Tid Bits `N Bytes - The Winnipeg PC User Group

Transcription

If undeliverable, return to:
Winnipeg PC User Group
337C Pembina Highway
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3L 2E4
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Newsletter of the Winnipeg PC User Group Inc.
“A Charter Member of the Association of PC User Groups (APCUG)”
June - July 2005
Upcoming General Meetings
• The June General Meeting will be held on Thursday,
June 16, 2005 topic and presenter TBA. Check the Club Website for updates
.http://www.wpcug.ca, or http://www.wpcusrgrp.org, or http://www.wpcug.net
• The July General Meeting will be held on Thursday,
July 21 2005 topic and presenter TBA. Check the Club Website for updates
Announcements
• The newsletter is now mailed out “in house” to save the Group
some money. You too could participate in this fun event. Contact
Doug Hutsel for details! • If you can, pick up your copy of the newsletter at the Resource Centre on the Saturday prior to the General
meeting, please let Doug Hutsel know if you do!
40599174
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2
The Winnipeg PC User Group, Inc. is a non-profit
organization formed to provide those with an interest in the
IBM Personal Computer or compatible computer, with an
opportunity to come together and otherwise assist one
another in the use and understanding of these computers.
The group serves as a forum to exchange ideas, to discuss
the latest developments, and share information.
••• ••• •••
This periodical is published bi-monthly for the purpose of
advising members of the various group activities and
sharing of information between other similar User Groups
around the world. It is mailed to all members of the group
and to all other User Groups who reciprocate with a copy
of their newsletter.
••• ••• •••
The group is not affiliated with any commercial organization and receives no financial support other than through
membership dues and paid advertising in the periodical.
The officers are volunteers and only receive the following
benefits: they learn more about their computer, gain
satisfaction from having helped others and meet many
people with common interests and problems.
••• ••• •••
Monthly Meetings are held on the 3rd Thursday of each
month, except December when the meeting is held on the
second Thursday. The Executive meets on the 2nd Thursday of each month, except December when the meeting is
held on the third Thursday. Members are welcome.
Volunteers for many activities are always needed.
ISP Dial Up Number
975-0200
Website: http://www.wpcusrgrp.org
COPYRIGHT POLICY & LIABILITY WAIVER
This publication is © Copyright, Winnipeg PC User Group Inc., 2003.
The reprinting in another publication, of original material appearing
in this newsletter must give credit to the Winnipeg PC User Group
Inc. and to any author indicated. Such material may be reprinted at
no cost, but a copy of the publication in which it has been reprinted
must be provided at no cost to the Winnipeg PC User Group Inc.
Views and opinions expressed are those of the author indicated (or the
editor) and not necessarily of the group or executive. The group,
contributors, and the editor of this newsletter do not assume any
liability for damages arising out of the publication or non-publication
of any advertisement, article, or other item herein.
The WPCUG does not assume responsibility for damages arising from
the publication or non-publication of any advertising in this
newsletter. Acceptance of advertising does not imply endorsement by
the group
WPCUG Board of Directors
Elected Officers for the period ending October 2003
Home Phone
President & Program ......... Jon Phillips .......... 888-9180
<[email protected]>
Vice President ..................... Paul Kesson ......... 489-7617
<[email protected]>
Treasurer ............................. David Estey ......... 489-3728
<[email protected]>
Exec. Secretary ................... John Kesson ........ 489-7617
<[email protected]>
Membership ........................ Doug Hutsel ......... 831-7478
<[email protected]>
Online Services Manager .... Greg McClure ....... 942-3301
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Group Buyer ........................ Rodd Provencher .
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NEWSLETTER
Home Phone
Editor
Paul Stephen ............... 284-2810
<[email protected]>
Co-editor
Tom Howard ............... 224-3430
<[email protected]>
Current issue composed & edited by
Bill Webster [email protected] .................. 888-3544
Please do not call Board/Executive
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Winnipeg PC User Group Inc.
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 3
Mailing Addresses
General Correspondence: Attn.: Executive Secretary
Membership:
Attn.: Membership Secretary
Mail to the Resource Centre
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3L 2E4
Newsletter Exchange & Review Software
Paul Stephen
401-1025 Grant Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3M 1Y4
Contents Of This Issue
Kodak Image Correction & Enhancement -------------- 5
Exact audio Copy ----------------------------------------- 11
Which OCR Program is Right for You ------------------ 16
Silent attack on Our Computers ------------------------- 23
Monthly Calendars of WPCUG Events ---------------- 25
Reviewing the Reviewr ----------------------------------- 26
Google Tips ----------------------------------------------- 28
Minutes of April General Meeting ---------------------- 30
Tech News ------------------------------------------------- 32
Yearly Membership Dues
Junior Membership (under the age of 18) ....... $25.00
Adult Membership .......................................... $49.95
Associate Membership .................................... $20.00
Corporate Membership ................................. $125.00
With an adult membership you receive one copy of our
periodical and any member of your family may attend the
User Group General meetings. After an adult membership
has been purchased, additional associate memberships may
be purchased which include a draw ticket at the general
meeting, but no newsletter. A corporate membership
entitles you to two copies of the periodical and any
member(s) of your organization may attend our general
meetings. Contact Doug Hutsel (membership@
wpcusrgrp.org or 831-7478) for further details.
