Vol. 22 number 7 September 2005 The newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group Calendar OPCUG General Meeting National Museum of Science and Technology 1867 St. Laurent Blvd. Second Wednesday of each month, 7:30pm Sep 21: Setting up a Home Theatre System, Sylvain Dumas Nov 09: Linux Live Install, Michael Ondrechak, OCLUG. Dec 14: Harley's Hits for the Holidays, Harley Bloom et al. Beginner SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. IT Pro SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. PIG (or Wing?) SIG, after all the other SIGs, at 10 p.m. Chances "R", 1365 Woodroffe (at Baseline), College Square Please note that unless otherwise noted, SIGs meet at 9:00 p.m. (immediately following the OPCUG General Meeting). ____________________________ Coming Up... September 21 (THIRD Wednesday) Sylvain Dumas, Montreal. "Setting up a Home Theatre System" Have you ever wanted the best home theater that you could ever dreamed of? Have you ever wanted to be the envy of all of your friends because you have the coolest technology around? Well, fret no more. Leading edge home theater technology is at your door. Did you know that your PC is THE best DVD player around? Did you know that you can have THE best sound around from your PC? Did you know that your PC can control your regular audio / video gear in your house? Would you like to control from a single PC, or even from a Pocket PC or a Touchscreen, all your audio gear, your projector or TV, your satellite system or cable system, control your lights, listen to all your MP3 in an organized way, check the weather, etc. All of this is possible with a simple PC at a very low cost. Sylvain Dumas, a home theater enthusiast from Montreal, will show you that using simple tools (some free, some at very low cost) hardware and software, you can automate your home theatre and much more. Your imagination is the limit. And coming up later this year... November 9: Michael Ondrechak, O-C Linux Users Group. "Linux Live Install" December 14: Harley Bloom et al, Bloom Microtech. "Harley's Hits for the Holidays" ____________________________ September Raffle by Chris Taylor At the September meeting, thanks to the generosity of MindShare - one of the user group support organizations within Microsoft, we have a copy of Digital Image Suite 10 to raffle off. This easy-to-use photo editing software makes it a snap to quickly correct common image problems such as crooked pictures, lighting problems, skin blemishes, distracting objects or backgrounds, red eye, and much more. Digital Image also has enormous depth for those willing to roll up their sleeves and dive in. Digital Image Suite comes with Digital Image Library for organizing and cataloguing your images. Digital Image Suite 10 is valued at $140. Tickets, as always, are $1 for one, $2 for three, or $5 for ten. ____________________________ June Raffle Winners It was a busy raffle night when the OPCUG met on June 15th. The following lucky winners took home the following prizes: David Clark - an IPOD Shuffle George Campbell - Corel Draw 12 and Paint Shop Pro 9 Michael Cayer - Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Eric Clyde - Word Perfect Office 12 Bob Herres - Ossurance software and Paint Shop Studio Pro Claude Jarry - Ossurance software. Thanks to Corel Corp. and OS Security Software for the prizes. ____________________________ 2005 OPCUG Workshop Digital Imaging Workshop by Alan German For the third straight year, the Ottawa PC Users' Group will be offering a beginners' workshop; however, this year, the approach will be a little more "focused" as we cover the basics of purchasing a digital camera and processing the resulting images. If you are planning to move from film to digital images, are thinking of upgrading your current digital camera, or want to know how to take your pictures from snapshots to works of art, this just might be the workshop for you. Club members who have spent considerable time researching the associated issues, and developing advanced digital imaging techniques, will share their knowledge and expertise with workshop participants in four basic sessions: Buying a Digital Camera - When selecting a digital camera, you are faced with a bewildering variety of choices, a wide range of prices, and a large number of confusing terms that differ considerably from those typically used for film cameras. This session will provide information on important features such as: megapixels and memory cards; optical vs. digital zoom; viewfinder and battery technologies, and will put you on a firm footing to find the camera that is just right for you. Image Processing - This session will show image enhancement techniques and illustrate the power of advanced image editing. We will show you how to use advanced selection techniques, transform images every which way, use layers and a variety of filters for special effects, and much, much more. As part of the presentation, a digital collage for this OPCUG event will be created in real time with participation from the audience. Output Options - Are you going to print your digital images on your own colour printer, or should you consider using a professional printing service? How are you going to store and catalogue your images so that you can easily retrieve them later? Do you know the best ways to