This should be an entertaining evening. Come along and support us and put your views forward on how you would like to see the club run.
The present Committee are all willing to stand again in their current posts. Any further nominations for Officers of the Committee should be sent to the Secretary via iceni@woolridge.org.uk . This also applies to any items for Any Other Business.
AGM
ICENI COMPUTER CLUB 2005
7.30 p.m. Wednesday 6th April
Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The formal business is expected to be over in an hour and then we are looking forward to hearing Paul Beverley speak on technology tips. He is an old friend of the club and has been involved in the Acorn RISC scene for many years and is editor/owner of the two magazines mentioned above. The Archive magazine covering mainly RISC topics with a host of interesting and up to date articles. The second, Living with Technology, has a broader multi- platform brief covering, not only computing, but all aspects of modern and some vintage technology. I can recommend these magazines as well worth reading.
Tony gave a very good talk on the use of the Nikon Coolscan III to scan slides and transparencies. He has inherited his father's collection of over 2000 old photographs and is using the scanner to save these as digital files. He managed to acquire an old RISC PC with a SCSI card for the scanner running RISC OS3 from Revitalise. He also uses an old piece of software called !Imagebank, which allows a browsing, compressing and cataloguing of image files. This allowed him to catalogue groups of files by location, which include many historic pictures taken around Suffolk and Norfolk. Imagebank also produces thumbnails of the pictures allowing for easy identification. Unfortunately this software, written by SJ Middleton of Irlam Instruments Ltd in 1993, is no longer available and the firm is no longer in business. Tony said that it would not work on RO4 anyway.
Most of the photos are transparencies and it takes about 40 seconds to scan a picture using !Dplngscan and TWAIN driver to produce JPEGs of 1MB size about 1200x 800 pixels. The gamma is set to 0.4. He scans usually at 900 x 900 dpi and saves at 75% quality. There has been some deterioration of the colour of the slides mainly in the skies and he sues a clean soft handkerchief to flick the dust off. He can manage to process about 60 a day and stores about 10 compressed files on a floppy.(Is that right? Ed.). Tony had also modified the original slide show software from Acorn in order to locate his own slides and run a slide show from the Imagebank images. He also produced a numbered contact print sheet with 24 photos per sheet. Anyone know how to do this in a word processor ?
Paul mentioned at the meeting that there was a reference to YASSA (Yet another Slide Show Application) in Archive magazine recently. Paul writes:-
After the demonstration last month about using the slideshow application
it was timely that the PD column in the March Archive magazine mentions
the freeware utility YASSA (Yet Another Slide Show Application). You just
drag a directory containing images on to the task bar icon & you can run a
slideshow of them. You also have the option of creating a script for the
slideshow varying the amount of time each slide is displayed. It can be
downloaded from http://www.danceswithferrets.org/lab/yassa/index.html .
Thanks Tony for an interesting talk and demo of photo archiving. I have since seen a few Coolscans for sale on ebay for around £130. They used to be well over £400 originally.
Your editor also visited the Essex club again this month for a talk by Stewart Brookes on Easiwriter/Techwriter. Stewart was keen to tell us that there was ongoing and active development of Easiwriter with an active user group, including WIBLI ( Wouldn't It Be Lovely If...) suggestions list for added features. We were also encouraged to upgrade to the latest version 8.31 (which I have now done Ed.)
Techwriter/Easiwriteris a complex document processor. Essentially these two are the same product for normal documents except that Techwriter also enables mathematical equations and expressions to be handled as well. It behaves with a very differently philosophy to frame based word processors. It is very important to read the manual since many features are not at all intuitive. In particular it uses structures e.g. paragraphs, tables, sections, chapters, lists etc. to control how the whole document is structured. These may also be nested. Effects can be applied to individual characters e.g. Bold or else to paragraph styles, headings etc. in order to do this the structure is selected by clicking on the type of structure first rather than highlighting with the mouse directly. I asked a question about flowing text around a graphic was found it is necessary to highlight the picture structure first and then move the graphic also choosing left or right justification. It enables heading styles for a document to be set up and then modified such that all headings with the same style are changed automatically. There are multiple spell checkers available and paragraphs can be identified as in French, say, and checked against a French dictionary. Stewart was a very entertaining speaker and gave a very helpful talk.
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| 6th April 2005 | AGM followed by a talk by Paul Beverley on Ten Technology Tips. | |
| 4th May 2005 | IYONIX and RISC OS | Jack Lillingston (Castle Technology) |
The Committee have recently met and discussed the future programme covering a range of topics. If you have a particular computing area which you would like to hear about or would even like to talk about yourself please let us know.
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. As you can see we are hoping to have a few more talks with outside speakers this year. We will give more details as soon as they are available.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8NP , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events their next meeting will be:
| 12th April 2005 | A talk on PAT by an expert on electrical safety. PAT (Portable Appliance Testing) is a system for safety certification of portable electrical items. All items used in Gt Baddow Village Hall must be certified. |
| 10th May 2005 | AGM Followed by the Text Editor competition! |
For details of the above see the website
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL has changed to
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk