Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter / Meeting Minutes

January 1999

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 9, 1999, at 7 PM, in Room B-309 of the Lycoming College Academic Center. Paul Cohen from SkyCable in South Williamsport will speak about DirecPC Internet access via satellite. All meetings are free and open to the public.

In December we met for dinner at Benjies. There was no meeting at the college.

The first meeting of the new year was opened by Kathy in John's absence at 7:05 PM, January 12. Nineteen people attended in terrible weather including many newcomers to hear our guest speaker.

Committee Reports:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

No action this month..

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

Robbie has the following systems assembled and tested:

• Compaq II 286 Portable, 640K, CGA, 20MB HDD, 5¼ floppy drive [two systems]
• Compaq III 386 Portable, 2MB, VGA, 40MB HDD, 5¼ floppy drive, 3½ floppy drive
• 486DX midtower, 8MB, VGA, 80MB HDD, 5¼ floppy drive, 3½ floppy drive
• 386SX midtower with 387 math coprocessor, 16MB, VGA, 80MB HDD, two 3½ floppy drives, CDROM, sound card
• 386 midtower, 8MB, VGA, 40MB HDD, 5¼ floppy drive 360K, 3½ floppy drive

Windows 3.1 with the Y2K patch is installed on all systems capable of running it.

We also have a few 286 systems and one XT without monitors.

Computer Help:

No questions this month.

Information for the Good of the Group:

• ZDTV, produced by the Ziff-Davis publishing house, is now carried on Susquehanna Communications channel 56, as well as DirecTV and DiSH Network.
• Muriel ( drmom@geocities.com ) has been exploring online stock trading and is willing to discuss it through email. She will consider presenting a program for us later this year.

Internet News:

• Kolb Net Works is testing a webcam at http://www.kolbweb.com/webcam.html
• John sent in a report that US Netway has increased their monthly fee slightly.

Program:

Our guest speaker this month was Rob Colley from Hoyer's Photo in Williamsport. He brought several models of digital still cameras and discussed their features. He pointed out that Sony has a camera that stores images on floppy disks. Many other models require a serial connection to download images to a PC, though some are beginning to appear with USB and infrared ports. Another innovation in data transfer is a flash memory card adapter for floppy drives.

Sony's newer models also use a rechargeable battery. Less sophisticated models typically use AA batteries.

New digital cameras offer resolutions of up to 1520 x 1180 pixels. Epson makes an affordable 1440 x 720 dpi color printer, and special papers are available to give photo-quality output. Many cameras now offer in-memory manipulation of images, but any image can be edited with the software of your choice after being downloaded to your computer.

Guest speakers on any computer-related topic are always welcome.

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