share your images with friends and relatives electronically? Our expert will cover all the bases of capturing, storing, and preparing digital images for output. Problems and Solutions - Do you have a specific problem with digital imaging? This is a workshop, and we are here to help. If you are going to participate in the workshop, send your query to us in advance (E-mail: workshop2005@@opcug.ca). This session will deal with common imaging problems and provide you with the solutions. The workshop will be held from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 19, 2005 at the Heron Road Community Centre (1480 Heron). Registration is $50.00 which will include a CD-ROM with all the presentations from the workshop, and a range of associated reference information. The registration fee also includes lunch and coffee breaks, and a one-year membership in OPCUG (a $25.00 value by itself). This year, as a special bonus to workshop participants, we will be featuring a draw for a number of software packages, books related to digital imaging, and lots more. Prizes will include copies of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite 2006 and Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7. Attendance will be limited to the first 60 registrants so, if you wish to ensure your place at the workshop, send in your registration fee promptly. Complete details of the workshop, and a copy of the workshop registration form, are posted on OPCUG's web site at: http://www.opcug.ca. Watch for this article in the October issue of Monitor Magazine and see the ad (designed and created by Bert Schopf) in the September through November issues of Monitor Magazine and Ottawa PC News (PDF and paper issues). ____________________________ The OPCUG now has a Privacy Policy Perhaps you are aware that the Federal and Provincial governments have enacted legislation designed to protect the personal information of individuals. This has become more important in this era where more and more often we use digital products such as bank cards, mobile devices, the Internet to conduct our transactions, such as EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). To be in accordance with the legislation the OPCUG began the development of a Privacy Policy spearheaded by my predecessor, Tim Mahoney. I'm pleased to announce that we completed the work this Spring. The Group now has a Privacy Policy. I encourage you to become familiar with the policy at http://opcug.ca/privacy.htm so you can see that the Group is guarding the personal information you provided to the OPCUG. The OPCUG Membership form and website now indicate the policy is in effect; that your use of the OPCUG and website indicates your acceptance of the policy. Please take the opportunity to review these and address any questions you may have to me, Bob Thomas, either at our meetings or by email to: privacy@@opcug.ca. Bob Thomas Privacy Director ____________________________ Product Review True Image 8.0 by Chris Taylor We all make sure we have regular backups so we can easily recover from any accidentally modified/deleted file or a hard disk crash, right? Ok, maybe not. Why don't we all do backups? Tape solutions are expensive and prone to errors. Imaging programs usually don't work from within Windows. Copying individual files optical discs can be cumbersome, fraught with failure to catch all files and doesn't provide easy recovery from a major crash. Copying open files can result in incomplete backups. The result is that most of us either don't do effective backups or don't bother with backups at all. But then I found a program from Acronis called True Image. Now I do backups because True Image fixes just about every complaint I have about backing up my computer. True Image creates images of your hard drive partitions. An image is one or more files that contain a replica of everything on a hard drive. Image files can be stored anywhere - another hard disk partition on your computer, an external hard disk, a drive on another computer on the network, or recordable CDs or DVDs. In the event of a disaster, True Image can reconstruct the imaged disk to exactly the same state it was in when the image was created. Some imaging software makes you exit Windows and run from a special configuration to create an image. This is done because Windows typically has files being written to at any time, preventing the imaging software from making a valid copy of all files. True Image manages to get around that limitation and the image will contain a valid copy of all files as they existed at the beginning of the image creation. Because True Image can run while Windows is running, you can easily make an image at any time. Even better - True Image includes a scheduler so you can automate the process of creating images. Images can either be complete or incremental. An incremental image contains the changes since the previous complete or incremental image. As such, it is typically created more quickly and the resulting image file is smaller. While restoring a complete image is great for recovering from a disaster, often what you really want is just an individual file or folder. True Image allows you to browse images by mounting them as virtual, read-only drives. You can then use Explorer to browse the virtual drive and copy files or folders to anywhere