By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

As usual, Gene Barlow’s yearly presentation should reacquaint us with our hard drives. He is a font of knowledge on the subject, and one of his topics is the different scenarios of backing up your entire hard drive. It is a subject to which we should all pay more attention.

I have my usual problem this month--a lack of articles. Except this is the first month that I have no article, except the minutes, from a member or from myself, and I am not going out and purchase a new program or piece of hardware just to be able to write about it. So, I need to fill up this space with something else. Let’s see what I can produce.

Free Online Tax Filing. If you go to the IRS site http://www.irs.gov/app/freeFile/jsp/index.jsp? and link from that page to one of the vendors listed there, you may just get your taxes figured and filed for free. Some of the vendors listed have restrictions on who may use the free service, others don’t. TurboTax, for example, claims that everyone qualifies. I assume that for complicated returns, this service probably lacks the additional forms needed. So Donald Trump need not attempt it.

Treasury Bills Online While we are on the topic of money, have you thought of investing in Treasury Bills instead of CDs at your local bank? http://www.treasurydirect.gov/ is the site to get you started. As I write this, the return on a six month T-Bill is right at 3%, far better than any short term instrument your bank is offering. To get started, you need to download the “New Account Request” Adobe Acrobat file, print it out, fill in the information, sign it and mail it in. Two of the items to be entered on the form are a bank account number and bank routing number for the bank account from which money to buy the T-Bills is deducted and into which proceeds are to be paid. Once your account is set up, then everything else can be done online. T-Bills can be purchased for as little as $1,000 and in increments of $1,000. You can view your account at any time online. Additionally, periodic printed statements are mailed to you.

HP Scanner Redux I recently received an email requesting help with a scanner problem from someone out there on the web. They had done a search and come up with an article I wrote in the newsletter in January of 2003. They said their HP ScanJet 5370C was exhibiting the same problem as I had described. What I outlined in the article that got my scanner working again did not solve their problem, nor did my further suggestions.

My last suggestion to them was to junk the HP Scanner and buy an Epson one, which is what I did when my HP scanner died a year later (http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2004/march2004/epson_scanner.htm). HP has produced some quality products for me over the years (e.g., my still working LaserJet 4 Plus printer bought in 1995), but it is my belief that they have let their quality control lapse and have farmed out most of their manufacturing. I’ll give Epson a try for a few years. I also recently bought an Epson Stylus Photo 2200 for my photo printing and am very happy with it.

Perhaps with the departure of Ms. Fiorina HP will regain their focus on quality products and figure out there are other ways to create a profitable company than firing a lot of people. I could never figure why HP brought her on in the first place, since I think she presided over the near demise of Lucent, a once-great company. Now I see that after five years of decline at HP under her tenure she is being touted as a candidate for the president of the World Bank. I didn’t know she knew anything about banking. But, then, she didn’t know anything about computers, and she was hired to run a computer company and kept on for five or so years.

I see that I have over a page left to fill. What can I present? How about how I use my computer? That was the title of a talk I gave to another user group a few years back.

Like most of you, I use my computer to deal with email and browse the World Wide Web. Also like most of you, I have to delete more than 100 unwanted emails every day. At least, very few of them have viruses attached anymore. It seems that the Internet service providers are getting quite good at stripping the viruses from emails.

As far as web browsing goes, I find that I no longer go to all sorts of strange and new sites as in the past when all of this was new. The past few years most of my WWW time is spent at just a few sites--The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Google. The Internet is no longer a novelty.

In addition, I write computer programs and create and manage web sites. I use Microsoft’s Visual Studio .Net to write the programs and to create some of the pages at web sites. I use Microsoft’s FrontPage to manage the web sites.

Visual Studio .Net has several languages within it that you can use to write programs. My choice is Visual Basic .Net. Some of the programs I write are presented in our VB SIG. At the last VB SIG meeting we looked at a simple program that allows you to send text messages from your computer to anyone with a number with one of the major cell phone carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon and Alltel.

After I had demonstrated the program, I noted one thing that bothered me--with a slight modification and a database of cellular phone numbers, you could spam all those phones with text messages quite easily. Possibly the providers have a method of detecting such an onslaught and stopping it, but I doubt it, since I just read an article in InfoWorld about a vulnerability at the T-Mobile web site that would allow anyone to gain access to a T-Mobile account from the T-mobile.com web site, as long as they knew the account holder's T-Mobile phone number. Of course you had to know a bit more than that, but not much, since even I could understand it.

For many years I used Borland’s Delphi program for programming, but I have not used it much since the advent of Visual Studio .Net.

Photography Another use I make of my computer is to use it as my digital darkroom with the help of Adobe PhotoShop CS. I have been interested in photography since I was a teenager. In the 1970s and 1980s, I took that interest a step further and processed all of my black and white film and prints. In the 1990s I sort of lost interest in photography, except for starting to scan in photos and then negatives in the mid 1990s. However, with the advent of digital cameras and much-improved inkjet printers, I am back into photography.

Now I have total control. I can take a photo with my Nikon D100 SLR style digital camera and instantly see if it is worth saving. Later I can bring it into my computer, adjust the lighting and color balance, and crop it as desired. Then I can store it both on the computer and on a CD, send a lower resolution version in an email message or print the original image on my Epson 2200 in a size anywhere from 4 x 6 to 11 x 17. 11 x 17 is the largest photo paper I at present have, not the largest size the printer will print.

That is total control. My darkroom equipment is stored away in the garage, and all my chemicals and empty chemical bottles have been thrown away.

I have also found a use for my programming in photography by writing a program that will automatically take all the files in a folder and stuff their names and locations into a database. Later when I click on one of the records in the database, the program will display a thumbnail of the photo and allow me to enter data about the photo, such as a description and date. It is a great timesaver, and I eventually hope to realize my dream of having all my photos from the past scanned in and stored on hard drives with CD or DVD backups and catalogued in the program just mentioned. Additionally I will do the same for all of the new photo files from my digital photography. They, of course, don’t need to be scanned, but they do need to be catalogued.

Other programs I use are Quicken for all my financial records and Outlook to keep my calendar and address book. I do not use full Outlook for my email, using Outlook Express for that, except when I want to do an email merge. Of course I use Word and Excel. Excel was particularly useful recently when I needed a set of financial calculations to determine the best of several scenarios. And I use Access to keep and analyze all sorts of data, not the least of which is our TPCUG membership data.

I use Adobe Illustrator to create simple graphic designs and greeting cards. All of the genealogy information gathered by me and several relatives is stored in FamilyTree Maker. Microsoft Publisher is used in creating this newsletter and other desktop publishing projects such as the directory for my neighborhood organizations.

I suppose there are at least a half-dozen other programs that I use from time to time: Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Streamline, PowerPoint, Art Icons Pro, Delorme’s Street Atlas, Easy CD Creator and WS FTP come to mind.

Next month, someone please send me an article. u