Previous Meetings
Monday 12th December 2011 - Xmas Quiz
The evening started with Tony showing his new laptop, an Acer, with a blu-ray re-writer. Using the HDMI output we saw the high picture quality from two films, Pixar's Up, and The Polar Express. With animated films the detail can be lost when the video compression is used when transferring the film to DVD or blu-ray, but it was not evident here. As there were only two speakers set up Tony couldn't demonstrate the surround sound but it does sound good in the film Up.
We then went on to the Xmas Quiz, which costs £2 for members to enter. The quiz was supposed to be easier this year, but Tony says that every year. Surprisingly the winner, with 12 out of 20 was me (Laurence), with Miles, Francis and Dave tying second with 10 and John was third with 9. The prizes included copies of Norton Antivirus, Crazy Talk 6, Magix Photostory, Nero Move It, NCH Business Essentials Suite, A Guide to Office 2003 and a nifty bluetooth headset for your mobile phone. As most people managed to get three prizes each I'm pretty sure the evening was enjoyed by all.
The Questions (39k)
The Answers (40k)
Monday 14th November 2011 - PaintShop Pro X4/Google Tips
Laurence demonstrated some of the new features of PaintShop Pro X4
including Photo Blend, which is meant to help improve group photos where someone makes a face. He then showed the HDR (High Dynamic Range) exposure merge function,
which results in a dramatic looking image. He finished off with some of the effects, like Vignette and Selective Focus, before showing how the Fill Light/Clarity function
can improve a shot.
In the second part of the demo, Laurence showed the many features of searching using Google, showing how to improve the results of a query. There are also the added functions like the Calculator, finding the weather, the time in other countries, conversions, movies times and the quirks such as 'tilt' and searching for Chuck Norris. He ended with the feature in Word 2007 to generate random text to whatever length you require. A hopefully interest talk, but as I gave it, I maybe a bit biased!
Monday 10th October 2011 - Acer Laptop/SSD Drive/Dragon Dictate 11
Tony started off showing a new Acer Aspire Ethos laptop that he had on loan. It wasn't the model that he was promised, with a big screen
and blu-ray, but it had an i5 processor 2.3GHz, 8GB of memory and a 750GB hard drive. the case was made of aluminium instead
of the usually plastic, and the keys were lit as well. He showed some of the new restored DVD version of The Sound Of Music,
but that really needs a decent speaker system to do it justice.
He then showed a video of how he installed a 96GB solid state drive into a laptop. An SSD is very fast (Windows 7 boots
in just under 15 seconds) but they can be expensive, at around a dollar (or pound) per gigabyte. The 96GB model Tony had costs between £91-£120. You take the 2.5 inch drive
out of your laptop and put it into the supplied caddy. You install the solid state drive and then use the cloning software to
clone the hard drive (plugged in as an external drive) to the SSD. This can take around half a hour, so that's why Tony made
the video.
Finally Tony demonstrated Dragon Dictate 11, the latest voice to text software from Naturally Speaking, costing around £150. You usually have to train
the software to recongise your voice, but it seemed to work just as well when Francis had a go with it (and he had never used it
before). It can translate the spoken word to text using one of it's own programs (Dragon Pad, which is a bit like Word Pad) but
you can also use it with Word. You can play back the recording and it will highlight the words as it goes, which makes it easier
for you to correct any mistakes.
Monday 12th September 2011 - Sony Vaio 3D Laptop
The first meeting after our summer break started with Tony showing us one of Sony's most expensive (around £1700) i7 laptops.
It can show 3D Blu-ray films and comes supplied with one pair of active-shutter 3D glasses. Unfortuantely Tony could not get the
display to work, although it was working fine early that afternoon!
He went on to show his new Panasonic HD camcorder, which uses SD HC cards to record the footage, and comes with a 3D lens adapter. Tony had been to the Proms the other week and had made a short film of his trip (even though they ban the use of any camera inside the Albert Hall). He created this using Pinnacle Studio 15, importing the footage and adding still photos, music and titles. He went through the steps of creating a video using some footage of his grandchildren swimming in his pool. As with most video editing programs, there were many transistion effects available but most professionals only use a simple cut or fade. The only film series I know of that uses a fancy wipe is George Lucas' Star Wars films. If you don't have any music to add to the background of your film, you can use the SmartSound music which is listed by the type and style of music. This creates music 'on the fly' and has the advantage of fitting the length of the clip no matter how low or short it is. If you add another scene to your movie, you can just stretch the music and it will be recomposed to fit.
Monday 13th June 2011 - AGM and Lexmark Genesis S815 Scanner/Printer
The members of the board gave their reports, and then stood down. All three were re-elected. The subs are to remain at £20, but as the rent for the hall costs £36 per meeting, it was agreed that a cheaper venue (or a renegotiation on the price) really should be found. Anyone with details of a location close to where we meet should send the info to our Chairman/Editor, Tony, at his email address. Laurence reminded members that the website could do with some input from other members, and that the domain was renewed for two years just recently.
Tony then went on to show the Lexmark Genesis S815 Scanner/Printer. This device has a touch screen and instead of a traditional scanner uses a 10 megapixel camera to 'scan' the items in a tray accessed by pulling down the front of the screen. Multiple documents can be printed double sided and magazine can be scanned it they are not too thick. The quality of photos printed were not as good as expected, but this could have been down to the paper used. The printer uses a black and three colour cartirdges, which costs £14, but Tony could not say how many pages one set of cartridges could print. Items could be scanned and sent to a PDF or Word (as an RTF file) and the device can be set up to be used wirelessly with its built in wifi adapter. It also has a Pictbridge connection port, as well as an SD card slot. As the scanning resolution cannot be changed you can't use the scanning functions to enlarge an image but for everyday use it seems easy to use. The Genesis S815 costs £299 from Lexmark, but only £178 from Amazon.
Monday 9th May 2011 - Creating Music on your PC
This will be a bit odd as I'm writing a review of the talk I gave at the club meeting!
Laurence has been creating music since 1984, and showed some of his earlier work on a BBC Micro emulator. He followed with a history of the sound card, playing the same
music on each of the devices. After clarifying some of the terms used he showed the software you can use to create music, from Dance eJay (£20), n-Track Studio (£40)
to Reason 5 (£226). After a demo of a piece using a classical track as it's basis in n-Track Studio, he showed how easy it was to record your music using a MIDI keyboard (in this case
a Casio CZ-101), a £6 MIDI to USB adapter and the software. By recording a few bars on a lopp using quantising, you can easily build up a song and change the sounds with a few clicks.
He also showed the more traditional sheet music way to record your songs, using Sibelius 6 and PhotoScore (to scan in the music).
The hardware needed, a MIDI adapter and a MIDI keyboard is fairly cheap, at around £86 for the two, but the expensive part is the software itself. Most of them have a trial version available to download but there a few freewware music programs if you search for them. Getting additional sounds, like VST plugins or ReFill packs can cost a fair bit as well. For example, the Abbey Road Keyboards ReFill for Reason, which gives you vintage sounds from the famous recording studios, costs around £130. A hopefully enjoyable evening, and below are some mp3 files of the songs featured in the talk.
Chuckie B (MIDI File)
Chuckie B (arranged in Reason 5)
Dance (MIDI File)
Dance (arranged in Reason 5)
T.I.M. - Palladio Film (created in n-Track Studio)
T.I.M. - Cantaloop (example of Soundfonts)
T.I.M. - Sphere Two (example of Dance eJay
If you have QuickTime installed, you can compare the difference between it's own synthesiser and the Microsoft one. Play a MIDI file in in the QuickTime player and then play the same file in Media Player and see if you can hear the difference.
Monday 11th April 2011 - XBox 360 and Kinect
The meeting was a little different to normal, as Tony's grandchildren,
Ben and Sam came along to demonstrate the Kinect add on for the Xbox 360. This is a camera, microphone and infrared sensor that allows you to play games on
the Xbox 360 by just moving your body. Unlike the Wii and the PS3 controllers you don't have to hold anything. The Kinect does need to be calibrated before
you play any game, but this is fairly quick to do. Ben started with hangliding on the Motion Sports game. You also have soccer, boxing, skiing, and American
football and his brother Sam then showed the penalty shoot out where you take a penalty and then become the goalkeeper. Ben then showed the downhill slalom
skiing which he was quite good at as he had just come back from a real skiing holiday.