on your physical disks. What if you have a major disaster and can't even get Windows to load? How do you get to the program to allow you to restore an image? True Image allows you to create bootable rescue media. If you have a CD burner, True Image can create a bootable CD. Otherwise, you can create a set of seven 31/2-inch diskettes. I tried both. Both options will provide you with a version of True Image that can boot your computer and allow you to restore an image. It will even load network drivers, allowing you to access image files stored on another computer on your network. Very nice. As well, the boot disk option can be used to create images on computers running operating systems such as Linux or older versions of Windows. I first tested True Image on an old computer that has been sitting in a closet for a year. I ran it through a battery if tests, with full and incremental images, doing restores of complete partitions as well as individual files and folders. True Image didn't skip a beat. Every task I threw at it, it handled perfectly. Having confidence in the program, I moved it over to my main computer - a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM. Performance-wise, True Image is no slouch. At normal compression, it created an image of my main 80 GB partition, which had 30.27 GB of files in 20 minutes, creating an image file of 24.16GB. Increasing the compression to maximum decreased the image file to 22.73 GB, but increased the time to 90 minutes. Using no compression increased the image file to 28.78 GB and only decreased the image creation time to 17 minutes. About a day and a half later, I created an incremental image and was appalled to see the incremental image file was 6.97 GB. Much too large for the few files changed since the full image. The problem was Raxco's PerfectDisk deframenter. Since True Image looks to the actual sectors on the disk, as opposed to individual files, PerfectDisk's moving of files around on the disk caused True Image to create a much larger incremental image than would otherwise have been necessary. I turned off PerfectDisk and couple of days later an incremental image file was only 389MB. Considering my email programs modify some pretty big files each time they load, and I use X1 to index the contents of my hard disks, the 389MB incremental image size is actually quite reasonable. Given the interaction between defragmenting programs and True Image, I will have to rethink how I defrag my drives. I will probably switch to scheduling True Image to do incremental images once a week and a full image once a month. I will schedule PerfectDisk to do a full defrag the day before I have True Image do the full image. I store image files on my second hard drive. That won't protect me in the event of a disaster, where both drives could be corrupted or fail. So I decided to copy the images to DVD. I told True Image to create the files with a maximum size of 4.6GB so each file would fit on a 4.7GB DVD. I then discovered that my DVD burning software could only handle files up to 4GB. To compound the problem, I think a recordable DVD cannot store an actual 4.7GB it claims to be able to hold. Or maybe they count 4.7GB as 4.7 billion bytes, not the 5.047 billion bytes truly represented by 4.7GB (4.7 x 10243). After experimenting, I settled on an image file size of 2.15GB which allowed 2 files to fit on a single DVD. Even with recordable DVDs, it takes a lot of disks to store a complete image of my hard drive. Fortunately, prices on blank DVD media keep dropping. I found Memorex DVD+R 8x discs at Future Shop for $20 for a spindle of 50. If you have UDF software that treats your CD/DVD like a big, writable floppy disk, True Image can write the image files directly to the removable media. The problems I had with this approach was being around to change the disc if the image took more than a single disc, and the excruciatingly slow pace of writing to the DVD+RW media. Not True Image's fault, of course. I decided to stick with writing to my second hard drive and then later burning the image files to DVD+R discs. True Image can create a hidden partition known as the Acronis Secure Zone. It can be created from unpartitioned disk space or True Image can carve it out from unused space on existing partitions without disturbing existing data. The Secure Zone is not normally visible to other applications, which helps to protect the images you store there. Once created, the Secure Zone shows up as an available location to store images. True Image totally manages the space there. When you create new images, it will delete older images if it runs out of space. Secure Zone has some problems. If you are creating incremental images, you will eventually run out of space for new images, but True Image cannot delete any of the older files because the original full image plus all subsequent incremental images are required to restore a complete partition. In this case, you have to create a new full image, which will cause the old full image and subsequent incremental images to be deleted. Worse than the Secure Zone running out of space is not knowing about it. If running scheduled tasks to do incremental backups, when the Secure Zone fills up, the image creation silently fails. You will get warned that imaging has failed only if you load the program. But