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Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

BLU-RAY

At a recent meeting, a member asked, “What is Blu-ray?”
Here is a more detailed explanation than that which was given at the time.

The actual Blu-ray disc is an optical disc storage medium having the same dimensions as standard size CD and DVD discs. The main uses for it are high-definition video and data storage.
The laser-beam used to write and read these discs is blue or violet in colour, hence the name.
The CD and DVD format uses a red laser (why don't we call them red-ray discs?).

The blue laser has a shorter (less than two thirds) wave length, therefore a lot more data can be stored on the Blu-ray discs. A two layer Blu-ray disc can store 50 gigabytes, which is ten times the amount which can be stored on a single-layer DVD and almost six times that on two-layer DVD.

As from February, 2008, virtually all HD DVD makers have ceased production and marketing of HD DVD recorders and players and soon most motion pictures will be on Blu-ray Disc, not on DVD.

There are advantages with Blu-ray. It has the only 1080p output so that anyone with full high-definition TV will have every pixel on the screen in glorious detail. There are also benefits with sound formats, such as MasterAudio, DTS HD and Dolby TrueHD.
Most of the newer Blu-ray players also have 24 frames per second play-back so viewers will see exactly what was filmed. Alright if your equipment, including your eyes and ears, are up to it.

Blu-ray also offers a higher level of interactivity and connectivity, with some of the newer players able to be connected to the internet which will provide added content.

CD and DVD will probably eventually disappear but anything you have on such discs will still be playable on Blu-ray players, as they are “backwards compatible”. Also, some of the newer Blu-ray players have “upscaling”, which is said to enhance the output resolution on a DVD disc to near high definition.

Should we rush out and buy a Blu-ray player or writer/player? Probably not, unless your DVD player has broken down and has to be replaced, in which case go for Blu-ray, not a new DVD.
Blu-ray machines are still fairly expensive but they will become cheaper.

GOOGLE EARTH

Most members will have heard of and possibly tried, Google Earth, the “eye in the sky” programme which was developed by Keyhole Inc.
It was originally named Earth Viewer and both it and the company were acquired by Google in 2004.
For those who may not have heard of it, Google earth is a virtual globe programme which has stored an immense amount of satellite imagery of much of our planet and with it installed, you can bring up satellite images on your screen. You can even explore stars, constellations, planets and galaxies in space. (See foot-note.)
Google have now developed an updated version, Google Earth 4.3 (beta, which means it is still in development) and it is available for download. Yes, it is free (what a wonderful word)!
The new version has more than ever imagery with it and surprise, surprise, it almost certainly has your street and your house, close up, right there in it. You can enter an address and bring up an aerial view, then tell it to go to street view and there will be a fairly recent (some months old) view of your house.
There is provision to grab the picture and manipulate it to change the view, even spin it around, look up or down the street, etc. Just hope you were not out there doing something you should not have been doing when it was taken.

There has been some controversy over Google Earth and this version makes it even more controversial. There have been grumbles that it is an infringement on civil rights, in that it might have captured imagery of you and made it public without your consent.
There have also been rumbles about it being an aid to criminals or terrorists, in that detailed imagery of places and buildings can be brought up and studied by such people.

All in all, though, the chances of it being used for anything sinister is probably quite remote.
Download, install and enjoy.
Get it at http://earth.google.com/

FOOTNOTE:
Take a look at the magnificent shot of the Pinwheel Galaxy, which was taken through the Hubble Space Telescope. The Pinwheel is some 27 million light-years away from us.
Do you know what a light-year is? It is the distance that light can travel in a vacuum in one Julian year*, which is exactly 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometres (that is just under ten trillion kilometres) or roughly 5,878,625,373,183.61 international miles. Let's see, 27 million times er, er, well, it's a long way.
*One Julian year: The Julian year contains exactly 365.25 days and the Julian calendar was what our western societies used in earlier centuries, before the Gregorian calendar, which we now use and which simplifies things by altering the method of calculating Leap-years, which account for the extra quarter day.
The Julian year is still used by astronomers and other scientists when measuring lengthy durations of time and space; otherwise they would have to express it in days, which would be too unwieldy.
The Julian year is the basis of the definition of the light-year as a measurement of distance.
If you can even begin to imagine the incredible speed at which light travels, then you can appreciate just how far away from us are such things as the Pinwheel Galaxy. That distance means that when we look at such things, we are not actually looking at the thing itself, we are looking at the light which emitted from it millions, even billions, of years ago. Is it even still there? The mind boggles.

