CONGRATULATIONS RICK EDWARDS!! The photographs he submitted to the APCUG Conference in Las Vegas won First and Second by the Judges and First and Second People’s Choice. We also won Honorable Mention for our Newsletters. The Big Bear Computer Club is getting well known throughout the Region and now at the National Conference.

First let me apologize for cancelling our meeting in January, but the safety of our members was foremost. The Forest Service is trying to cut corners and one was not contracting someone to snowplow the Discovery Center. Since we don’t know if it is going to snow for our meeting, the board decided to move the meeting to the Village Yogurt Express (next to the Peppercorn Restaurant) in the Village as we don’t want to cancel another meeting.

Because we already had made arrangements last year to have Smart Computing come to our February meeting, we will have an abbreviated training on routers with Jim Applebury doing the training right after our program. We do plan to start our new training format in March so for sure make plans to attend.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

— Yomar Cleary

Big Bear Computer Club was well represented with six members attending the Association of Personal Computer User Groups Conference. Those in attendance were Nancy and Harry Hinz, Ron and Grace Fross, Karen Tangeman and Yomar Cleary.

We all went to different workshops… just to name a few: Creating a Podcast, Composing and remixing music with Acoustica; How to Create a Powerpoint; Virtual Technologies; Cyber Security; How to set up a Home Wireless Network and Identity Theft and many more other workshops. (more…)

Club Board Member, Rick Edwards, has once again scored big in user group photography competition winning kudos at the APCUG convention in Las Vegas for two splendid photographs he took in Kenya.

Shown above is the First Place winner in the Animal Category, a Crowned Crane drinking water. This photo also took First Place as Best in Show as judged by the Center for Photography in Madison, Wisconsin. Rick’s picture of a young Masai girl took Second Place in the People Category. These photos also placed first and second in the People’s Choice Category decided by attendees at the convention. This is certainly a big score for Rick, and an honor for our club.

Rick, an Associate of The Royal Photographic Society, perfected his photography skills while living in Nairobi Kenya observing wildlife in the many parks of the region. During his last two years of his stay in Kenya he became the official photographer for the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Several Big Bear Computer Club members attended the Association for Personal Computer Users Group (APCUG) Conference. This was a 3-day event of hobnobbing with computer nerds from most states around the US with some international attendance and representation.

Following the APCUG was the mother of all conventions, the 4-day 2008 International CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. This show is restricted to the trade, the bloggers and the press only and is not open to the public. Attending were an estimated 140,000 industry professionals for the year’s hottest gadgets at the 2008 International CES®. (more…)

One of the features built into Excel is the ability to automatically capitalize days of the week if you enter them in a cell. For instance, if you type the word “wednes­day,” Excel would automatically change it to “Wednesday.” To control this behav­ior, follow these steps if you are using a version earlier than Excel 2007:  (more…)

Your PC may have come with a recovery CD that will restore it to the precise state—as far as OS, drivers, and software are concerned—it was in when you bought it. But really, the older your system is, the less useful that CD is. It will lack all the latest security patches (including Windows XP Service Pack 2) and in all likelihood, many drivers will be outdated. So it’s an excellent idea to build a new recovery CD, and fortunately you can. The process is more involved than will fit here, so for our full instructions, point your browser to:

http://go.pcmag.com/xpsp2recover

Reboot to Safe Mode in Win XP

Sometimes in the course of troubleshooting you need to reboot and start Windows in Safe Mode, which is a minimal start-up that loads only those Windows components that are absolutely essential. In theory, you can enter Safe Mode by restarting and then either holding down the Ctrl key or pressing the F8 key at the right moment. In practice, it can be difficult or, with a USB keyboard, impossible (the USB drivers aren’t available in the DOS start-up environment). To configure Windows XP so its next restart will enter Safe Mode, launch the System Configuration Utility (msconfig) from the Start menu’s Run dialog. Click the BOOT.INI tab and check the box titled /SAFEBOOT. Don’t touch the other settings. When you reboot, XP will start in Safe Mode and will keep doing so until you uncheck that box.