the beauty of scheduling is not having to go into the program. I would like an option of a flashing tray icon to inform you of the completion of any scheduled task. Maybe flashing green for successful and flashing red for failure. There is no way to directly access the image files stored in the Secure Zone. If you want an off-computer copy of your image files to protect against major disasters such as a complete failure of your hard drives, including the Secure Zone, you are out-of-luck. The scheduler built into True Image is quite flexible. You can choose to create an image daily, weekly, monthly, one- time, when the computer starts, when you log on, when you log off, or when the computer shuts down. I can't image creating images on startup or shutdown, but maybe that's just me. You can choose any partition or collection of partitions to be imaged and specify whether they are to be full or incremental images. True Image also includes functions that help when upgrading a computer. If you move to a larger hard drive, you can easily clone your existing hard drive to the new one, retaining all the existing partitions and data. There is a tool that can check the integrity of an image file. Kind of nice to verify every now and then to make sure you will be able to use the images should you need them. True Image has its own log file, eschewing the Windows application log. The 81-page manual is included with the program in PDF format. It is very clearly written and understandable. Overall, I am very impressed with the capabilities of True Image. I no longer have an excuse for not having a recent backup of my computer. System requirements: Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP, 128MB RAM, 20MB disk space. Supported file systems: FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP. Available through www.acronis.com for US$49.99. But you can get it through a user group discount for US$34. To take advantage of the deal, point your browser to www.usergroupstore.com. The code UGJUN05 will get you the discount. Also at the User Group Store, there are a couple of articles that might be of interest Perfect Backup Approach and Using Acronis True Image. They can be found at www.ugr.com/newsletters. ____________________________ Product Review Copying vinyl to CD for (one hundred and) five bucks - Part III by Alan German Did you notice the slight shift of emphasis in the title? Our costs seem to have jumped by $100. This results from the purchase of Easy Media Creator 7 [or now Creator 7.5 - see the side bar at the end of this article] in order that we can make use of Sound Editor and the CD-burning capability included in the package. Of course, you may already own a full version of this package (perhaps you were the winner of one of our raffles in April and May!) in which case your cost remains at $5 for the Y-adapter cable (see Part I of this series in the May 2005 issue of Ottawa PC News or at http://opcug/ca/public/Reviews/vinyl_to_CD.htm. Indeed, you may wish to refresh your memory on the story so far. In this third part of the series, we will assume that your computer is hooked up to your stereo system so that you can record music from an LP record of your choice (Part I). The techniques we will adopt to record and burn tracks to a CD-ROM are similar to those detailed previously (Part II). However, in this session, we will be using a one-stop solution to recording and burning the music. This should make our lives easier, but let's wait and see. With Easy Media Creator 7 installed and running, we need to select Sound Editor from the Tools' menu. If you tried Wave Repair, as described in the earlier articles, the main screen of Sound Editor (see Figure 1) will look fairly familiar. Once again, we have a split window with the upper and lower halves ready and waiting to receive the left and right channels of our recording. A tool bar at the bottom of the window has a microphone icon. Clicking on this icon lights up the microphone in red, and enables monitoring of the recording. With our LP record playing, a slider allows the sound input level to be adjusted. The levels are monitored as a series of green, yellow and red bars to the left of the waveform windows. Once we have set an appropriate recording level, pressing the big red Record button starts the recording process. At the end of side one of the record, pressing the red button again (it's now showing two vertical red bars) provides a pause in the action. Flip the record to side two and repeat the recording process to capture the entire LP. Now, press the Stop button and prepare to save the recording to a disk file. But, you may have to be patient. The help file tells you to save the file immediately; however, the save command may not be immediately available. The program has to save a temporary file to disk. This process is no doubt highly dependent on the speed of one's hardware. In my case, it took a while but there was no indication from the program as to what was going on. The disk activity gave a clue, and a little exploring showed that indeed a temporary file was being created. Once control is returned, you do wish to select File - Save, choose a file name, probably leave all the options at their default values, and press the Save button to retain the recording in a directory and file name of