The evening was finished off with Fifa 2010, one of the older Xbox 360 games which unfortunately does not work with the Kinect. Instead you use the wireless controller which has a multitude of buttons to control your player on screen and enable him to pass and kick. The boys certainly know their games (and their football) and are competitive. As they had to get home it wasn't possible for the other club members to try any of the games but it showed how easy it was to play the games with the Kinect device. The sensor costs around £100 and comes with one game, or you can get it as part of a bundle with the XBox 360 for £290.
Monday 14th March 2011 - Hallmark Card Studio Deluxe
Tony gave a brief demonstration of Hallmark's latest Card Studio software. It can create all types of cards, calendars, invitations, etc. from it's 16,000 graphics, which
took over an hour to install. He showed how easy it was to pick a design and customise the card, adding your own text and pictures. The initial designa are "a bit cheesy
and Americanised" to quote Tony, but look good when printed out. You can use special greeting card paper with envelopes, which you can get from places like WHSmiths, although
they only seem to stock A5 cards which fold to an A6. You can get a package of the software and 20 greeting card paper sheets and envelopes for about £24 from Amazon, or just the
software for £15. Tony did remark on how the software seemed a little slugish on his laptop (and that's not due to the speed of the laptop itself) but despite this it can
produce quality cards that are alot cheaper than shop bought ones.
Monday 14th February 2011 - Is a Mac Better?
In our first meeting after the Christmas break, John Childs talked about Apple Mac computers. He had a 15 inch MacBook Pro Intel Core Duo laptop (starting price £1530) but his pride and joy was a 27 inch iMac quad core desktop (custom made, £1950). Both run OS X (Snow Leopard), based on a Unix core, which was upgraded for around £40 for five computers. The iMac uses a wireless keyboard and mouse (with no physical buttons on top, but functionally they are there) and has a built in DVD drive and several USB ports around the back. The built in speakers are better than the ones you get on a laptop but the monitor only comes in a gloss format whereas the laptop can have a matt finish. John showed the ins and outs of the OS and the bundled programs, and although Apple have their version of Office/Works, called iWorks (£60), he uses the freely available Open Office. Microsoft Office is available in Mac format, as are many programs. John uses Photoshop CS5 (£530) for his photography work and Adobe Lightroom to organise his photos. The latter costs £200, but Apple have a program called Aperture which does the same sort of thing, and costs £44 from their iStore.
John showed that you can dual boot between the Mac OS and Windows XP using Boot Camp, but with VMWare Fusion 3 (around £70) you can run a Windows OS in a window, much like Microsoft's Virtual PC.
He also explained how you don't really need anti virus software as system files are protected and the OS is more secure, but as the majority of computers are PC based, hackers haven't
bothered to write a virus for the Mac, yet. There's no denying that Macs look very good and the OS is slick, but the hardware is expensive. A PC equivalent of John's iMac is a Sigma Plus all in one, £960 from Novatech. This has a 24 inch monitor, half the memory (4GB),
dual core (not quad core), wireless keyboard and mouse, Windows 7 Home Premium and a touch screen (something Apple doesn't do with their large monitors). It doesn't look aa good
at John's Mac, but costs less than half of the price. Build quality for Macs is second to none, with a good design and a operating system that really works (I'm quoting from John here!). An interesting evening.
Monday 13th December 2010 - Christmas Quiz
The Christmas quiz was at the same level of difficulty as it is every year. Some questions were easy and some were really hard. I managed 10 out of 20, and came joint second with three other members. First place was tied between John Childs, Mike Bray and Francis Jacques, all with 14 out of 20. The prizes available were several copies of Norton AntiVirus, Norton Utilities and Norton 360, some Video editing software from Magix, a copy of Paint Shop Photo Pro X3, a rather colourful set of headphones and a laptop bag. There were enough prizes for everyone plus one more, as our Chairman (Tony) set the quiz as per usually, and so couldn't win a prize! The questions and answers are available to download.
