Tony and Frank will be presenting a tour of their experiences with Virtual Acorn and describing the problems they have encountered on the way. Tony has VARPC-Adjust and Frank has VARPC-SE on their respective laptops. Michael has kindly promised to talk about the Windows aspects of the use of Virtual Acorn.
They are happy to respond to requests for information and questions. We will have the usual monitor arrangement so everyone should be able to get a good view.
I'll be very interested to find out about the use of Photodesk in VA and whether it is stable and runs quicker on this platform.
So please come along.
Gareth brought along Airport Express, an Apple wireless access point that also features a USB port for printer sharing, and a line out connection to allow streaming audio to a hi-fi. With iTunes software on a PC or Mac you can stream music from your PC. He spoke about security issues with WiFi WEP(Wireless equivalent Protection) being the simple system which uses a hex or ASCII keyword. Stronger security is provided by use of WPA (Wireless Protected Access) which uses a passphrase which is used to generate a key which changes every 30 minutes. Security may also be tightened up by not broadcasting the Network ID and also by limiting access to identified MAC addresses.( MAC filtering.)
Although apparently MAC addresses can be hacked even though they are meant to be hard wired and unique to each piece of equipment! You can't win!
He ran through all of the set up screens needed to configure the system. He also spoke at length about BT Openzone and Open WiFi. There seem to be more security issues with these as effectively all the people using an access point are in the same network. It is essential to have a personal firewall set up.
Gareth also showed us his home built M0n0wall box. This project (yes they are zero's in the name!!) is an open source router/firewall based on FreeBSD. It runs on most PC hardware, but also certain embedded hardware.
Several others had brought laptops with wireless cards and were able to join in the ad hoc network set up.
After the break Peter showed his BT ADSL router (no phone line) with wireless access point and showed the logon via the network for configuration. Unfortunately he forgot to bring his password to show all the configuration set up (oops) !
Peter also showed his Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 with a Symbol Spectrum 24 WiFi card in a compact flash format card and used Opera to access the router set up from the Zaurus.
Wireless speeds are nominally 11Mb/s in practice about 600kb/s is achieved with 802.11b protocol. With 802.11g the figures are 54Mb/s and 2Mb/s respectively. Don't forget that in a LAN or hotspot this bandwidth is shared between all users.
It was quite an interesting evening and it is good to see so many people bringing computers along to the meetings.
This is ongoing but there is no progress to report at the moment.
I've been busy lately editing photos and video and learning how to produce DVDs. At the moment our plans for the November meeting, which were to hear Richard Brown speak about Oregano3 developments, are in jeopardy because we cannot gain online access at Bourne Vale Club. If anyone has a mobile phone with blue tooth on a contract with spare free minutes which they would be willing to use we might still be able to do it but otherwise we will have to choose another topic/speaker for the evening. Has anyone any other ideas?
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| October 5th | Virtual Acorn hands on | Club |
| November 2nd | Outside speaker TBA | TBA |
| December 7th | Gadgets, DVD burning etc. | Club |
| January | Social evening TBA | |
| February 1st | UNIX, Solaris and Java | Club |
| March 1st | JPEG slideshow 10mins per person | Club |
| April 5th | AGM |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are available. the more distant dates are more provisional in definition! Some more meetings may have an outside speaker.
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
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events their next meeting will be:
October 11th when Tony will present a repeat of the talk he gave at Iceni a little while ago in which he described his recovery of 40-year-old transparency images by scanning and the first stage of archiving onto modern media.
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
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
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.