Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter & Meeting Minutes

August 2000

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 12, at 7 PM, in the Winters Room of the James V. Brown Library, 19 East Fourth Street, Williamsport. Please note the new permanent meeting location.

Club member Geoffrey Knauth will demonstrate VMware, a program that allows one to run a complete Windows system as a process on a Linux system.

Our last meeting was called to order by Vice-President Kathy Kolb at 7:05 PM on August 8, 2000. Treasurer John Yarosz was not present, so there was no financial report, but we believe that there were no expenditures during the summer.

Committee Actions:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

• Kathy has designed and printed new membership cards. They are very nice.
• She also brought a draft of an 8½" x 11" poster for review. The design was approved after a minor change in wording.
• She will have copies made on heavy stock at Staples and bring them to the next meeting for distribution by members.
• We are ordering new business cards and will distribute them to local vendors along with the posters.
• Dan offered us space for the Club's web site on www.lycoming.org. We are going to move it there so that members can be given access to maintain the pages themselves, taking the burden off Kathy who has sole access to the site on Sunlink. The URL will be announced when the site is ready. Redirection pages will be placed on the old site.
• Effective in September, the Technology Branch will be unavailable on meeting night. The JVB Library has graciously offered us space in the Winters Room, near the front door. We will have access to a video projector and screen and a T1-class Internet connection. The Library is handicapped-accessible.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

Robbie will not have space to store the collected equipment in the future. Dan suggested disposing of the majority of it which is hopelessly outdated. There were no objections, and we will reimburse Robbie if there will be a significant cost.

Computer / Internet News:

• Dan needs volunteers to be lab monitors at the Wednesday night classes, 5-7 PM at the Technology Branch. If you can be of service, please contact him at dyoas@jvbrown.edu.
• Geoff reported on a bug in Netscape's Java interpreter which allows a web site to disable links, and also one-click access in Windows if the user has selected that option.
• Jim saw a commercial concerning Gateway's trade-in program. They accept Pentium 75s and better.
• Susquehanna Communications is finally planning to expand into Montgomery, although Jim suspects he'd be happier with DSL but Alltel doesn't offer it despite having it in strange places such as St. Mary's, Pennsylvania
• Jim reported on some new programs: Cookiewall (www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/cookie.htm) monitors and lets you manage web cookies; 98Lite III (commercial; see www.98lite.net) gives you added flexibility in removing and reinstalling components of Windows 98.
• He also reported on a privacy threat in NetZip Download Demon / Real Download / Netscape Smart Download. See www.grc.com for details. The site owner, Steve Gibson, plans to implement a warning for this "feature" in future versions of his OptOut monitoring-detection program.

Open Discussion:

Jim wanted to discuss printer technologies. His bottom-feed inkjet had been having repeated problems picking up paper despite cleaning, and he suspected that the situation was humidity-related. He wondered if Club members preferred top-feed since he thought it would solve the problem. Kathy said that to the contrary, she found top-fed printers to be annoying because they tended to feed multiple sheets.