Monday 8th November 2010 - Scanners and PDF Creation
With the addition of a new u shaped sofa in the middle of the hall, which was compfy for members watching the demo, Laurence started the evening showing the Ion Pics 2 PC scanner. This can scan photos and 35mm slides/negatives, and is effectively a 5 megapixel web camera. Laurence compared the results from this scanner to scans of the same images done on his Epson 1660 Photo Perfection scanner, which were better. At £100 this is one of the more expensive slide scanners available, but with the lack of decent results and flaws (it scans at 1800 PDI but saves a 96 DPI image) it was a bit of a disappointment.
Tony then showed his Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner which has Digital Ice included, which automatically removes spots and marks from your scans. It may be more expensive and take longer to scan slides, but the results were much better. With the holder provided you can set it to scan twelves transparencies automatically, although it was advised to go and make a cup of tea whilst it was doing this as it takes quite while!
Finally, Tony showed Nuance's PDF Converter 7 software, an alternative to Adobe Acrobat for making your own PDF files. He demonstrated how to turn a printed page into a PDF, password protect it, and join PDFs together. At around £70, this is a cheaper alternative to Adobe Acrobat X, which costs around £500 for the full version, or around £220 for an upgrade version.
Monday 11th October 2010 - Swann Security Cameras
Tony demonstrated two cameras from Swann Security. The first was a Digital Guardian Camera & Recorder ADW-400, a wireless security camera that transmits the picture and sound to a base unit that records to an SD card. The camera is mains powered, but does come with a power cable extender. It records at 16fps and can cope with low light levels, with a night vision setting. It can start to record when it senses movement, and the base unit can emit an alarm at the same time. It can cope with up to four different cameras, but the base unit only has phono out sockets for you to connect to a television. There is no connection to a PC, but as it records to an SD card it doesn't really need to. The package costs around £170.
the second camera was a RemoteCam DVR-410, shaped like a keyring fob. It has two controls, one for power and the other to take a photo or start recording. It uses a microSD card, and a 2GB one is supplied. It has a better resolution that the Guardian, and can record sound via the built in microphone. Tony showed some stealth footage recorded while we we have a coffee and apart from the camera shake it was good quality footage. He then showed some footage taken when he went to his local post office and he kept the fob with his keys so he could hold it in a suitable position. The unit has a rechargeable battery that lasts an hour and a the 2GB card can record around 25 minutes. It costs around £33.
The RemoteCam was the favourite of the two cameras shown, and will be on some members christmas lists!
Monday 13th September 2010 - Virtual Air Traffic Radar
We hit a problem with our first meeting after our summer break, as Tony couldn't get internet access from the club's free WiFi. We guessed that the new router has some setting to prevent access, so part of the meeting was held in the room with the PCs that are connected to the router. He showed us a live flight tracking website called Casper, at casper.frontier.nl which shows aircraft positions and other data over several airports. If you subscribe to the site (which costs £13 for half a year) the data is in real time, but if you visit it as a free user, there is a fifteen minute delay. You can see the altitude and type of aircraft, as well as the flight number. If you use another site I found called Flight Aware at http://flightaware.com/live/ you can enter the flight number to get more information about it. Tony also used his radio which picks up the air traffic control messages but as we were indoors it did not get a good signal.
Tony then showed his air NAV radar box (cost around £380) which uses a special aerial to pick up the same data that the web site uses, but gets it direct from the aircraft. The box connects to a PC and the software displays this information, but is very graphic intensive and can use Goggle maps to enhance the display. As we had no internet access the display was not as good, and the range was around 60 miles, not bad for an aerial under a foot high indoors. An interesting evening, even for non airplane spotters!
Monday 14th June 2010 - iStorage diskGenie and Paintshop Photo Pro X3
The evening started with Tony demonstrating diskGenie, an external hard drive with 256-bit hardware encryption, by iStorage. It does not require any additional software and has pin code access to the drive, powered by the USB port. The data is encrypted/decrypted on the fly so you don't see any slow down in access. It is quite expensive though, at around £115 for a 250GB capacity, up to £200 for a 640GB. It uses a 2.5in hard drive, but you can get an SSD version (£200 for 30GB, £1210 for 256GB). An alternative is to buy a 2.5in hard drive (£30 for 160GB) with an external enclosure (£8 or less), and use some software like Stegano Safe (version 11 is £27). That's £68 or less for effectively the same kit (without a number pad).
