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Meeting Archive -2005-

December - Special Meeting


November 16th


At our November 20th meeting we baked...

No we didn't bake cookies.  We baked BartPE CD's.  What is a BartPE CD?  Well it's a bootable Windows XP emergency CD.  With this CD if you operating system crashes, you will still be able to access your files.  BartPE was created by someone named Bart, the PE is for Preinstalled Environment.  It's something that you can actually do from Microsoft.  Some of the things you can install with BartPE are Nero, Norton Ghost, web browsers.  There are actually sites dedicated to this operating system:

BartPE Homepage

BartPE Plugins

BartPE Forum

Classic TechTV Video On Bootable Xp Video

October20th


At our October 20th meeting we created our page on the Wikipedia.

We also showed off the new Adobe Acrobat reader version 7. In version 7 the reader will actually READ text in the pdf file to you. You can also capture pictures from the pdf file to be used in different applications.  If you use alot of pdf files we really do recommend that you get this upgrade to an excellent program.

On to our Wikipedia page. I demonstrated how to use the Wiki markup language.  In doing so, on the page I left it.. Well not completely done, this didn't sit well with the people from Wikipedia. They had actually maked our page for deletion.  After some debating and excellent rebuttles to their arguments as to why we should be taken down. They helps us with the page and now we are part of the Wikipedia.

Our page is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPCUG

If you are interested in helping with this page you can find all editing information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing

One thing that has happened recently with Wikipedia they will be requiring people to sign up for accounts to edit pages. I have a WPCUG account that if anyone would like to use to contribute to the page, they can email me for the password and username.

Mike

September 15th, 2005


First off, I would like to welcome everyone back for the start of another great year of fun at WPCUG.

WE HAVE HIGHSPEED INTERNET FOR THE MEETINGS NOW!!!!!

Our meeting started off with Larry going around and asking everyone what their favourite shareware was.  We did this so that we can update our downloads section on our site.  If you have any suggestions that arn't on our list please email them to us.

Next I showed off a password management tool called Keepass with this program you can keep all of your passwor and usernames safe and secure.  One of the best features of this program is that you can use your USB Flash Drive as an acutal key to open you Password Database. This program will also generate passwords for you and it will also tell you the level on encryption of your current password

Next Bob showed off a nice utility for making PDF files.  This program PDFCreator is from the sourceforge.net website. When you install this program, what it does is adds a virtual printer to your system.  When you want to create a pdf file, you tell the computer to print to the PDF creator and your all set. It saves allthe formating in your files.  Th great thing about this program is that it is completely free.  You could get the Adobe Acrobot PDF Creator, which retails for $449.99US.  But why when this program will do the exact same.

Larry next showed off GoogleEarth.  With this application, you can fly all over the world thanks to Google.  What this program does, is takes images from space and plots them on a virtual globe. With a highspeed internet connection, you can travel to any part of the world that Google has mapped. One cool feature of this program is that you can turn on buildings, so when you go to a city with the buildings turned on you get a sense of depth.  Also you can change the angle of your viewing so that you can lookat objects.  One thing that really stands out with this is the Grand Canyon. It feels like you are flying in the Grand Canyon with this program.  If you are running Windows XP and a highspeed cable/DSL connection this program is a must to try out.

A few website I spoke of at the meeting were:

Broadband Reports

Digital Home Canada

Digg

I also spoke about the Opera web browser.  This program was a paid program with you wanted the banner ads removed.  As of today (Sept 20th, 2005) they have taken the banner ads out and made the program free for everyone.  I encourage you to check out Opera as an alternative to Internet Explorer.

Mike


June 16th, 2005


At our last meeting Larry started off the meeting by showing off our newly redesigned website.  We went into some of the new points of the site such as the real-time virus updating on the home page.

Next Larry showed off yet another cool gadget.  I think we should now on call Larry our Gadget Guy.  Larry showed off the SMC EZ Stream™ Universal Wireless Multimedia Receiver.  What this handy little piece of hardware does is lets you stream audio or video from your home computer to TV or home audio receiver.  You can stream the following formats :  MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MEPG-4, DivX 4, DivX 5, Xvid, MP3, JPEG, BMP, and Internet Radio.  Larry showed off this little gadget by playing a couple of videos on it, showing some pictures and playing an AWESOME song (?).

Our next topic for the night was the new "fad" in the internet world... Desktop Searches.  What Desktop Searches allow you to do is have your coming help you to index your files.  No more, having to remember what directory something was in.  Load up and desktop search, type in a name, phrase, or whatever and BLAMO, it's there.  The nice thing about the desktop searches is that they also search inside files.  Have an email or a word file with someone's name in it, but can't remember what you named it, or can't remember when you sent/received the email.  Type it into a search and it will find it for you.  We showed off 3 desktop searches.
1) Copernic desktop search
2) Google desktop search
3) MSN desktop search.

All three are pretty impressive.  I don't want to say one is better than the other because they all do an equally impressive job.  We have a link with all of the desktop searches in an easy to view chart.  
Desktop Search Chart

Finally, the night wouldn't have been complete without me (Mike) getting up and showing a program that I had just discovered.  This program was alot of fun, it's called AutoStich, it is a demo program.  What this program does is takes a group of pictures and stitches them together to make a panorama picture.  For an EXCELLENT example of this go to the developers website.  
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
Here an an example of a picture I took at the last meeting and stitched together.

Before


After


The pictures taken above are in the exact order they were taken.  Notice how the picture with the fridge was taken out.  Well, that wraps up out show for this month and this "year".  We are now officially on Summer Holiday.  I will try to update the website with new downloads as I find them.  If anyone has any downloads or sites they would like to get added to our lists please email them to me.  Also, who knows, we might get a page on the Wikipedia.  Remember to check it out to see if something showes up :-)

Have a Great Summer Every.....
Mike


February 17, 2005


Larry showed us a new piece of hardware call Convert-X which is a harware solution to video compression. It allows you to input digital data and converts it to analog and then compresses it to a smaller file in digital format. It can also use raw video and convert to compressed digital format. 
An example would be to input a DVD video and convert it to a more compressed MPEG vidoe file that can in turn be burned to a CD. 

We also discussed the various DVD ad CD formats which are available. These can be very confusing and a few different websites provide tables that compare these formats. hese are listed below. Just click on them.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/dvd_standards.cfm
http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/cdaudio/cdaud_intro.htm
http://www.icdia.org/cdprosupport/recordng/cditmac/cdformat.htm

We also discussed various Internet scams and how not to succumb to them. If it sounds too good to be true, beware! 

There is also a new development in the field of Anti Spyware Microsoft has aquired a new piece of software which was written by Giant Antispyware and  is making it available at the Microsoft site. This will become a Microsoft product and is is now available as a free download. 

http://www.microsoft.com/spyware

NOTE: Although the Giant Antispyware lists it's system requirements as Win 98, ME, 2000, and XP, the Microsoft site list 2000 as minimum system. I downloaded and attempted to install on Win98 SE and it won't install. 

Another piece of freeware discussed was Everest Home Edition which is similar to Belarc, which looks up all your systems information and keeps it handy for you. Mike Celotto has links to these dowloads on his site, so here is a link to ... 

Mike's Playland



Bob Pajot