. Here's how they fared:
Disk Librarian 2.2: The whole issue of diskette cataloguing programs is one I would like to investigate Real Soon Now, because with today's proliferation of software, some means of keeping track of all our disks is needed. In this case, the program was severely limited in capacity, which was unable for catalogue contents of archived files. Since that capability is essential to me, I did not consider the program further.
HexEdit 1.1: A 32-bit [i.e. WINDOWS NT] file editor, particularly helpful for editing group and other non-text control files -- retained for further investigation.
WinCat/Pro 4.0: Another diskette cataloguer, this one for WINDOWS, and one which in its earlier manifestations has caused me no end of grief because of deep and fatal bugs. This version is a considerable improvement, and passed the "killer" test I have for CD-ROM cataloguing [a CD-ROM with 640Mb of .ZIP files which apparently has some 70,000 files on it]. Unfortunately it does not enable a direct search for archived file contents [so you can't find that WHATSUP.DOC, for example, is part of the file BUGSBUNY.ZIP]. The archive pack with about 3,000 archived files in this sample was 1.14Mb; since I have at least 30 times that many files on disk, the data file for this program would be about 35Mb, which is a bit steep. In short, this was not what I was looking for either, though it is a well-thought-out program with a number of good features.
Button Manager ($CAD19.00 w/o disk or $24 with; e-mail 70252.1364@compuserve.com): A superb, powerful, easy to use tool which allows you to turn Program Manager groups into button pads, including pop-up title designation for each icon when the cursor rests on it. Unfortunately, it does not work directly in NT [and "as issued" I suspect it won't work in W95], but if you have lots of programs under any version of WINDOWS 3.1 and want an easy way to bring them under control, this is the ticket.
Launch Boy: Another tool worth looking at if you have lots of WINDOWS programs in lots of groups, since this utility lists program names alphabetically within groups ordered alphabetically. It suffers from two fatal drawbacks: it is supposed to run a selected program by clicking on its name, but did not do so under either NT or 3.11; and worse, it is not freeware. Outline Program Manager, on the other hand, not only IS free, it also works. The fact that Outline Program Manager is a bit more complex and less graphically cool doesn't outweigh these two advantages, so Launch Boy was sent Out to Launch.
Tame 3.3: This is a multiprocessing assistance utility which claims to work under nearly every Intel-based environment; it uses PIFs to run and needs some time to evaluate [in particular it is not clear how this will work with NT or W95 or if it will even be needed].
WinHog 4.0: This is worth paying for, and in fact I have done so already for v.2.0. This utility examines your hard disk and shows you a pie graph of disk space filled by directory at any subdirectory level on which you invoke the program. This is extremely handy if you are trying to see which directory has so bloated that you need to transfer files elsewhere. The upgrade allows you to see space occupation under various cluster sizes and allows you to compare the amount of slack in each case -- essential if you are considering upgrading to a disk larger than 250Mb. Unfortunately, the mail address given in the program is invalid.
Vault 32: This is an NT version of a WINDOWS program which stores notes in an outline format. While a potentially useful tool, I have several such programs in the pile, and need to run a comparison test to see which is the best, so this is retained until I can do so.
CTS Serial Port Utilities: This DOS product needed more analysis before decision, though it looked useful for dealing with serial port problems, but since an NT/W95 setup can't make use of such tools, I have not evaluated them further.
Dazzle! 5.1: This is a highly impressive DOS "screen saver" -- if you have a high-resolution graphics card, this will show off what it can do. Still, this is not something I am prepared to pay for, so I did not evaluate it further.
Personal Harmonograph Simulator: This replicates on screen the traces on 1 to 4 penduli over a given point. Good if you are interested in this sort of thing, but I'm not; so I sent it swinging.
JoeSIm: The price for this appear unbeatable (apparently it is free); it is an Eliza-style simulation of a program which talks to you, although Joe is a bit more taciturn for Eliza (if you've never experienced an Eliza simulation, it is a brutally simple program which appears to engage you in conversation -- quite creepy how you get the sense that there is someone "really" interacting with you when the basis of the program is so simple).
Well I guess there was a small problem with my hard disk demo at the last meeting. Of course the silly thing worked fine the next day after I changed the I/O card.
Continuing along on the same topic, I was working on a fairly recent clone 486DX/2 - 66 machine the other day. This had the basic multi I/O card and a 270 meg hard drive. The motherboard used 30 pin SIMMs for the RAM (a clue). The person who used this particular computer needed to upgrade their hard drive to a substantially larger one. No problemo I thought.
Well, this box did not support large drives, that is anything over 528 megs. A similar machine a few months older used 72 pin SIMMs for the RAM and did support large drives. Cool. Just something to look out for in computers that might be hanging around.
So how does one get a large hard drive into a computer that doesn't support it. I used Disk Manager from Ontrack Computer Systems (www.ontrack.com) on my older 386SX computer. Worked fine. Seagate bundles a program with their large drives, in fact it is on the drive itself and you move it onto a floppy. Some of Seagate's larger drives can be split into 2 drives by setting a couple of jumpers. You then set your CMOS to two identical drives for C and D, each half the size of the actual physical drive (if this makes sense). To fdisk it looks like you have two physical drives. Sort of neat eh.