Laurence then continued with a demo of Corel's Paintshop Photo Pro X3. The full editor has some new features, like Smart Carver, which can adjust the size of a picture whilst keeping objects the same size (like making a picture widescreen without stretching the people). A new Object Extractor makes it easier to take an object from one photo and place it in another, and there's an improved object remover to take unsightly objects out of your photo. The text function has been improved as well, and there's a new Vibrancy filter (which does the same as increasing the saturation). You also get four KPT plugin filters to add extra features to the program. The Project Creator is the same software from the Digital Studio 2010 package Corel released a while ago which let's you create calendars, collages, slide shows and easily upload to Facebook and Flickr. The final piece of software in the box shown was Painter Photo Essentials 4, which takes a photo and paints it like a watercolour, pencil drawing or oil painting. This is a cut down version of Corel's Painter program but some good results can be achieved and it's fun to watch the picture being automatically 'painted'.
Monday 10th May 2010 - AGM/Acer Aspire 1825PT Netbook
The AGM was fairly quick, with Francis and Tony standing down and being re-elected as Treasurer and Chairman/Editor. As Paul Kuzmin was no longer going to attend the meetings, Laurence Fenn was collared, sorry elected, as secretary. The subs were agreed to remain the same at £20, and members who paid up were offered some software for free. Afterwards Laurence demonstrated the new Acer Aspire 1825PT netbook, on loan from Acer. This was after a system restore was needed (which took ages to complete) as some of the updates applied by Tony seemed to cause problems, like lack of internet access and ability to play videos/music.
The netbook (which doesn't appear on Acer's site as yet) has an impressive 9 hour battery, and as well as three USB ports and an SD card reader, has an HDMI out port. This was shown with the big screen television in the hall and the picture quality was very good. However you can't use this as a blu-ray/DVD player as there is no built-in drive, but it would work with an external one plugged into one of the USB ports. The touch screen works well but can be difficult when accessing small items on the desktop, like the close button on a window and the screen does hold the finger prints. Still, if you don't mind waiting a while to run programs and only one at a time (netbooks are not good at multi-tasking) then the €600 price tag along with the built in Bluetooth/Wi-Fi could entice you.
Monday 8th March 2010 - Laurence Fenn Graphical Adventures
First Tony showed us a Ricoh CX2 with built in video. Power DVD 10 out soon 3D compatible - need glasses 3D and a special 3D graphics card.
Laurence's talk followed giving the history of graphical adventure games, including:
- 1982 Philosopher's Quest on BBC micro and was text based.
- 1980 Mystery House on Apple 2.
- 1978 Atari console Adventure - 2D with Easter egg required 4k of memory 128 bytes.
- King's Quest interactive game series from Sierra 1984 - 1998 each improving in graphics eventually 3D we saw a video about the making of KQ6.
- Prince of Persia 1989 - 2003 Sands of time ongoing realistic movement 3D eventually - Disney releasing a film based on the game in May 2010.
- 1990 Secret of Monkey Island (Lucas Film games) - pick up objects from one side to move to the other side has been re-release 2009 with speech. Involved character who undergoes trials to become a pirate.
- Another World Delphin software 1991 & 2006 versions on many consoles and DOS - difficult game to win without cheat codes.
- Alone in the Dark 1992-2001 about a detective up to Win 95 - had a movie made that was a flop.
- LucasArts games 1992-93 include Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle & Sam & Max. We saw a Fate of Atlantis demonstration.
- 1993 Myst - Apple Mac 3D background different endings. Riven and further Myst versions.
- The 7th Guest - 1st game for PC CD ROM and Mac and Phillips CD-i. Sequel 11th hour 1995 all puzzle games with videos in between, the latter on 4 CDs.
- 1993 Return to Zork - a couple of famous actors involved was combining real motion pictures with cartoon animation.
- Under a Killing Moon - a Tex Murphy adventure with two sequels, 1994-1998 with famous actors. On up to 6 CDs!
