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Our featured guest for the March 22nd meeting will be David Baxter
- Product Specialist for the MPowered service from MT&T.
The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm at the Maritime Museum of the
Atlantic, 1675 Lower Water Street, Halifax. Plus the opening
introductory talks on the following:
Rob MacCara --How to clean your computer
Bill Marchant - Something about OS/2
Diane Smith - Letters with Envelopes in WordPerfect
NOTE NEW MEETING FACILITIES
The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The HAPCC has a new meeting place at: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 1675 Lower Water Street , Halifax, NS.
Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Parking available in the nearby Government
parking lot or in the Museum parking lot. Access to the building
is via the Night Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the
regular front doors. If door is locked, use the bell on upper
left side of the Night Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and
has a theatre type of layout. Washrooms are located close by.
Elevator service is available. Coffee served.
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.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
In an other item in the press the Queen has
entered cyberspace and the link is The British Monarchy-The Official
web Site. It is worth checking out.
The Bluenose, a fishing schooner, is an icon of down east history. Find more on the story
at Bluenose II Home Port Page.
A look at the guest speaker from last month:
Our guest speaker was Sgt. Bill Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of
the Halifax Regional Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of
how and when the police department started using the Internet. They were
the first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt. Cowper is
continually receiving calls from all over the world looking for assistance.
The presentation showed how well the department and the officers in the
patrol cars are versed on getting the criminals off the streets.
If you would like to check-out their web site the address is:
Halifax Regional Police Service gives an idea of what an
'Internet Cybercop' is all about.
The HAPCS has two kinds of meetings. Firstly
the regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend
regularly, secondly the monthly (approximately) planning
meeting which organizes the business of the Society, including
what happens on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on
Monday, a week after the regular meeting in which all members of the
Society are urged to attend. At the planning meeting, we discuss
feature speakers for regular meetings, finances, membership,
training, and other computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
Rob MacCara.. The little browser that could
Bill Marchant... Putting the Explorer on the keyboard
Ron Xu.......EIDE Caution-- Computer Paper
Meeting schedule for the upcoming year
The Browser war is over, or so we're told. The odd thing is, there are no
winners. Microsoft and Netscape are giving their browsers away, so there's
no money to be had in this market and users are stuck with two bloated and
still buggy choices, which is infuriating to all involved.
Still, a small - make it tiny - browser is now available as a public beta
from Bigfoot Partners; it just might make huge waves in this unpredictable
category. It's called NeoPlanet, and it's a full-blown browser, supporting
anything you've grown to expect from this category: plug-ins, ActiveX,
Java, tables, you name it. Yet it manages to do all this with a 600KB
download, which once installed, takes up only 1.5MB of your hard disk
space. The secret to NeoPlanet's ability to offer a full feature set in a
tiny package is that the product uses the Internet Explorer rendering
engine built into Windows 95. However, if you've installed IE3 or IE4 and
then uninstalled it, there's a great chance that you've also removed the
HTML rendering engine that came with your copy of Windows 95. Company
officials promise that by the time this program ships, it will offer
work-arounds for people who've unintentionally uninstalled the rendering
engine.
But wait ... There's more to NeoPlanet than just a plain browser: a
well-organized 'channel bar' features a hierarchical directory with links
to many popular sites in categories such as news, travel, entertainment,
cars, and more. These aren't push channels, mind you-just your very own
local mini search site that updates dynamically whenever you go online. You
may also customize it to your heart's content. If you find the channel bar
intrusive, it's easy to turn off. However, I tested NeoPlanet on a
notebook, and the channel bar hardly took up any space, certainly not
enough to get in the way. There's also a full-screen view, which hides all
menus and toolbars.
In addition, you get a built-in POP3 e-mail client, and best of all a
simple drag-and-drop tool for publishing documents to a Web site. This tool
eliminates the need for a third-party FTP client, and since it's based on
the HTTP protocol rather than FTP, corporate users can upload files to
their own sites even from behind the firewall. NeoPlanet is still in beta,
but it's stable and fast. Some user-interface issues still need to be
resolved (some menu options are missing), but company officials are saying
that by the time the product ships-probably in mid-February-those will be
taken care on. As far as I'm concerned, this browser is ready for prime
time.
Do you constantly discover that you need access to the Windows Explorer,
and find that using the right mouse button on the start button is
inconvenient, and the desktop even less so? I often find that my desktop is
filled with other windows, and that is when I need to use the Explorer most
often.
I recently discovered through reading a magazine on how to put the Explorer
on the keyboard.
Lets assume you want access to the Explorer, with the folders of your C:\
drive displayed. Right click on START, and select OPEN. In the start menu
folder, make a new folder. Call it DRIVES. In the drives folder select NEW
| SHORTCUT. In the command line of the create shortcut dialogue box, type
'C:\'. Finish the create shortcut wizard.
Right click on the new icon and select PROPERTIES. Then select the tab
SHORTCUT. In the target window you will find the C:\ that you put there.
Replace this with 'explorer /e, C:\'. If you OK this you will be able to
open the Explorer with the C drive featured, by clicking START | DRIVES |
C:. But before you do this, add the shortcut keys. You need to select keys
which do not conflict with other shortcuts. Very few others use
Ctrl+Alt+Shift so try them for a start. You may have to ensure that the
name of the drive 'C:\' is in the Start In Edit box. If it is not there the
keys do no seem to work.
Put the cursor in the Shortcut Key Edit box, just hold down the appropriate
keys, and release them, then close the boxes. Test by pressing the
designated keys. The Explorer will open with the folders of the C: drive
featured on the right window, and all the other folders on the left.
Repeat the procedure for all your folders, including the CD-ROM if you want to.
You can get a restricted Explorer with the selected drive only available if
you want. In the target window you would use 'explorer /e,/root,C:\'.
You can also select any Icon you like. Go to Change Icon in the shortcut
tab of the properties box and select the icon you like from the list
presented. If you know how, you can make your own icons and use them, but
that is a subject for another presentation. Finally, you can rename the
icons in the Drives folder. I have (C) System, (D) Programs1, (E)
Programs2, etc. I found that since they appear in the box in alphabetical
order, this results in a neater presentation.
Of course, the object of doing this is to use the keyboard, so the
presentation is not really important unless you want to go in to change
something.
Here's a warning to all using EIDE hard drives, I recently read about a
problem with over half of the EIDE hard drives out there. I don't remember
the specifics but I think the problem is that data on your hard drive gets
corrupt gradually due to incompatibility with Win95 which was recently
discovered. I though it was a hoax, but when I checked Microsoft Web site,
there was a mention of this and there was a patch for it at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/info/dskts.htm (The link no longer
works)
Do download their patch and use it to save yourself from grief. This file
is only 114KB, worth the trouble.
Quotes:
'Please don't tell my mother I'm a computer programmer. She thinks I'm a
piano player in a brothel.'
Newsletter Articles we are almost always in
need of good articles. If anyone has something that they feel
would make a good article, an interesting story to tell, or even
a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass it on.
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI
Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming
year at the last planning meeting. The dates for these are listed
below after confirmation of the dates.
As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early part of January due Christmas Eve being the fourth Sunday of the month.
March-22 April-26 May-17 June-28
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8 days) after
the general meeting. They are currently held at a members home
and the address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning meeting.
Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or events.
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at
the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
Forward to: April 1998 Newsletter
Back to: February 1998 Newsletter
Go to the: Newsletter Archive
