Newsletter September 2007

Future Meetings

Below is a list of dates for 2007, these dates have been confirmed.

September 5th
October 3rd
October 31st
November 28th
December 19th

Last Month….

Saw the resumption of club meetings after the summer break and what better way to open the second half of the year than an evening with member’s new acquisitions and gadgets. From past experience, this was going to be a varied and enjoyable meeting.

Geoff opened the evening with a Digital Picture Frame marketed by TEXET. By Geoff’s own admission, not the best gadget he had obtained and really tends to be aimed at a specific market. That said, what are these picture frames all about? As their name implies, they offer the owner the opportunity to randomly display photographs. So back to Geoff’s unit. The body had a display area of 211mm x 158mm and a screen resolution of 640 x 480. The package will accept a whole range of memory cards including CF, SD, XD and Micro drive. All you have to do is drop your favorite pictures onto the memory card, plug it into the unit and it does the rest. The unit will also accept .mp3 music files to play as background music to the slideshow. It will also accept video media in the form of Mpeg1, Mpeg 2 and Mpeg 4. Picture files are accepted in Jpeg format. The package comes with its own small remote control that offers a range of control features including slide interval, pause, loop and volume control. I guess these units are ideal in shop windows etc to advertise products etc and of course a novelty value for visitors. Definitely a new way to display the family photo album.

My first offering was an in car FM Transmitter and Charger for my IPO mp3 player. These little gadgets were strictly illegal in this country up until a few months ago. Apparently they infringed the broadcasting laws, (back to the old pirate radio station days!). Anyway it was deemed that these little units are not powerful enough to cause a major incident and they are now legal. These units transmit your .mp3 files to a preset frequency on your car radio. BMW and Mercedes owners please ignore – you already have a socket that does it all for you. There are numerous units around and they will do the same thing for most portable .mp3 players via a standard connection from the earphone socket. Most however, do not charge the player up and have a tendency to lose their ability to stay locked on to the radio frequency – who wants radio 4 breaking into your favorite Robbie Williams album! The unit I am currently using is manufactured by Macally. So what is special about this unit? Well for one, it sits neatly in the in car cup holder and as a dedicated Ipod unit comes with a whole range of adapters to hold the various types of Ipod in place. The unit will operate over the full commercial FM frequency band 88.1Mhz – 107.9Mhz and is adjustable in 0.1Mhz intervals. There are also 4 Quick settings pre programmed. This unit will charge the Ipod during operation as well - very handy on long journeys. The charging unit makes use of the cigarette lighter socket. There is also a miniature jack socket that allows other audio players to use the same unit. So far, I have used it all over the country and it appears extremely stable. Definitely a winner in my book. The unit costs around £30 and is readily available on the web. For more details about the unit try www.macally-europe.com.

My other new acquisition is a Nikon D80 SLR camera. You may remember that I wrote an article on the new range of 10Mp cameras now available and what they had to offer. I have had it a few months now and am very pleased with it indeed. Whether my photos will be any better, only time will tell. As expected with this type of camera it has a myriad of controls and options which could leave the user a bit cold, but there is always the auto function to get you started before unraveling such mysteries as Aperture Priority, White Balance and ISO settings. I am still learning but it is great fun and the results are looking good. Currently I am trying to get to grips with .RAW files which give much greater control over digital adjustments. Why such a big camera you may ask. Well the opportunity to shoot at 10Mp allows you to not only blow up the image to A3 size with no quality loss but also to take out a small section of the shot and still produce good prints. The range of digital SLR cameras is growing weekly and there are some excellent products available. The D80 costs around £530 for the body only. They are also bundled with various lenses and priced accordingly. So if you are thinking of taking the plunge and moving up from a digital compact there has never been a better time and there are lots of bargains to be had.

Peter Simpson must be our resident PDA addict. Every time we see him he seems to be sporting a new model. His latest is the HP IPAC which sports all the usual functions of a PDA and includes Microsoft’s Excel and Word. Not happy with the inbuilt stylus, Peter bought a small stylus pen off the internet which he found more user friendly than the one supplied. It also doubles as a torch and a Laser pointer for presentation purposes.

Peter then showed us his TEAC .mp3 player which has a USB connector and can play music loaded on to SD memory cards. It can also be powered in a car via the cigarette lighter power socket. Another of Peter’s goodies was a Crossword Checker belonging to his wife. This small PDA style unit offers puzzlers the chance to check for clues etc. The package contains the Oxford English dictionary and Thesaurus.

Finally his latest toy is a JVC digital camcorder. Peter explained that unlike his old camcorder this unit was small and compact. Included is a 30Gbyte hard drive and the batteries will last 2 hours on continuous use. The unit sports a 34X optical zoom, four different record modes, 360 degree viewfinder and connects to a PC via a USB connector. It also comes with its own software editing package. Still finding his way round the camcorder, Peter is extremely pleased with the results so far. For more details on this little gem get in touch with Peter.

Finally our evening would not have been complete without something from Steve Orrell and he did not disappoint. Steve explained that his pet hate was being stuck in avoidable traffic jams. So he needed something that would pre-warn him of any current traffic issues wherever he was traveling. After a lot of research he finally went for the Nokia Web Tablet. This unit is a miniature stand alone computer driven by Linux. It boasts a battery life of 3 to 4 hours and works with Wi Fi. The unit gets RSS feeds downloaded from the Highways Agency which updates all problems on Motorway and A Roads. Steve has then coupled this unit with a Nokia G3 phone to allow him to access the internet via Bluetooth technology. Organizations such as MAIMO are dedicated to writing software for the Nokia Web Tablet and have written a GPS package which is built into the unit and gives the user’s position anywhere in the world. You will never get lost again. And the cost? Well the Nokia Web Tablet including the mapping software and GPS unit comes in at around £167. The G3 phone will set you back another £117. So if you are interested in this piece of clever technology get in touch with Steve and he will furnish you with all the finer details.

Our thanks to everyone who took the trouble to share their new acquisitions with the group and making it an enjoyable evening. Don’t forget, if you do obtain a new piece of technology and want to share it with the group, let us know and we will fit you in to the programme.

Next month Peter Simpson is going to delve into the art of genealogy and the software available to track down your long lost ancestors.

Dave Robb

Ben has again volunteered to organise the Xmas Dinner which will be on Thursday 13th December. We will give more details when they are available.

Thanks to Mike for last months little puzzle, we hope you enjoyed the challenge below is the solution.

Across
1. Firewall

4. Crash

6. Virus

7. Email

9. Quarantine

12. Cyberspace

13. Zoom

14. Password

Down

2. Abacus

3. Delete

4. Configure

5. Vista

8. BootUp

10. Enigma

We hope to include another puzzle in the near future so watch the back page.

The first thing I found was that the systems in use at the moment rely on the American military satellites. This means that we have no guarantee of service and they can turn off the public side of the system at any time. In order to overcome this possible problem Europe is looking to develop its own system called Galileo at first this was a totally incompatible system but this has changed recently and the systems will be compatible with each other. This will give the benefit of more satellites so in turn we will get greater accuracy, you will know to within 1 metre. The only problem is that the European system is still some years away.