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Is your PC adequate to handle the new programs you are downloading to it?
Here is good advice from our friend Howard
Jones. His comments were given to a club member who was
experiencing problems running their computer after downloading an
upgrade to the Charter F-Secure security program.
"The
minimum memory requirement for XP has been 512MB for several years,
definitely since SP2 was released. As I work with customers whose
primary complaint is "my computer is slow" I have found several of the
early computers with XP as the operating system using as little as
128MB RAM - many with only 256MB. Memory is relatively inexpensive and
if the computer will accommodate even more than 512MB (768 to 1024MB
would be even better), I can assure you your computer will perform
faster"
If you need help with your system you
should know we have at least three people in the club who work on the
upgrading and repairing of PCs. If you have a need, send me a
note and I will give you their names and email addresses.
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Here is an excellent note sent in by Dick Schmeling.
"I recently learned about, and have been
using, a FREE program that some TVCUC members may also find
useful. The program is called "CutePDFWriter". Portable
Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993
for document exchange. PDF is used for representing
two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application
software, hardware, and operating system. When "CutePDFWriter" is
installed in your computer, it can be used easily to create/convert
virtually any document file format into the PDF file format for
distribution to people who may not have the same third-party software
that you have.
PDF formatted document files
have several advantages. They can be viewed and printed
by any recipient having Adobe "Reader" installed in their
computer. (Note: Adobe "Reader" is also downloadable and free
from www.adobe.com , and almost all new computers contain a
copy.) PDF file recipients need not have the "mother" program
from which the original document file was created; i.e.,
Word, Excel, Power-Point, Publisher, Quicken, etc. PDF file
sizes are small, and therefore, upload and
download quickly. PDF document files cannot be
altered easily by recipients. The PDF file document looks exactly
like the "mother" document from which it is created; i.e., text,
graphics, photos, etc. The "CutePDFWriter" program can
be down-loaded FREE from www.cutePDF.com , and is a much less
expensive alternative to paying $600 to $700 for Adobe "Acrobat"
to do the same thing. Installation is easy and fast.
To create / convert a document to the PDF format, one simply does the following:
1. Open the document in its original form, then click on "File", then "Print".
2. In the "Print" window "Select Printer" box, click on "CutePDF Writer", then "Apply", then "Print".
3.
In the resulting "Save As" window, accept (or revise the default
file name) in the "File name" field; then accept (or revise the default
file folder) in the "Save in" field. Then click the "Save"
button.
4. A PDF version of the original "mother" document file will be created in the folder you selected. That's it!"
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Photography - No picture this month - just some
helpful advice! David Pogue is a technical writer for the New
York Times. Here is part of a recent article which I found
helpful. His Web site address is given for those of you who want
to consider getting his newsletter.
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THE BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TRICKS OF ALL TIME
1. Half-pressing the shutter button (to prefocus) eliminates shutter lag.
Everyone
hates shutter lag. That's the half-second delay between the time you
press the shutter button and the time the photo is actually
snapped--during which your child, pet, or action photo slips away.
(Pocket cams have shutter lag; S.L.R. cameras don't.)
Shutter lag is
the time it takes the camera to calculate focus and exposure. Thing is,
you can make it calculate that stuff ahead of time. Aim the camera,
anticipating where the subject will be, and half-press the shutter
button. When you hear the beep, you've locked in the exposure and
focus. Keep the button half-pressed; now you're ready. When the subject
appears, push the rest of the way down. Presto: no shutter lag!
2. For the blurred-background effect, back up and zoom in.
In
technical terms, what you're looking at is a limited depth of field.
That's a geek-shutterbug term meaning, "which part of the scene,
front-to-back, is in focus." Subject yes; background, no.
That
beautiful, professional effect is easy to get if you have an S.L.R.; it
practically happens automatically. (Dial up a wide aperture--a low
f-stop number--to accentuate the effect.)
On a pocket cam, choose
Portrait mode. Move your subjects away from the background--the
farther, the better. Finally, use the back-up-and-zoom-in trick. That
is, stand away from your subjects--the farther, the better--and then
use the camera's zoom to "bring you" back up close. Thanks to a quirk
of optics, zooming in helps create a shallow depth of field.
You may look like a weirdo, backing way up like that. But it really works.
3. Force the flash outdoors.
It might not
occur to you to use the flash when you're taking pictures of people on
a bright, sunny day. It certainly wouldn't occur to the camera.
Problem
is, the camera "reads" the scene and concludes that there's tons of
sunlight. But it's not smart enough to recognize that the face you're
photographing is in shadow. You wind up with a dark, silhouetted face.
The
solution is to force the flash on--a very common photographer's trick.
The flash can provide just the right amount of fill light to brighten
your subject's face--without affecting the exposure of the background.
It
eliminates the silhouette effect. Better yet, it provides very
flattering front light. It softens smile lines and wrinkles, and it
puts a nice twinkle in the subject's eyes. (It also means that you can
ignore the old "rule" about taking photos on a sunny day--the one that
tells the photographer to "Stand with the sun behind you.")
4. Exploit the magic hour.
Hate to break it to
you, but serious photographers don't get a lot of sleep. Show me an
award-winning, breathtaking landscape--a pond shimmering in the woods,
golden clouds surrounding a mountain peak--and I'll show you someone
who got up at 4:40 am to be ready with a tripod as the sun rose.
That
hour after sunrise, and the hour before sunset, is known as the magic
hour. The lower angle of the sun and the slightly denser atmosphere
create rich, saturated tones, plus what photographers call sweet light.
It's an amazing, golden glow that makes everybody look beautiful, every
building look enchanted, and every landscape look breathtaking.
It's
a far cry from the midday sun, which creates much harsher shadows and
much more severe highlights. Landscape shooting is more difficult when
the sun is high overhead on a bright, cloudless day.
5. Use a lampshade socket as a tripod.
Another
chronic problem with pocket cams is getting blur when you don't want
it--which is just about any time you're indoors without the flash.
Yeah, yeah, we know: "Use a tripod." But come on: for the average
person on vacation or at school events, buying, hauling around, and
setting up a tripod is a preposterous burden.
Often, there's a wall,
parked car, bureau, tree, pillar, door frame, or some other big,
stationary object you can use instead, to prop up either the camera or
your arms.
But here's my favorite trick: It turns out that the
threads at the top of just about any lamp--the place where the
lampshade screws on--are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount!
In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and
presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod. People might
think you're a genius, a nutcase, or a genius nutcase, but never mind.
It works.
Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com
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Here is a site sent in by our Vince Alline.
From time to time, all of us have lost a manual for a device we
own. This site has 100, 000 product manuals available on
line. It is as follows:
http://www.retrevo.com/samples/index.html
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If you like to listen to music while working on your
PC or just have some music you like running in the room where your PC
is located, here is a great site. www.theradio.com Type in the title of most any song and you can hear it play and when finished, continue to play other songs.
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