- 1995 Phantasmagoria - By Sierra on 7 CDs based on The Shining - banned in Australia! Uses objects picked up to progress through the adventure.
- 1995 Full Throttle by LucasArts - cartoon-like game with Mark Hamill
- 1997 The Curse of Monkey Island - improved sound interactive cartoon.
- 1998 1st 3D graphics Grim Fandango (I loved that game for its humour and super graphics) was a commercial flop so LucasArts people all left to join different companies.
- 2001 Runaway A Road Adventure. Spanish version detailed 3D graphics.
- 2006 Scratches. Very dark imagery and spooky music very well done but disturbing.
- 2008 A Vampire Story. Ex-LucasArts people as well - quite humorous - sequel awaited.
- 2009 Tales of Monkey Island - more from Guybrush the hero made for Windows & Wii. It is released in sequels that form episodes.
- 2009 Machinarium - large Czech Flash game with a little robot and thought bubbles.
- 2010 The Whispered World - about a clown and a pet worm.
He then explained how to play the games on a modern PC. Four ways, firstly, check for Windows updates for games. Some like The 7th Guest, Under a Killing Moon, and 11th Hour have updates that will run the game in Windows instead of DOS. Some games have been released on Great Old Games which have been tweaked to run in Windows and are cheap. Myst: Masterpiece Edition $5.99, Simon the Sorcerer $5.99, Phantasmagoria $9.99.
Secondly, Microsoft offer a free download of Virtual PC, which allows you to set up an environment to run the game. MS-DOS 6.2 is currently free from Microsoft as well, or you can use FreeDOS.
Thirdly, If it is a LucasArts game, Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2, Return to Zork, The 7th Guest, King's Quest 1-4, Gobliins 1-3, Disc World, Space Quest 1-3, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky then ScummVM is a program that will run the game using its own code, so it can run a game. Versions for Mac and Pocket PC available as well.
Lastly, Any other game can be run using DOSBox 0.73. A free download that sets up an environment with virtual drives that can be mapped to any folder. If ISO images are made of the CDs needed, these can be mount so you don't need any of them when you play the game. The CD can be changed with a keystroke. It can be quite complex to set up, so there are front ends to DOS Box that help you set up the game.
If you want to search for old games, here are some sites:
http://www.dosgames.com/gameindex.php
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com
http://www.classicdosgames.com
http://www.abandonia.com
http://hotud.org
As a final note, if anyone saw the video files Laurence played before the demo, they you can see them online. The Hero and the Jazz Hamster.
Monday 14th December 2009 - Christmas Quiz
Our Christmas Festive meeting on 14th December 2009 consisted as usual of our annual Christmas Quiz. A splendid selection of donated "goodies" was up for grabs (the most expensive being worth over £200 retail). We had joint highest score winners in the shape of Paul Kuzmin and Mike Bray who both managed to score 14 questions right out of 20. Being Christmas we ensured everyone attending the meeting had a warm mince pies and went away with a prize!
Monday 8th February 2010 - Gizmos and Gadgets
At the meeting on Monday 8th February of Gizmos and Gadgets we had a demonstration of a variety of items.
1. This included the Cygnett FM Transmitter, ideal for streaming your iPod or MP3 music to your in-car stereo to a vacant spot in the FM band. Also
ideal if you have a mini-DAB radio and want to listen to DAB stations on your in-car FM stereo.
2. Also shown were two Hard-disk enclosures from Sandberg:
a. Multi hard Disk Box 3.5" for IDE or SATA 3.5" hard disks c/w PSU and
b. Multi Hard Disk Box 2.5" lets you use a 2.5" IDE or SATA hard disk as a portable external hard disk. The box connects to a computer
either via USB 2.0 or eSATA, giving speeds of up to 3 Gb per second (IDE hard disks cannot, however, be connected with eSATA).
Both Boxes come with an adapter bracket to convert an internal SATA port to an eSATA port. As an added bonus an eSATA cable is supplied with both boxes.
3. Doro MemoryPlus was demonstrated to show how a bleeping receiver with key-ring can be attached to hard to find keys or whatever. One press of the
transmitter and the key-ring receiver bleeps to show its whereabouts - ideal for older folk with short-term memories who may have forgotten where
they've put essential items, like keys for example.