FREE GRAPHICS PROGRAMMES

In the July issue of the Busnet Browser was a “Beginners Tip” referring to the Paint programme which comes with Windows.
For those who are not aware, this programme did indeed come with Windows from the very first release. Over the years, it has had occasional alterations made to it, with some features being changed or done away with and with some additional features introduced, as Windows itself has changed.
Essentially, however, Paint has always been a very basic programme with not many useful features for anyone really interested in producing digital graphics.

For those who may be interested, there are two free (yes, FREE!) programmes which I would recommend.

First, there is Paint.NET, which can be obtained by download at
http://www.getpaint.net/

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing on-line community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plug-ins.
It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool.
It has far more capabilities than the Microsoft Paint programme.
Not as good as PaintShop Pro, but it does have features that PSP lacks.
NOTE:- When you install Paint.NET you may see a message come up, advising that the programme requires the .NET Framework to be installed. This is a Microsoft add-on which assists some applications to function. Just click OK on the message and it will take you to the Microsoft site where you can get it. If you are using Vista, you should already have it but with earlier versions of Windows you might not, depending on what other applications have previously been installed.

This ability to use differing fill colours is unusual; in most paint programmes you have to select an area before filling it. In this programme, so long as the area has a closed outline made with reasonably solid colour, you can fill it with any colour of any shade you want. As you can erase the outline after filling, then manually paint the same fill back to fill in the erased portion, this gives you an easy way to separate your colouring in any painting.

Second, there is GIMP for Windows 2.4.7 (ensure you get this version, you may have trouble with earlier versions on Windows XP and Vista. Ensure also that you are downloading the Windows version). Go to http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed programme for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint programme, an expert quality photo retouching programme, an on-line batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted. Upgraded versions of this programme are released from time to time.
GIMP is capable of many of the advanced tasks that you would only expect to find in leaders of the field such as PhotoShop, and yet it is available FREE!
This is a far more powerful and comprehensive graphics programme than either Microsoft paint or Paint.NET.

SCRAP-BOOKING SOFTWARE

At a recent monthly meeting, we were given a talk and demonstration about “scrap-booking”, ie., organizing photographs onto pages, which can have backgrounds or not, and onto which you may also introduce descriptive text, captions, embellishments such as little clip-art decorations, and what-not.

A fair bit of the address was, let's face it, aimed at getting us to purchase some rather expensive wares, including software, albums, fancy papers etc.

Before deciding to go into some of those items, decide whether you really want to purchase and fill very large and heavy albums with printed photographs then have to find somewhere to store them.
After all, we are now in the digital age and you can do digital scrap-booking, which entails producing exactly the same kind of thing except that your pages are stored on computer files, which can be kept on something as small as a USB memory-stick or a Data-card, carried in your pocket or purse, and displayed anywhere there is access to a computer. Or you could purchase one of those “electronic frame” display gadgets which you can set up to give a Slide Show of your digital scrap-book pages.

If you ever do want “hard copies' of your creations, then you can print them.

You do not have to spend a lot to get started with digital scrap-booking. In fact, you can get a pretty good programme called Scrapbook Flair, for nothing.
Go to http://www.scrapbookflair.com/index.aspx
It is a 60mb download.

Scrapbook Flair has a lot of similar features to the one we saw, and with it come a number of templates, backgrounds and embellishments, in different categories. If they are not enough, you can join their on-line community free, which will entitle you to download a whole lot more.