Another interesting item I recently found out about was a small board from DTC (Data Technology Corp) that adds a new hard disk BIOS to older machines. This is a DTC 1181 and goes in one of your regular ISA expansion slots. I am waiting to get one from Ken-Porter (K-PC Lte). This supposedly eliminates the 528 meg problem from older computers without having to use some sort of driver.
What I really like is to have a computer that knows about your hard drive and fully supports it. I recently upgraded my old 386SX-25 motherboard to a nice new Pentium. My case, a mid to full size tower, has an additional fan in front to help cool these things. When I finished putting all my assorted bits and pieces into the case, I booted up the machine expecting to now have to set the drive type in the CMOS. Wrong - the thing booted straight up off my hard drive.
The CMOS on the later machines has a number of settings for control of onboard IDE. Mine was setup so that it auto-detected the hard drive. There are a number of other items relating to the enhanced IDE (EIDE) which I will not get into here, one reason being that I have not had that much of a chance to play with these. I want to backup my hard drive first.
I guess that is all for this month. I will do some exploring for the next issue and hopefully have some new experiences to report.
There is so much information available on the internet that it's sometimes hard to know where to start. There are however several internet services that have as their continuing mission "To seek out new URLs, boldly go and tell".
Two of these services are "The Scout Report" and "The Weekly Bookmark". Both services accept nominations of interesting internet sites and after a review process publish' a weekly list. You can either subscribe to the list and have it delivered directly to your mailbox or... you can use a web browser to visit their archive and browse the current and back issues.
The Scout Report is a Publication of Net Scout Services and provided by the InterNIC as a Service to the Internet Community. It offers a selection of Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators, the InterNIC's primary audience. However, everyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML) or visit the Web version of the Scout Report. Subscription instructions are included at the end of each report.
Here is the web site for the scout report
Recently the Scout Report featured among others.. under Research and Education'
The American Civil War Home Page with hundreds of links including general resources such as timelines and overviews, images, letters, accounts and diaries, bibliographies, state studies, specific battles, and rosters, among others.
Bellingham Public Schools curriculum and lesson plans This site offers a selective collection of WWW Curriculum resources by Subject or Grade Level and lesson plans integrating technology into the curriculum. Also provided are lessons for adult learning of new technologies. School Board Policies are listed (copying permitted) including Internet Policy/ Procedures, Copyright Policy, Technology Plan, and a Parent Internet Permission Form.
The Submission Guidelines are a clue as to what they promote...
*Submissions should of interest to all users. *No nude images or other sexually oriented material. *Business or commercial sites are scrutinized very highly. No stores, internet malls, or other strictly commercial material. No advertising is allowed.
A recent edition featured:
We feature artwork from rock n' roll related artists and live concert footage from various videographers. We are working with the Save the Earth Foundation's rock memorabilia auction to bring interviews with Santana and Jeff Beck to the Web with our RealAudio technology.
The Jerry Garcia Tribute site received several internet awards!
The Flat Screen Space Theater" web site ...is a "tour de force" for anyone with an interest in astronomy.
It offers a "planetarium tour", vignettes on black holes, gas giants, starbirth (and death), and hotlinks to other relevant sites. The author is an accomplished science journalist, and part-time Hubble researcher. Highly recommended!!!
NOTE: If you're using a graphic browser... there are lots of images and it can be slow, but it's worth the wait.
Gail Dedrick's Guide to the Monarchs of England an Great Britain The first illustrated guide to those wacky guys and gals & enough links to satisfy every Anglophile.
If you visit check our newsletter on Chebucto Community Net the
links to the Scout report and Weekly Bookmark will be
activated... Happy hunting!
ab934@chebucto.ns.ca
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect. How does one get an article to me? Various ways are available. You can bring it to a meeting or give me a call and upload it to me. If you are on the Chebucto FreeNet, Internet, or any type of e-mail system that has a gateway to the Internet, you can send something to me via the internet to where I work - hlfxtrad.educ.stuartce@gov.ns.ca or stuartce@ednet.ns.ca.
It does work, but if you are sending a file attachment to your message to me at gov.ns.ca, it should be UUencoded and not a mime attachment. The ednet email works fine with regular mime encoding.
Much of the clipart used is from Novell (formerly WordPerfect) Presentations 3.0 which comes as part of the Perfect Office Suite. The only problem is that there isn't a printed list of the images so you have to root' around a bit.
The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP Laserjet 4M. The main body of the newsletter is set in 10 point Palatino with the article headings being 14 point bold. The title on the first page is ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic 19.2 and 16 points.
There were about 115 copies produced this month of which around 110 were mailed out. Any extra copies from the previous few month's issues that I have will be brought to the next meeting for those who are new to the group or may not be in regular attendance.
I do have a complete set of all the previous newsletters and if someone wanted to look through these, let me know and I can bring them to the next meeting.
The dates for this year's meetings are listed below.
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where
possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this
newsletter.
Forward to: January 1996 Newsletter
Back to: November 1995 Newsletter
Go to the: Newsletter Archive