4. We saw introductory videos from Corel showing the features of their just released latest versions of their popular photo and video editing
programs: Corel PaintShop Pro X3 and Video Studio Plus X3.
5. Also saw instructional videos of some other newly released programs.
Overall the February meeting was an interesting and informative evening with a variety of new and fascinating items on show.
Monday 9th November 2009
Two items on show this evening:
1. Tony Hawes brought along his laptop with Windows 7 64-bit installed and demonstrated and commented on the features in Windows 7 which appealed to
him most: Aero snap to pin items to the sides of your desktop. Aero Peek for temporarily minimising (clearing) the icons on the desktop. Libraries
for quick access to most used documents and images.
2. He then moved on to a demonstration of Nuance PDF Converter Professional 6 in action with his Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner doing the
scanning. He demonstrated the main features of the program which included how to create, convert, edit and share PDF files. At a fraction of
the cost of Adobe Acrobat, PDF Converter 6 was shown to be a worthy and cost effective alternative.
Monday 12th October 2009
This month's meeting consisted of three items:
1. A short practical introduction to some of the new and interesting features of Windows 7 which went on sale 10-days later.
2. We then saw three short introductory videos from Corel showing what's new in Corel's new, cheap and easy-to-use Digital Studio 2010 suite of programs.
3. Laurence Fenn then gave a practical demonstration of Corel Digital Studio 2010 in action.
Monday 14th September 2009
Paul Kuzmin showed his 1-TByte Linux Ripserver NAS (Network storage System), Linn Akurate DS (Digital Streamer) and speakers showing how the whole system worked together.
Monday 8th June 2009 - Improve Your Photo Taking
John Childs presented an interesting evening discussing his photography hobby using Canon cameras and various lenses which he manages to wield without a tripod. All these lenses are zoom lenses apart from a 50 mm traditional fixed lens and he mentioned that fixed lenses are actually more expensive than zoom lenses. He discussed the difference between JPEG for every day use and RAW images for special pictures that can have a lot more processing done in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. He also gave a number of useful tips for our summer holidays such as avoiding putting the subject in the middle of the picture and much better to put in one of the outer 1/3 sections. This tends to make the picture look more dynamic. Also if the subject is moving in especially sporting pictures it is a good idea to leave a space in front of the subject to move into which looks much more natural than the subject heading out of frame. In animal shots he generally aimed for the eyes and blurred the background and often crops the picture to focus especially on the animal. He said the blurring the background was very difficult for small cameras to achieve.
Another mistake in photos was not to include a focal point in many landscapes that draws the eye. The timing of pictures was also thought to be essential in landscape pictures with dawn and dusk being the best times. It is also good to give an object of sense of scale in the case of statues and monuments especially. In wildlife scenes it is best to go in as close as possible. He also favoured the use of diagonals such as in a picture of motorbike racing and he showed as some successful panning where the motorbike was in focus and the background was blurred with the motion. He then brought out his spectacular prints which looked incredibly lifelike, my favourite being the otter. I was really impressed with the quality and it is good to see such enthusiasm.
Photos taken at the meeting (resized for display)
Next September and I plan to demonstrate the Ripserver LINUX network storage device alongside a Windows or LINUX computer with loudspeakers I bought some time ago from Tony. This has enabled me to archive my entire CD collection and I hope to also put a couple of DVD movies and some pictures on just to show what it can do.
Monday 11th May 2009 - AGM and Epson Scanner
Monday 11th May 2009. We held our annual general meeting and Francis Jacques was re-elected treasurer, Paul Kuzmin secretary and Tony Hawes the chairman and editor of ROM magazine. The treasurer said that the subscription to the club would remain at £20 but this would not quite sustain us in through the next year. The membership had fallen quite drastically and as the landlords insisted that the charge for our hire of the hall for the night could not be reduced below the existing £36, it was decided that we would miss the July and February meetings as well as the August meeting so that we met nine times a year. This was proposed by Kevin Kibbey and was seconded by general agreement and a show of hands. With just nine meetings we should be able to cope without raising the subscription. There was also discussion about whether a different venue could be found but this might be more a longer term objective. The University of Surrey was one considered location.