VISTA RESTORE POINT PROBLEM

It seems that if you install both Vista and XP on a computer, set up as dual-boot (and a lot of people are doing that), each time you boot into XP it may delete any restore points made by Vista.

At least one person who has discovered this occurring, made inquiries and found that Microsoft considers this a "minor problem" and has no solution to offer at this time.

If you have your computer set up in this manner, it is certainly something you need to be aware of.

INTERNET EXPLORER 8

Internet Explorer 8 is now available.
As in IE7, you cannot make pages in your Favourites available off-line. To do that, you have to stay with IE6.

TRY COPERNIC

Do you use Google for all your internet searches?

Why not try something different?
Forget the Google toolbar and install Copernic Agent basic and its companion programmes, Copernic Meta and Copernic Desktopsearch.

These three programmes, which are all free for download, will probably provide you with all the search-power you will ever need for searching your computer itself and for the internet.

Copernic Meta manifests itself as a small search window on your task bar, so it is there instantly no matter what task you are engaged in.
If you suddenly need information on what ever you are working on, provided that you are connected to the internet, you just type your keywords into the search bar and click on the icon alongside.
There is no need to activate Internet Explorer, Copernic Meta does that for you.

There is provision for entering any number of search engines into the Copernic Meta search base and you can select any one of them to do the search with, including Copernic Agent.
You can even put Google in there if you like.

Copernic Basic has been around for much longer than Google and has been upgraded a number of times.
It does multiple searches with up to 16 search engines (not to be confused with the engines you put into the Meta search bar).

Malicious Software Removal

Microsoft has released a tool to remove malicious software of the particularly difficult kind, eg. the Blaster, Mydoom, Netsky and Mydoom worms, to name a few.
(These are the type of malicious software which require more than just a virus scan to get rid of).

This tool, which works with Windows 2000, Vista, XP and Server 2003, can be downloaded from the Microsoft site.
It is updated monthly so unless you have Windows Update activated, you have to download, install and run it once every month.
If you have Windows Update activated, it should, once installed, update and run automatically. Read the options when you visit the site.

To obtain the tool, you visit
www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx

Even if your PC has shown no sign of the presence of any malicious software and your virus scans tell you all is well, you should use this tool now that it is available.
Infections such as this tool has been devised to detect and eradicate do not always indicate their presence.

Warning

As previously mentioned in our pages, do not respond to any email which purports to come from Microsoft.
Microsoft does not send emails out to anyone, suggesting that they should upgrade or obtain patches or anything else.
If you receive an email message which purports to have originated from Microsoft, you can be quite sure that it did not!
In all probability, it will have been sent by a person who is trying to get you to click on a link which will hit you with a virus.
Yes, it has been happening again recently and yes, people have been caught.
Do not, ever, believe such a message, no matter how authentic it might look.

WARRANTIES

What are your rights if you purchase an item (perhaps a computer or peripheral hardware for a computer) then find that the item, although not faulty, does not perform the function for which you purchased it, even though you specified that purpose to the sales person and you were assured that the item was suitable for the purpose?

Under consumer law, there are two important warranties available to you, namely, merchantability and fitness for purpose.

Merchantability means that the product will work properly doing most things applicable to such an item, without causing problems (in the case of a computer, such as crashing for no apparent reason, or failing to boot up properly, etc.)
Merchantability is implied when you purchase a new product, you do not have to specify it.

Fitness for purpose is not implied.
If you want the item you are considering purchasing to fulfil a specific purpose or purposes, then you should specify those purposes to the salesperson.
If the salesperson assures you that the product is suitable for such purposes, then fitness for purpose becomes implied.
If the product, having been purchased by you in such circumstances then fails to fulfil the specific purpose or purposes, then you should be entitled to a refund, repair or exchange.

Of course, you are always likely to have the salesperson refute your claim that you did specify a specific purpose and deny that any assurance was given that the product was suitable, in which case you should take the matter to higher authority and seek satisfaction.

