GREATER BOSTON SENIOR COMPUTER GROUP NEWSLETTER
Issue No. 64, Sept.14, 2005
CHAIRPERSON:: Charles Moir, cmoir@rcn.com
EDITOR: Harriet Mandell, harrietd@rcn.com
WEB PAGE: Garry Ziffer, http://users.rcn.com/gbscg
LIAISON: Eve Welts, ewelts@rcn.com
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MARKING TIME….“I have this website on my desktop”, writes Fred Hammond, for its easy access to the current year’s calendar, lists of holidays, and other functions such as: perpetual yearly calendar-make yearly calendar for any year, monthly calendar or custom calendars. http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar.
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EVER WONDER……why Microsoft Outlook 2000 attachments appear at the bottom? Microsoft Outlook only places attachments at the bottom pane of an e-mail when the message is in HTML or Plain text format. If you want your attachments to be placed within the body of an e-mail, you must be composing an e-mail in Rich Text Format. To change the format of your Microsoft Outlook e-mails follow these steps: 1. Open Microsoft Outlook. 2. Click Tools and then Options. 3. Click the Mail Format tab. 4. Click the down arrow on Send in this message format and select Microsoft Outlook Rich Text.
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TRYING NEW THINGS… can be interesting. LeapFILE Personal Edition is a web-based service designed to avoid the frustrations of sending large files such as photos, videos, music and PDF files. E-mail is great for sending messages and small files but it quickly reaches its limits when sending large files. Email providers impose limits on the size of each e-mail message. Incoming and outgoing messages exceeding the limit are automatically rejected. The typical limit is 1-2 MB. It also creates problems for the recipient whose e-mail accounts have limited storage, and large e-mail messages are rejected because they exceed the given storage quota or may fill up the receiver’s inbox causing other e-mail messages to bounce. Sending a large file through e-mail will slow down everyone’s e-mail service and frustrate the receiver’s ability to access the rest of the mail. Try LeapFILE free for 14 days. You will get 250MB of capacity to evaluate the system. http://www.leapfile.com/www/start/Trial.isp
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SEARCH FOR SOUND….Yahoo http://audio.search.yahoo.com is the latest, and perhaps the largest site to offer audio searches. You can locate specific music, sound effects and other audio such as speeches. Just type your search term and hit Enter. You will get a list of results. The site provides other search options enabling you to limit the results to music or other files. Search by artist, album or song title. Yahoo lists songs from download sites for which you need to pay as well as free audio files that are legal.
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GO FOR GAS PRICES….try this site for shopping the gasoline market for your car. It will search via a zip code…. http://autos.msn.com/partners/sponsorpage.aspx?page=gas&src=Home&pos=gas .
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. TEST FOR SPEED…..the following site will allow you to test your internet speed It is. http://us.mcafee.com/root/speedometer/test_0150.asp
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MORE AUDIO SEARCHES…can be found at GoFish… http://www.gofish.com will help you search for songs and audiobooks. Do a general search or limit your search to one type of file. Enter your search phrase and click GoFish. It will search song lyrics even if you know a few words from the song and use them as your search term. The search results will be organized by artist, album, song and audio book. Clicking on a link opens a list of stores selling the audio file. It shows the file type, player compatibility and price and, if a disc is available, links for purchasing a CD.
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DISPLAYING THE TRADITIONAL DESKTOP ICONS….Older versions of windows had some icons that always appeared on the desktop: My Documents, My Computer, My Network Places, Internet Explorer, Recycle Bin. Of these five only the Recycle Bin appears on the Windows XP desktop by default. Want to display any of the other icons, just follow these steps…1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop. Make sure you right-click the desktop itself, not on an object lying on the desktop. Windows displays a context menu. 2. Choose Properties. The Display Properties dialog box springs into view. 3. On the Desktop tab, click the Customize Desktop button. Windows displays the Desktop items dialog box with the General tab selected. 4. At the top of the dialog box, select the check boxes corresponding to the icons you want displayed on the desktop. Conversely, you can deselect the check boxes of any icons you don’t want displayed. 5. Keep clicking OK to dismiss all the dialog boxes on the screen. The icons you selected should be visible on screen, along with all the others you have.
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FOCUSING WITH POINT AND SHOOT DIGITAL…Autofocus cameras produce very sharp pictures when used properly. However, getting sharp results may require telling them where to focus. A common focusing problem occurs when you decide to place a subject off-center in the viewfinder frame. This might happen when you are photographing people, but want to use an interesting background such as mountains, a building or other such object. If you point and shoot with the scenery in the center, the camera focuses on the scenery and your people unsharp in the printing. It is called tunnel focus. Avoid this. Lock the focus anytime the composition does not place the viewfinder’s focus point on the most important part of the scene you are shooting. Locking the focus means that you deliberately make your camera focus on some object in the scene, perhaps a person or something interesting in the foreground…and keep the focus locked at that exact distance until you take the picture. Here is how you lock the focus. 1. Look through the viewfinder and position its focus point on the most important part of the scene…your main subject..in effect you center that subject. 2. Press the shutter button halfway down, until the green focus –OK lamp in the viewfinder eyepiece glows steadily. 3. Holding the shutter button halfway down, reorient the camera so your desired composition appears in the viewfinder. 4. Press the shutter button all the way down to take the picture. In other words you lock the focus by aiming the focus point at your people(which temporarily puts them in the center of the viewfinder) Then keeping the shutter button halfway down, you swing the camera to place them off-center and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.
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WANTED: URL's of web sites; Helpful hints for Mac users, Win 95/98/ME/XP. Software reviews, desired topics for future meetings. Send these items via email to the editor. Please sign your email with your name. We will publish your email address, but not your name, phone number or address without your permission