Tony then went on to demonstrate an Epson scanner - not the one that he had hoped to be lent by Epson, but his own Epson Perfection 4990 photo instead. He demonstrated the various masks for transparencies and negatives as well as the very good OCR capability of Abbyy Fine Reader. His laptop was running the first release candidate for Windows 7 and seemed to function perfectly well. We all admired the photo restoration qualities of Epson's software that comes with the scanner, in particular the restoration of badly faded colour transparencies with a pronounced pink cast to near true colours, and all at the click of a mouse, without the intervention of Photoshop or PaintShop Pro was quite amazing.
Monday 20th April 2009 - Crazy Talk 5
Our webmaster (that's me) Laurence Fenn gave a demonstration of Reallusion's Crazy Talk 5. This program can take a photo and turn it into a talking animation. He showed how you mark the defining features on a face and then import a sound file to animate to. You can add background music and move tehe features on the face as well as add effects and objects like glasses, hats or a moustache. As the whole process can take a while to create, he played some files he created earlier, like a gorilla singing Phil Collin's "In The Air Tonight" and also his niece's dog Ozzy singing "Take Me Out" (by Franz Ferdinand). YouTube has quite a few videos created with this software, and you can create video files in a variety of formats, included mobile phone files and flash video files.
You can see examples of what can be done with the software at this Ozzy Sings link or this Tom Speaks link.
Monday 9th March 2009 - Resizing Images/Ricoh R10 Camera
Our meeting on Monday 9th March was in three parts. It started with a most interesting talk by Laurence Fenn on Resizing Images on your PC with the minimum loss of detail. He first listed the various image sources, digital cameras, mobile phones, email scanner or web downloads etc. and then asked the question "why resize". Perhaps your image is too big, it consists of too many KBs to send by email, to add to a document or for a web page or even too small to print out for your requirement. He then went on to explain the resampling methods available and the factors to consider:- blurring, colour depth, resolution etc and showed examples. He then listed the software that can be used to resize images and their various prices. Laurence will be putting an expansion of his talk on the club web site, available in the Articles section.
Continuing on this theme Tony Hawes demonstrated a free program Image Resizer which is part of Microsoft Power Toys for Windows XP. This is available at Power Toys website. By right clicking on an image and selecting "Resize Pictures" the image can be converted to one of four standard sizes, small, medium, large or handheld PC. For example when an image of 400KBs is reduced to "small" it occupies only 69KBs. The image can also be resized to a "custom" size.
The evening finished with John Childs describing the Ricol R10 camera. This is one of the better compact cameras available in the £150 to £200 range. It has a 7.1 optical wide angle zoom and 10 million effective pixels. The sensitivity is given as ISO 1600 but John (who is a very experienced photographer) detected noise starting to show above about ISO 400. It has a 3 inch LCD monitor and has a well constructed body. For the market it is designed for it would be a good choice. That ended a most interesting evening.
Monday 12th January 2009 - Continuum Theory
We had an interesting and rather different talk at our meeting on Monday 12 January, our first meeting in 2009. Miles Osmaston agreed to give an introduction to Continuum Theory. His talk was based on a paper he delivered to a conference on the "Physical Interpretations of Relativity Theory" held at Imperial College, London in September 2008. In his talk, which took the form of a Power Point presentation, after a brief introduction to Continuum Theory, Miles argued that the aether as required by James Clerk Maxwell in has famous equations of the 1870's but avoided by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity of 1905 was of fundamental importance. Its neglect under the general relativity banner had been highly detrimental to scientific progress as it had fostered the intangible concepts of Big Bang, Dark Energy and black holes. He explained how the acceptance of the aether can lead to a new understanding of gravitational forces and he then went on to illustrate how this can clarify the formation of galaxies and planetary systems like our own. A very complex and thought provoking talk requiring much concentration. We must thank Miles for the work he has put into these subjects and sharing his conclusions with us. The paper he gave to the conference sponsored by the British Society for Philosophy of Science is on the internet at www.physicsfoundations.org.