your choice. Sound Editor provides a variety of options for cleaning up the recording, including the facility to remove clicks and crackle. (Not that you will need to do this. You took good care of your LP's when you were a teenager - didn't you?) Figure 2 shows a section of music where a single spike results in a distinct click on the soundtrack. To eliminate such noise, we drag the mouse across the click to highlight the section of the music. Then we select Tools - Apply Effect to Selection - Declick. This menu provides sliders for the level of "declicking" and "decrackling". Set the sliders to an appropriate level (100% may well do) and press OK. After the progress bar indicates completion of the task, the selected waveform will show the results of the processing. Note the difference between the before and after waveforms in our example. Other useful options can be found under the Edit menu, including commands to delete a selection of the waveform, and to eliminate leading and trailing silences. If you are feeling really creative, you can apply other effects to the recording such as giving it the properties of having been recorded in a church with options for reverberation times and echo level. If you feel completely wild, you can give the music a robotic effect and change its character entirely. Once you have the recording in its final state of clarity, it's time to break out the individual tracks. Sound Editor is very competent at this task. Select - Tools - Auto Locate Tracks, and the program will scan the waveform for the inter-track silences, placing blue markers ahead of each track. You can manually check any given marker by selecting a portion of the waveform that includes the marker and playing the selection. If the marker is not required, right click on it and select Delete Track Break. Alternatively, to add a marker, click on the waveform at the desired location, which will produce a vertical yellow line, and select Tools - Insert Track Break. With all the tracks properly identified, it should be time to select File - Save All Tracks. But, take note of the titles of the individual tracks. Track 1 has the name of the original WAV file (such as benny_goodman.wav), while the subsequent tracks are titled 2 - Untitled Track, 3 - Untitled Track, etc. If you save the individual tracks at this point, you will have the option of overwriting the entire file with just Track 1, and additionally creating a bunch of files as numbered "untitled tracks". Personally, I don't find this to be an appropriate course of action. The default is to lose the complete WAV file, which we might wish to refer to if it transpires that we have made any bad choices in processing the individual tracks. Furthermore, we will also end up with a bunch of files with rather meaningless names. The help file suggests renaming the tracks individually. If you want to have individual tracks named with the title of the tune then this will work just fine. My typical modus operandi is to stick the CD into the drive, press play, and listen to the entire disk. Consequently, for me, giving each track in the series a unique name is overly tedious. There is also a particular problem with the default naming scheme when it comes time to burn the tracks to the CD. 10- Untitled Track will come before 2-Untitled Track, and so on, in the play list. My work-around was to rename the first track as benny_goodman_01 and then save all the tracks with their default titles. I recalled that ACDSee, in addition to managing digital image files (see http://opcug/ca/public/Reviews/acdsee7.htm), can also deal with audio files. So, it's a simple matter to line up the ten or so tracks in the directory with benny_goodman_01.wav as the first file, followed by 2 - Untitled Track and the rest of its siblings. ACDSee's Edit - Batch Rename command then makes creating a series of files with relatively meaningful, and ordered, names a snap. Now it's time to burn our CD. In the Music section of Easy Media Creator's main menu we need to select Create New Audio CD. The resulting screen will be familiar to those who have previously burnt CD's. Navigate through the Select Source window, and highlight the desired tracks. Press the green arrow on the menu bar of the Audio CD Project window to copy the selected tracks into the project. It's worth noting that, by default, the tracks are ordered alphabetically (hence the desire to name the tracks 01, 02... etc.); however, individual tracks can be dragged up or down the list so that the play list can be tailored to your specific wishes. This is especially handy if you are burning tracks from two LP's to a single CD, but the second LP's title, and hence the filenames of its tracks, come ahead of those of the first LP. To change the order, select all the files for the second LP, at the top of the project list, and drag them as a group below the last track from the first LP. Once you have all the desired tracks in place, check the status bar at the bottom of the window. This will give you disk size of your blank CD, the total recording time for the project, and the free time available on the disk. A set of numbered boxes represents the individual tracks. These run across the status bar, illustrating how they will span across the CD. A pop-up window indicates if the selected files won't fit onto