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

Printing Much of my computer time the past month has been spent printing out large images. In last month’s newsletter I mentioned the panoramas that I had been printing. Well, I don’t have many panoramas to print, but I have many, many other photos that I would like to view as large prints. By large here, I mean mostly 11" x 17" images. That is a convenient size since the aspect ratio of the images produced by my digital camera is approximately 2 to 3, and this fits nicely with almost no cropping on the 11" x 17" paper. The printer used is an Epson Stylus Photo 2200 (2400 is the latest version).

If the largest images you have printed are 8.5" x 11" ones, then you are in for either a pleasant or an unpleasant surprise with the 11" x 17" ones. It will be a pleasant surprise if your image file has enough information (pixels) to produce the large print. It will be unpleasant if your file does not have the pixels or is of poor quality. All of the files produced by my camera have enough pixels. However, very few—possibly one in 50—are of the quality that I want to print them as 11" x 17" . So far, I have only printed 20.

Just as an 8.5" x 11" is more impressive than a 4" x 6" photo, an 11" x 17" completely outclasses an 8.5" x 11". Some photos that are nice as 8.5" x 11"s are stunning in the larger format. Of course, there is no way of demonstrating that in this article. Perhaps I can bring a portfolio of them to the next meeting.

Of course, there is one drawback to the 11" x 17" s or the even larger 13" x 19"s that I can print—the price of paper and ink. Based on what paper and ink cost me and using Epson’s estimate of square inches printed per ink cartridge, I come up with about $8.00 per 11" x 17" . Of course, that doesn’t include the wear and tear on my $725 printer.

And if the print comes out a little too dark, you have just thrown $8 in the trash can. So it is important to know how the print will compare to what you see on your monitor. Supposedly you can calibrate your monitor using Adobe Gamma. I have tried it with so-so results. And I am not going to pay $300 plus to buy a device to do it.

Actually, I get a fairly good match between what I see on the monitor and what I print. I accomplish this by knowing the image will always print a bit darker than the monitor shows it, and I adjust the file’s brightness accordingly just to do the print. Additionally, I have downloaded the ICC profiles of the types of paper I use made by Epson and Ilford for my printer. I then set the print driver settings to use the proper profile with no color correction.

For anyone who might actually be doing this, a note of warning: When you do a print with preview on this particular printer using the ICC profiles and no color correction, the print preview will appear very red in tone. Epson says to ignore this and proceed, as the print will be fine. And it will. When I first started using the printer and profiles and saw the reddish preview, I would cancel and simply print with no profiles and hope for the best. But reading at the Epson site that the print preview did not give an accurate rendition when using the profiles with no color correction gave me courage to proceed with first printing 4" x 6"s and then moving up to the larger formats using the profiles.

From what I have read, getting a reddish tone to prints from inkjet prints is not all that uncommon—and I produced my share when I was trying to learn how to use the different profiles and print driver settings for this printer. But once I learned what the correct combination of settings were, I have been able to produce results superior to just simply using the default settings.

Until we meet again was the subject of an email I just received from friend and club member Wade Herman. Normally that would not be out of the ordinary except that Wade died of a heart attack July 27th in Asheville, NC.

The email was listed as from “Wade” with subject “Until we meet again” and began with the salutation “Dear family and friends.” I forwarded the message to club members for whom I have addresses, so I won’t repeat the details of the message here other than to say that it touched on the past, the present and the future. At this point I do not know if Wade wrote it earlier and set it aside to be used at the appropriate time, or if some family member or friend penned the message. Of course, if you are of a Spiritualist bent, then there is the possibility that Wade did actually send it himself. Regardless, it was well done and much in line with the way Wade did things.

The computer connection My acquaintance with Wade actually coincides with my involvement with the personal computer, which for me began when our family bought an Apple IIe in 1983 from Florida Computing in downtown Tampa. After having the computer for a few months, I learned from another neighbor that there was the fellow living a couple blocks away who also had an Apple. That was Wade. He actually had a slightly earlier version of the Apple—an Apple II. Our main interaction at that time was simply sharing information on the various software programs available for the Apple.

