April 2000
News Letter
A message from the newsletter editor:
Message from newsletter editor:
As of this moment 7:45 on Tuesday evening, I have absolutely nothing from anyone else to put in the newsletter. So I am going to wing it with material I have gathered over the last month. It will be as many pages as I can make it. Surely someone in the club is doing something that they would like to share with the us. Editor doesn’t mean creator so help me please. My schedule is
such that the Tuesday evening right after the
officer’s meeting is the only time to do the
newsletter.
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IWIN.COM http://www.iwin.com Warning: If you have a lot of free time, then be sure and steer clear of this site. It is highly addictive! At first it seems harmless enough. A simple collection of games, surveys, trivia quizzes, and puzzles. You know, solitaire, crossword puzzles, poker, bingo--that sort of thing. But what gets you hooked are "icoins," a fictitious currency that you earn by playing the games and solving the puzzles. You can then use your icoins to purchase raffle tickets in drawings for real prizes. You can select from hundreds of options ranging from cold hard cash to patio furniture sets. So far, IWin.com has awarded over $1.2 million in cash and prizes. Who needs Regis! You just might be the next cyber-millionaire!
WORKING OFFLINESave online time when using a dial-up account and Netscape Messenger by downloading e-mail, then reading and replying to your messages offline so as not to tie up the phone line for extended periods of time. First connect to your ISP as you normally would. Start Netscape Messenger and retrieve your new messages. Now disconnect from the ISP by double-clicking the Connection icon in your system tray (in the lower right corner of your screen), then clicking Disconnect. In Messenger, click File, Offline, Work Offline. (On some systems, clicking Work Offline in Netscape automatically disconnects you from the ISP. Try it while you're connected to see if your system works this way.) Read your messages and reply to them normally. Your outgoing messages go into a queue for Netscape to send when you log back on to your ISP. When you're done, click File, Offline, Work Online. Netscape should log back on to your ISP and send any messages in the outgoing queue. You can then disconnect and go about your day knowing that you saved a few minutes of online time.
By default, Netscape sends any unsent messages when you go back to working online. You can change this setting in your Netscape Preferences. Click Edit, Preferences and select Offline in the Preferences window. The other two options for When Going Online are Ask Me If I Want To Send My Unsent Messages and Do Not Send My Unsent Messages. If you choose the Do Not Send My Unsent Messages option, you can send manually at any time by clicking File, Send Unsent Messages.
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EVITE.COM http://www.evite.com The next time you're planning a big event or even a dinner with some friends, forget about paper invitations and voicemail. If your friends are online, then just blast out email invitations from Evite.com. Choose from dozens of preformatted cards, from Baby Showers to Poker Games. Even Wedding Invitations! It only takes about a minute to fill out an invitation, which can be customized to include a pop-up map and directions to the designated meeting place. Evite automatically tracks responses, giving you a detailed account of yeses, nos, and maybes. If there's an invitation-worthy event in your future, just tell Evite.com and it will send you an email reminder.
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Zipinfo.com
Kfor any valid ZIP code, find the city and state plus: county name and FIPS code, time zone, MSA/PMSA, area code, latitude and longitude, congressional district. Just enter a ZIP code, city, or city and state and punch GO.
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DISK CLEANUP
Windows 98 includes a nifty utility to clean your disk (for example remove temporary files which were "left over").
To Start Disk Cleanup:
1. Open Windows Explorer or My Computer
2. Right-clicks the disk you want to free space on, and then click Properties
3. On the General tab, click Disk Cleanup
4. Click the unnecessary files you want to remove, and click ok
The program tells you how much space you can free up and where the files are it suggests removing. You, of course, check which ones to remove.
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SEARCHING MAMMA.
Billed as The Mother of All Search Engines,
Mamma.com at http://www.mamma.com claims to access 4.2 million unique users and 40 million pageviews on a monthly basis. Mamma probes 10 major search engines simulatenously and creates a virtual database, formatting results by relevance and source.
CYBER POP.
Who can resist the allure of popping those little bubbles that are used for packaging? You'll find perpetual bubblewrap at http://www.urban75.com/Mag/bubble.html where you can run your cursor over the bubbles and they pop. Unlike the real stuff, they also recharge, so you can spend an entire rainy afternoon doing this and wondering if you should give serious thought to life outside the PC.
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FOR THE MIDDLE WHEEL CROWD
If you have a middle wheel on your mouse, you probably are looking for something to do with it other than scroll. Here's a couple of slick tips recommended by a reader. Unfortunately, they work only on Microsoft Internet Explorer. With the browser screen active, holding the Shift key down, the middle wheel, depending on direction, will advance you back or forward. If instead, the CTRL key is depressed, that wheel then enlarges or reduces your Web view.
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WEBZARD HTML EDITOR.
OK, this one is basic for sure, a really
stripped-down version of an HTML editor. But it has some nice features for a simple little editor. Front Page is not going to fear competition from this item, but then, its free price tag is appealing. Take a look at http://www.webzard.co.uk/html .
VIRUS RESOURCE.
Add this to the collection of Web sites that you really should visit before you pass on the next virus scare such as ôthis one must be for real because it came from my aunt who knows someone who works for (Dell, Gateway, or fill-in-the-blank)." The site is http://www.911virusalert.com/home1/home1.html .
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A PANORAMIC VIEW.
