Six folks braved the rainy weather (or at least the dire prediction - the rain held off for the most part) to meet at the Bank of the West in Petaluma for our February SIG meeting. Before the meeting got started, we chatted a bit about free DSL and other free ISP type offers as well as about a comprehensive discussion of DVD on the recent Digital Duo. Also mentioned was a link to the Computer Chronicles web page http://www.cmptv.com/ and the recent program discussing the new developments in the Web/Internet.
To get the meeting rolling, we had a little fun with a Power Point slide show explaining why men die younger, looking at a little cartoon movie about a thief and trying out a cute screen saver that explains what happens to your computer when you spill water on it (thanks Ben Ezzell!).
Next we looked at some of the amazing pictures from the recent satellite rendezvous with the asteroid Eros. Then, for those looking to make there own special sound effects, we looked at "Quack Sound Effects Studio" which features a total visual approach to making sound effect wave files (sirens, phaser sounds, etc.). Following that, we reviewed a music flash card program called NoteCard which was intended to help budding musicians improve sight reading either as notes, on a keyboard or on a guitar neck.
Turning from sound to sight, we looked at Photo Side Show, an application to make picture slide shows. The unique aspect of this program is the capability to synchronize the pictures to a wave file sound track (e.g., music or voice narration). The program also includes picture-editing functions (i.e., color, size, brightness), a zip file creator to package up the shows and a TWAIN interface for digital cameras and scanners. Also from the same publisher was a graphics utility called "All Thumbs" for making picture thumbnails.
A disk utility called SpaceMan was last on the prepared agenda. SpaceMan scans disks or folders, reporting the total, cumulative disk space consumed by each item and, optionally, producing a list of duplicate file names that can be easily marked for deletion. The interface is just like Windows Explorer, making it a snap to use. In addition, the program will create text reports that can be printed or copied to the clipboard for use by other programs.
We finished up the meeting checking out some clever batch and logo files from Steve Cerruti. One set of batch files created tables of contents from Win9x .CAB files and another set could extract specific files out of the cabs - handy if you needed to restore a munged system file. The logos made it real clear about waiting until Windows was ready for you to shut it down - just what you need for that impatient person you share your system with who blithely powers down as soon as they click the Shut Down button.
• Here are Internet links to some of the programs we explored.
Asteroid Eros pictures:
http://near.jhuapl.edu/iod/archive.html
Quack Sound Effects Studio ($50 Shareware):
http://www.morello.co.uk/quack.htm
NoteCard (freeware musical note training):
http://familygames.com/free/notecard.html
Photo Side Show ($20 Shareware picture slide show program):
http://home.att.net/~vaportrail/index.html
All Thumbs (freeware picture thumbnails):
http://home.att.net/~vaportrail/SSFree.html
SpaceMan ($15 Shareware disk utility):
http://www.extrabit.com/spaceman99/index.html