the CD. Finally, press the Burn button, followed by the Details button in order to check the options set for the burning process. Make sure that Record Methods is set to Read-only Disc. This will ensure that the resulting CD will be closed so that it can be played on any CD recorder. You can probably leave all the other settings at their default values. At least, that's always my preference - until something doesn't work! Easy Media Creator 7 offers other options for customizing your music CD's. CD TEXT allows you to store information like the title of the disk, the artist's name, and the titles of the individual tracks on the CD, provided this feature is supported by your burner. The textual information will then be displayed on electronic devices that support CD TEXT. In addition, rather than maintaining the tracks as WAV files, you can convert and burn them as MP3's. And, with Label Creator, you can produce colourful labels, jewel case inserts, and descriptive booklets. In my view, Creator 7 provides almost one-stop shopping for copying vinyl to CD, except for the somewhat awkward track naming convention. It's certainly a very convenient package for recording music, editing the resulting waveforms, and burning the sound files to CD. Bottom Line Easy Media Creator 7 (Proprietary, $99) Roxio, Inc. http://www.roxio.com Editor's note: Part 1 of this series can be seen in last May's issue or at http://opcug/ca/public/Reviews/vinyl_to_CD.htm. Part 2 can be seen in last June's issue or at http://opcug/ca/public/Reviews/vinyl_to_CD_part2.htm. For a broader review of Easy Media Creator 7, see last April's article by the same author at http://opcug/ca/public/Reviews/easy_media7.htm. [SIDE BAR] Easy Media Creator 7.5 Roxio is now part of Sonic Solutions and the latter have brought some of their expertise in sound recording to the package. In particular, Creator 7.5 now features an "LP and Tape Assistant", a sort of wizard that leads you through the recording process. The package has an excellent help file, with exceptionally clear graphics, on setting up the connection between a sound system and a computer. The recording process is similar to that described in the main article, with some minor differences in the details. The program will now automatically adjust the sound level prior to making a recording. It also features a mixing board for processing multiple tracks into a single recording. The LP and Tape Assistant wizard effectively integrates the recording and burning procedures to provide a complete solution to copying vinyl to CD. ____________________________ Reminder: Contest for Best Newsletter Article In an effort to generate more content for our popular Ottawa PC News, the Board of Directors (BOD) has decided to hold a contest for best article written by one of our members. The contest will launch in September 2005 and run until June 2006. Members of the BOD cannot participate. You do not need to be a computer expert to participate. You can write about a personal computer experience that was humourous or frustrating. Did something you buy improve your computer experience (be it software or hardware)? Maybe you know of a terrific virtual photo album that organizes digital pictures. How do you ward off all the SPAM invading our inboxes? There are many computer topics. Articles can be submitted between June 1, 2005 and May 14, 2006. These will be published in the Ottawa PC News between September 2005 and June 2006 inclusive. Articles will be published in the order they are received. If a large number of articles is received, some may not be published due to space restrictions as we approach the May deadline. And in that case, in order to have as many contestants as possible, an article submitted by a new participant will be published over one submitted by a returning participant. Participants will be offered a choice of having unused articles published after the contest period or having them destroyed. Only those articles published during the contest period will be eligible for the contest. All articles must be original and written by the participant. Articles must be kept under 1000 words (including words like 'the', 'a', 'it', etc.). Only members of the OPCUG may participate (BOD members are excluded). The BOD reserves the right to refuse an article because of improper or questionable content and the article will be returned to the author for revision or retraction. Individual participants may submit more than one article over the contest period. A voting sheet will be included in the June 2006 newsletter and posted on the website at that time. Ballots from the general membership will be collected at the June 2006 general meeting. Votes will be tallied at the meeting and the winner presented with a prize (to be determined). Send submissions to brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca between June 1, 2005 and May 14, 2006. Articles may be written in any basic text editor, MS Word, or Corel WordPerfect. Good luck and good writing! Brigitte Lord Editor, Ottawa PC News ____________________________ Books for Review by Chris Taylor Thanks to O'Reilly and Microsoft, we have some books that are available for review. If you write a review, you can keep the book. If interested, please see me at a general meeting. First come, first served. Any books that are not used for reviews will be used as door prizes at some point in the future. From O'Reilly (www.oreilly.com): * Windows XP Personal Trainer by CustomGuide Inc. Do you find Windows XP a little baffling? This book helps you learn basics like working with programs, managing files and folders, customizing windows, optimizing and maintaining your computer and networking. Written in a non- technical and engaging style. Includes an interactive CD. * Internet Annoyances by Preston Gralla This book strives to make using the Internet as stress- free as possible. It presents solutions for glitches that complicate the Internet experience. Learn how to thwart would-be hackers, eliminate pop-up ads, conduct effective searches, and more. * Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb This exploration into the moment-by-moment works of the brain uses cognitive neuroscience to present experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception. If you want to find out what's going on in your head, then Mind Hacks is the key. For OPCUG discounts at O'Reilly's, visit http://opcug.ca and click on the PROMOS button. From Microsoft (www.microsoft.com/mspress): * Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson Unload those boring, bullet-riddled slides-and unlock the amazing story buried in your presentation! Communications expert Cliff Atkinson shares his innovative three-step system for increasing the impact of your communications with Microsoft PowerPoint. ____________________________ OTTAWA PC NEWS Ottawa PC News is the newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group (OPCUG), and is published monthly except in July and August. The opinions expressed in this newsletter may not necessarily represent the views of the club or its members. Member participation is encouraged! If you would like to contribute an article to Ottawa PC News, please submit it to the newsletter editor (contact info below). Deadline for submissions is three Saturdays before the General Meeting. Group meetings OPCUG normally meets on the second Wednesday in the month, except in July and August, at the National Museum of Science and Technology, 1867 St. Laurent Blvd, Ottawa. Meetings are 7:30-9:00 p.m. and Special Interest Groups go until 10 p.m. Fees: OPCUG annual membership: $25 per year. Mailing address: 3 Thatcher St., Nepean, Ontario, K2G 1S6 Web address: http://opcug.ca/ Bulletin Board - PUB II (BBS): http://opcug.ca/default.htm President and System Administrator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 727-5453 Meeting Coordinator: Bob Gowan, bob.gowan@@opcug.ca Treasurer: Alan German, alan.german@@opcug.ca Secretary: (Mr.) Jocelyn Doire, jocelyn.doire@@opcug.ca Membership Chairman: Mark Cayer, Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca, 823-0354 Newsletter: Brigitte Lord, brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca Email: (Mr.)Jocelyn Doire, Jocelyn.Doire@@opcug.ca Public Relations: Morris Turpin, PR@@opcug.ca, 729-6955 Facilities: Bob Walker, 489-2084 Webmaster: Brigitte Lord, opcug-webmaster@@opcug.ca Privacy Director: Bob Thomas, privacy@@opcug.ca, 820-6835 Director without portfolio Wayne Houston, Wayne.Houston@@opcug.ca Beginners' SIG Coordinator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 727-5453 IT Pro SIG: Bob Thomas, ITProSIG@@opcug.ca, 820-6835 Note: We added an extra "@" to the emails to reduce spam. (c) OPCUG 2005. Reprints permission is granted* to non- profit organizations, provided credits is given to the author and The Ottawa PC News. OPCUG request a copy of the newsletter in which reprints appear. *Permission is granted only for articles written by OPCUG members, and not copyrighted by the author. ____________________________ Newsletter by email: To receive the newsletter by e-mail, send a message to listserve@@opcug.ca with the plain text "subscribe NewsletterTXT" or "subscribe NewsletterPDF" (without quotes nor HTML code) in the body of the message. No subject line is required. Cancelling the Paper Newsletter: You can help the environment and save us some costs by sending an email to Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca asking to cancel the delivery of the paper version of the newsletter (or ask him in person - Mark is usually at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings). Announcements Mailing List: To subscribe to the Announcements List send an email to listserve@@opcug.ca, leave the subject blank and in the body of the message put "subscribe announcements" (without the quotes nor HTML code). Within a couple of minutes you will receive a confirmation message from the list server. OPCUG clock/calendar/calculator and mug: Check out the clock/calendar/calculator and thermal coffee mug sporting our club logo at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings! OPCUG insulated mugs are $15 and OPCUG clocks are $20. Reuse, recycle: Bring your old computer books, software, hardware, and paraphernalia you want to GIVE AWAY to the general meetings, and leave them at the table near the auditorium's entrance. Please limit your magazines to publication dates of less than two years old. If you don't bring something, you may want to TAKE AWAY something of interest, so look in on this area. Any item left over at the end of the meeting will be sent to the... recycle bin.