Drop caps can be a nice finishing touch for some types of documents. Word allows you to create three types of drop caps, and to adjust how those drop caps appear. Drop caps are a decorative touch, done through typographical means that you can apply to your document. Drop caps are traditionally done with the first letter of a chapter or some other major section of a document. To create drop caps, do the following if you are using a version of Word prior to Word 2007: (more…)

One of the first things that surprised me about this program is it comes with five discs. Of course because of that, it took about 20 minutes to install so don’t expect to throw in the program and whip out a card while you’re running out of the door. If you’re not familiar with greeting card software, they easily allow you to create and personalize greeting cards for many different occasions as well as making announcement certificates, scrapbook pages, children’s activity pages and more. (more…)

Thanks to inexpensive little digital cameras and cell phones with photo capabilities, nearly everyone nowadays is a snapshooter. For most there is no need to do anything with pictures once they are shot except take the files to the corner drugstore for prints, or store them on a computer hard drive for viewing and maybe post a few in a blog or on a social networking site. Snapshooters are an easy lot to please and if some of them have the desire and wherewithal to make minor adjustments to their image files, there are lots of basic software programs out there, many of them freeware, that fill the bill nicely. (more…)

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 is a good program for downloading your digital pictures and making photographs. Add Scott Kelby’s, The Photoshop Elements 5 Book, and these pictures can be great. Use the book often and your pictures are out of this world. I am amazed how much more I can do each time I review a chapter.

Scott Kelby writes the book as if here were talking directly to you. First, what you are going to do or accomplish, then step by step how to do it with illustrations. It would be hard to get lost with his instructions. The fourteen chapters outline what you can do in each section and how to do it. Elements are like a college text book, when once read you kinda remember something can be done and are able to go back to that section. Going to the Table of Contents or Index and you are well on your way to creating excellent pictures. There is a complete chapter on retouching portraits that covers everything from removing blemishes to love handles. (more…)

Instead of listing a few review programs that are available, I would like to inform you that any program you are interested in and would like to install on your computer is probably available for review. All you have to do is ask for it and review it. The program could be on landscaping, any kind of crafts, digital photos, video, any kind of home decorating, games, office or accounting programs, gift cards, label, and printshop programs, any program you are interested in having. All you have to do is let me know which program you would like to review. I will then contact the vendor and it takes about 10 days to receive the program. Sometimes the vendor will grant the reviewer a license online and all the reviewer has to do is download the program. Reviews are not hard to write; in fact they are quite easy. You are given instructions on how to write a review plus I have many samples you can look at. Also if you need any help all you have to do is e-mail or call me. Writing a review is like telling someone about the new program you just received. You tell them what you like about the program, what you don’t like, and how the program could be better, that’s it. There’s your review. And you can review books, also.

— Karen Tangeman, Review Editor

Whenever we go online to surf the web or check our email, we expose our computers to the possibility of acquiring some nasty bit of software whose intent is to make our lives miserable. Sometimes it will just make a mess of our computer’s operating system, but increasingly these days its intent is more insidious than that: It wants to get whatever personal information about us it can. It wants the login info to our online banking, investing, or shopping accounts for instance, and it wants to snoop around in our computer as unobtrusively as possible so that we don’t realize our computer has been hijacked until it’s too late. It may even send copies of itself to the folks in our email address list, signing our name to the emails without us realizing it, particularly if our virus protection isn’t up to date or yet aware of the malware. (more…)

By Dick Maybach, Columnist, Brookdale Computer User Group (BCUG) Brookdale, NJ — www.bcug.org — n2nd(at)att.net

You can greatly improve your e-mail experience by properly configuring Outlook Express, which is the default Windows e-mail client. Outlook, which is included with MS Office, is a completely different program, but it has a similar user interface for e-mail. The two programs are similar enough that you should have no trouble adapting these procedures to your version. You should modify them as you get more experience with your particular mix of e-mail messages. (more…)

When digital cameras were in their infancy, the quality of the pictures obtained from them could not approach the quality of those from the average 35mm cameras, but within a few years the pixel count of the light sensors within the digital cameras rose dramatically, and the resolution of the images they captured became acceptable, even remarkable. At the same time, the sensors became smaller as did the cameras, and digital photography became very popular with consumers. Now we have digital cameras smaller than a pack of cards, and even smaller digital phones that can record images, and the sensor’s pixel count has broken the ten million mark. We perceive a compact digital camera’s picture quality to be a function of its megapixel count, and the manufacturers work hard to increase that count to sell more cameras. But are we truly getting better results from our digital cameras when we upgrade to higher megapixel counts? (more…)

1. You kiss your girlfriend’s/boyfriend’s home page
2. Your bookmarks take 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom
3. Your eyeglasses have a Website burned on the lens
4. You find yourself looking for new subjects to search
5. You refuse to go on vacation where there is no electricity and no phone lines
6. You take a vacation only after buying a cellular-modem and a laptop
7. You spend half of the time on a plane with the laptop on your lap and your kid in the overhead compartment
8. Daydreams consist of ways to get a faster connection
9. You dream in HTML
10. You type com after every period when using a word processor.com