Download another plug-in for Netscape Communicator and/or Microsoft Internet Explorer from
and then, equipped with Live Picture Zoom Viewer 3.2, check out the art galleries from that site. You can view the entire scene in 360 degrees and zoom in or out for a better 3-D feel of your surroundings. There are quite a few such sites around.
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METAPAD.
A good replacement for Microsoft NotePad with many extras, yet a small and free download of 21kb, is MetaPad at
This is no substitute for the more powerful word processors such as WordPerfect or Word, but for a simple little text editor, it does a lot.
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MUSIC MANIA.
Streambox at http://www.streambox.com/Products/products.asp provides several nice utilities for the music buffs. The Streambox Ripper converts CD and Real Audio files to WAP, MP4, or Windows Media Audio formats. Streambox Magic Spell adds voice to instant message software such as ICQ, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Instant Messengers, using Microsoft Agent and a built-in text-to-speech engine. Streambox Rio Explorer manages, moves, and copies MP3 files from PC to Diamond Rio MP3 Player.
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A SURE SHOT
In the not-so-good old days, a screen-saver was a necessity to avoid monitor burn-in. Not so anymore, and screen savers are purely decorative. If you like them, and wallpaper, to spruce up your screen, then there's likely no more complete source than Webshots, where you can download free software and daily images from a selection of more than 100,000 at http://www.webshots.com .
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THE PESKY AUTOMATIC DIALER
A Tipworld subscriber recently wrote:
"Many of my clients have to sign on to their ISP with dial-up networking first, then launch Netscape. How do I set them up to dial automatically? Second, I no longer WANT to dial up automatically--how do I turn the feature OFF?"
The Dial-Up Networking autodialer is up to its old tricks. Both of your questions have the same solution. First, a little background: When you start a program that involves use of the Internet through a dial-up connection to your ISP, Windows 95/98 checks to see that a connection is present. If one is not present and the Internet settings are at their defaults, Windows connects to your default (most often used) ISP. Therefore, when you start Netscape, which of course uses an Internet connection, Windows usually assumes you wish to start such a connection.
Changing these settings is simple. Open your Control Panel by clicking Start, Settings, Control Panel. Double-click the icon labeled Internet Options. Select the Connections tab at the top of the window. To specify that you do NOT always want Windows to establish a connection, select the Never Dial A Connection option. The other two options, Dial Whenever A Network Connection Is Not Present and Always Dial My Default Connection, are self-explanatory. However, if you choose one of the latter options, make sure you set your favorite ISP as your default connection. Furthermore, if you choose the Never Dial A Connection option and you later WANT to connect, you will have to do it manually through the Dial-Up Networking folder under My Computer. Right-click the icon in your Dial-Up Networking window and click Connect, or drag the icon to your desktop to create a shortcut, which you can then double-click.
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KEEPING THINGS COMPACT
As you receive and store e-mails in Netscape Messenger, they start to accumulate disk space. Netscape has some features that help cope with the slack space. Start Netscape and click Edit, Preferences. Expand the Mail & Newsgroup preferences and select Disk Space. The first two options are the ones that involve e-mail messages. You can tell Messenger to ignore messages on your ISP's mail server larger than a certain size (50KB is the default). This is generally not a good idea. The option is available so that people with slow dial-up connections won't have to download large messages or attachments before they can read the rest of their mail. Unless this is a major concern of yours, I'd leave the option unchecked.
The second option is of particular use to people with a lot of e-mail messages downloaded and stored on their computer. Basically, Netscape keeps track of the unused (slack) space your stored messages take up, and it can clean up and compact your messages to release that space to other applications. Netscape can do the compacting automatically whenever it can free up a specified amount of space (the default is 100KB), or you can do it manually whenever you feel it's necessary. To compact your folders manually, in Messenger, click File, Compact Folders. You won't lose messages by doing this. It merely cleans up the disk space allotted to messages but not used.
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CACHE FOLDER CLEANUP
As hard disk capacities become bigger and bigger, we're finding fewer and fewer reasons to use today's tip. However, for those of us who still have a modest amount of hard disk space to play with, it's often necessary to clean up as much space as we can in a hurry. Netscape stores a small (by comparison) amount of data from previous downloads in a cache folder for later retrieval. This space is usually 5MB to 20MB and is on an age-based priority system (meaning new data replaces older downloads first). To clear this data and gain back that space, click Edit, Preferences. Expand the Advanced options and select Cache. Click the Clear Disk Cache button. Netscape erases all of the files in the cache folder.
Two points you should remember: First, on systems where several people have profiles for Netscape, clearing the disk cache clears only the folder associated with your name. To get the maximum amount of space back, all users must start Netscape under their name and clear their own caches. Second, clearing the disk cache may cause regularly visited Web pages to load a little slower than normal at first as the new data fills each cache.
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Larry Thompson, 457-5622
Vice President Jack Konold
Treasurer Richard Coop Sr., 459-8731
Member Services Rodney Malkoff, 453-1159
Newsletter Editor Jerry Henry 453-4144
Newsletter Distribution Marcy Young
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Newsletter editor Jerry Henry
jhenry@netusa1.net 453-4144
Keep those articles coming in WordPerfect, plain text, or Word
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POSTSCRIPT
Well folks it is 9:45 Checked email for last minute additions. None there. Too late. The deadline passed. I don’t even know what the program is: So Surprise
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