For those who never had one of those early Apples, let me remind you of the specifications of the Apple IIe (I think the Apple ii may have been more minimal). The Apple IIe came with 64 KB (that is KB not MB) of RAM with an external floppy drive with a capacity of 135 KB. All programs were run from floppy disks inserted into this drive. I think, the computer and a green screen monitor cost around $1,650. If you wanted to buy a second disk drive to write out data to, for example, that would cost you another $350 (I think, as stated, the price of the IIe included a floppy, but it may have been extra). If you wanted an additional color monitor (the Apple produced color), that would be around $400. An Apple dot matrix printer went for around $500. Compare those prices in 1983 dollars to what you can get now for just a few hundred dollars.

I stuck with the Apple, writing my little programs for it using the built-in Applesoft programming language, until we purchased our first PC from Gateway in 1991. That was by far much longer than I have ever subsequently gone without purchasing a new computer. Wade moved on to the PC format much sooner. So, after he purchased an IBM compatible, with no computer problems in common we had very little contact until sometime after 1991.

At some point in the mid-1990’s we began communicating regularly on computer problems, and that developed to discussions of life, in general: politics, automobiles, the stock market, etc. But no sports. Neither of us cared a whit about that.

The last phone call I received from Wade was about a week before he died. He was in Asheville, where he had a second home. He wanted to relate all his tribulations in finally getting his dial-up Internet connection there to work. In Tampa he had a RoadRunner (Bright House) cable connection for the Internet; they also apparently have a feature where you can connect to the Internet through a dial-up account when you are away from your main cable connection (Tampa in this case). I think you possibly have to pay extra for this and it is really through the AOL dial-up numbers. Whatever the case, Wade had signed up for it and used it on previous trips to Asheville.

This trip he had occasionally been able to share (with permission) a neighbor’s unencrypted wireless connection, but that would often drop out after only a very brief time. So he needed to try his dial-up. That is where the fun began. An attempt to connect via his modem to the local phone number produced the common error message that says in effect that your username or password is incorrect. I have seen that many times over the years, and it is usually solved by simply waiting a few minutes and then trying again when everything will be OK, since the problem was really a temporary problem on the ISP’s end. No such luck for Wade.

I wish my memory were better on this, but here is the outline of what happened as I can best recall it. In all, Wade spent over five hours that day with various phone-help people scattered all over the world. First he contacted RR help. I don’t recall the sequence of events here, but I believe they led him through all sorts of setting checks to see if that could be the problem. When that didn’t work, at some point they found out his operating system was XP and asked him if he had SP2 installed. On an affirmative answer to that, he was told that was the problem and he needed to contact Microsoft.

I think this took well over an hour, and he then moved on to Microsoft, where after a long wait on hold, he was informed that there was no way that SP2 would cause a problem with dial-up networking—which Wade said that he figured was the case all along. But he was just following up all possibilities since he had not been able to get things to work otherwise.

There are many details of all this that I cannot remember, but I know he again contacted RR in North Carolina with the Microsoft answer, and they tried more finagling to no effect.

Before I reveal the solution to the problem, a little history: Wade a couple of years back had RR as his Internet provider in Tampa, as many of us do. He had a username and password for that account. He then changed to Verizon DSL when that became available in the neighborhood and cancelled the RR (now Bright House) account. Then, sometime in the past year, he decided to change back to Bright House because of an attractive package deal for both cable TV and the Internet. When he did this, he created a new username and new password different from what he had before with RR.

Now back to North Carolina. After five hours of frustration, he decided to try the old RR username and password—you guessed it, the dial-up connection in Asheville now worked. Somehow, even though he had cancelled his RR account in Tampa and then created a new RR account, approximately a year later when he went back to RR, the Asheville account was apparently not cancelled or if it was, it was reinstated with the old information.

Of all the problems we discussed in recent years, keeping his two computers on a network was the most persistent. We always got the problem fixed, but sometimes it would take several days before whatever caused the problem was reversed. Some of Wade’s other problems were because he always wanted the latest and greatest in video cards and other hardware devices—many of which did not perform as advertised because they were slightly beyond the cutting edge. As for myself, I was happy to wait until others had tried out such stuff and the kinks had been worked out. But waiting was not for Wade when it came to the latest gadgets. And I will miss him. u