BROWSERS

The security problems in versions of Internet Explorer prior to the latest (IE8) may now be a thing of the past, at least until the malware writers get around the improved security features. However, there are other browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox and Opera, which have had better security than the older versions of IE, and many may still stick with them.
Have you seen the latest version of Opera?
Version 10.10 is now available. It has more new features, again adding to what was already an impressive alternative to IE.
You can get it at www.opera.com/ (8.8MB)
Hard to pick, now, which is best, probably just a matter of personal preference.

Forget about browsers like Avant Browser, Crazy Browser, Maxthon etc. as they wrap around and use the Internet Explorer engine.

Google have now set the cat among the pigeons by bringing out their own browser.
It is named Chrome.
Chrome is open source and free. What Google have done, it seems, is that they have examined all the other available browsers, picked the best features of all of them, put them together with some ideas of their own and developed this new browser.
One new feature in Chrome is that you no longer have separate bars for Address and Google. There is just one bar and you enter either your url or query in it and let it do its thing.
You can get Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html

Windows Antispyware

Version 2 of this software, now called Windows Defender, is now available.(br> This is a free download at www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software
It runs on Windows 2000, XP and Server2003 and needs IE 6.0 (or higher).

This is an upgraded version claimed to find general spyware on your computer, no matter what browser you have set as the default browser, and to have additional features for protecting Internet Explorer and for restoring it if it has been highjacked. It is an improvement on the previous version, which proved itself to be a good thing to have.
I recommend that you download this to your desktop and install from there, as some computer systems will not accept a direct install from the site and may not advise you until you've got to the actual intallation bit, which is a wasted download.

Be careful with the question as to whether you would like to join their "Spynet" though.
Apparently it links you into a global alert network and that may be another target for hackers.
The idea seems good but is it safe?

CLUB DETAILS

A question frequently asked by new club members:- 'What is the contact address for the club and where can I pay fees?'
Answer:- Busnet Computer Club Inc.,
PO Box 968
Busselton WA 6280.
Payments can be posted to this address or they can be made in person to the Treasurer when at the club on club days or meetings, both taking place at Busselton Senior Citizen's Centre, Peel Terrace, Busselton.

REMINDER:

All members should be aware that as from 2012, it no longer necessary for them to be a paid up member of Senior Citizens, Busselton.

Advice on reading this page:- If you glance at it, think you see things you've read before so do not read through, you'll probably miss something!
It is not intended to alter the entire page every time a new entry is made.

All our equipment is now housed at the club room at 'Senior Cits' and that is where all club activity is now taking place. Club days are on Wednesday and Friday.
General meetings still will be held on the third Thursday of each month, at 1.30pm, at 'Senior Cits'. Committee meetings will take place as necessary.

As all members should be aware, the club owns a good quality digital camera, which is available for loan to members, on payment of a small fee to keep up insurance on it.
You have to book ahead for it.

If you are looking for information on photography and cameras in general, go to our Cool-sites page for useful sites to browse.

Do you know what length of time adults are willing to wait for a web page to load before moving to another web page? :-
Less than 10 seconds...14%
10 to 59 seconds...32%
1 to 2 minutes...23%
2 minutes +...21%.
Thanks to Tele-Nation for Spacedisk for statistics.

Webmaster is still interested in hearing about web sites of interest and relevance to members, which, as said before, covers just about everything!

Rafferty's Rules

WA Driver's Rules of the Road

1. If I see a space, I will fill it.
2. My indicators are to (a) tell you I have completed my lane change, or (b) let the police know they still work.
3. I will enter the slipway from the centre lane.
4. The centre lane is for my use only.
5. I will use the left-hand side of my lane when turning right.
6. My mobile 'phone works really well while I'm driving.
7. I will dawdle at roundabouts and ignore other people who would like to cross.
8. I will put my foot down only after seeing amber traffic lights.
9. This road belongs to me alone.

.............................

Here's a thought to take with you:

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you.
Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good
while life and power are still yours. Marcus Aurelius

Bye for now.