BARUG News
January 2005Thanks to those members who were able to attend the December meeting with mince pies, coffee and advice to the Chairman on how to sort out a networking problem. Armed with your input I now have a fully working wireless system in which everything talks to everything else - at least some of the time. Flushed with its success my RISC PC managed to get some corruption on the hard drive which necessitated recovering all the data, reformatting the disk and restoring it to the way it was. Fortunately, the only casualty seemed to be a few email and newsgroup archive documents. This is the first such occurrence in the 12 years I've been with RISC OS. Contrast that with the work Windows laptop I have, which despite the virus checker managed to collect an internet infection whilst downloading Windows 2000 upgrade files from the official Mickeysoft site. (There is a school of thought which holds that Windows is itself a form of virus.... :-) ) This problem required two complete rebuilds of the machine, as the first hard disk reformat didn't seem to clear the problem fully. Fortunately I had two near-empty work days between Xmas and New Year in which to do this in the firm's time.... January's meeting will be on Wednesday 26 January, usual time and place. The Vice-Chairman will give a talk on 'Scanning in preparation for Printing'. As this is a subject in which he has considerable expertise - having had a hand in preparing at least one book with illustrations included. Come along and get to grips with the balance between scanning at insufficient detail, and overdoing the scan resolution so that the file sizes become huge with detail your printer can't possibly use! The next Show will be the South West Show, to be held on Saturday 26 February 2005. See http://users.argonet.co.uk/acornshow/main.html BARUG members assistance will be welcome. John Stonier has emailed to ask for assistance as follows: "Friday: one or two people to help exhibitors unload on Friday evening 7pm. Saturday: as many as possible to help exhibitors unload on Saturday morning 8am. - as many as possible to help with show duties throughout the day. - people with cars to pick up show attendees from Weston-super-Mare train station, as and when required. I will pay to cover fuel costs and an additional thank you payment. Exhibitors coming to the show so far, are: APDL, Aemulator/Cino, Archive, BARUG, CJE Micros, Castle, Fortran Friends, Icon Technology, ITC UK, John Norris, MW Software, Mathmagical, Oregano UK, Qercus, R-Comp, RISCOS Ltd, RISCOS Toolkit, SSS, Snell David, The ARM Club." In addition, because this year I have still got a pile of old computers and accessories to pass on, the BARUG table will be in use to complement the official Charity Stall. I'd appreciate some BARUG assistance to man the table whilst there's still stuff on it which the Charity Stall won't take (ie. hardware of any significant size). Hope to see you at the January meeting. It is proposed that, in the absence of a guest speaker in February, there should not be a meeting on Wednesday 23 Feb, but instead the Show should count as the monthly meeting. Please make your views known to me, either at the January meeting or by email. Happy New Year to all of you! Steve |