Advertisers
Healey Visual Inc. ----------------------------------------- 4
WPCUG ISP ----------------------------------------------- 9
Ink Jet Refills ----------------------------------------------- 15
Dave’s Quick Print ----------------------------------------- 27
Full page
Half page
Business card
Flyer inserts
Classified
Ad sizes and Rates
width
height
insertions
1
3
7.5
10
$65
$165
7.5
5
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3” x5”
$10
$225.00
Members are entitled to one free ad
(4 lines - 42 characters) - per issue.
others $3.75 per 4 line ad.
Extra lines $0.90 each
6
$270
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Newsletter Submissions
The editor will accept almost anything you wish to
contribute. Short submissions may be in any form what so
ever. If you have a favorite Shareware programme that you
use, (or one that is unregistered and you’d like to have
registered), write me up a 1-2 page review of the product
and I’ll try and get you a FREE registration! Contact the
editor if you would like to review a specific software
package.
Longer submissions should be made on 3.5" floppy
disks, or sent to my e-mail address: [email protected].
Files should be zipped before being uploaded or attached
to e-mail messages.
Other acceptable formats include: WordStar 3.x-5.0,
WordPerfect 4.x-5.1, Word, and ASCII. If you use one of
the above word processors. Special formatting such as
autonumber cause great problems for the special software
that we use to prepare this newsletter. Remove extra
paragraph and line feeds. DO NOT “format” your text PLEASE!
This newsletter is produced using the following software
and hardware tools: Microsoft Word 97, OmniPage Pro,
Graphic Workshop Professional, for conversions and
graphic library control. Printing is done using a HP Series
5MP LaserJet. Adobe’s Acrobat is used to produce the
PDF files. A special friend of this User Group is the Corel
Corporation and we use Corel Draw 10. Other hardware:
HP ScanJet 4300C, 638 megs of memory, 400 MHz
Pentium II CPU.
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Image Correction and Enhancement Products
from Kodak’s Austin Development Center
by Neil Longmuir
[email protected]
Kodak purchased Applied Science Fiction (ASF)
as part of Kodak’s digital strategy. Who is ASF?
“Applied Science Fiction has now become KODAK’s
Austin Development Center. We will continue the
development of imaging technologies which will be
incorporated into future KODAK and OEM products.”
The name probably does not mean much to you until I
link it up with a product called DIGITAL[v1] ICE.
DIGITAL ICE ships with many flatbed and slide
negative scanners. This utility or plug-in does a
phenomenal job of removing dust and scratches from
scans without degrading image quality. In my opinion,
there is no better product on the market today at any
price. I have the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400 slide
negative scanner and I can attest to the fact that
DIGITAL ICE really works. DIGITAL ICE can save
you hours and hours of touch up time. DIGITAL ICE,
as far as I know is not available as a plug-in to Photoshop.
However, Kodak’s Austin Development Center has
seven terrific software plug-ins.
The products are:
other imaging programs which support the Photosho
plug-in architecture.
My test hardware consists of an AMD 3200 processor,
1 gig PC3200 RAM, 320 gig of hard disk space, DVD
burner, CD-RW burner, ATI Radeon video card with 64
MB of RAM and a Benq 19 inch LCD display.
The main difference between the Professional
plug-ins and the non-professional plug-ins is the
Professional plug-ins support full 16 bit and 8 bit editing
while the non-professional plug-ins support only 8 bit
editing. There are other differences which I will get
into with each of the specific products. Let’s start by
defining a plug-in. A plug-in is a small software program
that plugs into an application to give the application extra
capabilities. A logical question is “I already have Adobe
Photoshop or Adobe Elements, why do I need a extra
plug-in? Why do I need the Professional plug-in?” Both
Adobe Photoshop and Elements are terrific programs
in their own right. But there are some things other
programs just do better. In the past I have said that just
because we’re going to a digital world does not mean
that Kodak is just going to roll over and give up. Kodak
manufactures terrific films and they are a major player
in the digital world. These plug-ins are just another piece
of Kodak’s digital strategy. I have no compromises when
it comes to images, if there is a product out there that
will enhance my images, I want that product available
to use. I may not use it on every image, but I will use it
when I need it. Trial versions of these products can be
downloaded from the Kodak web site www.asf.com.
:All of the above plug-ins are available for either Be sure to write down exactly your e-mail address and
password you signed in with. You will need this
the Windows platform or the MAC platform. These
information later when you want to download updates.
plug-ins are compatible with Adobe Photoshop and
The files are not huge and
once installed they can be
Hardware Requirements :
used. I would recommend
that you also download the
Pentium II or better with a 128 MB of RAM
PDF manual for the
Windows 98SE, Windows ME, NT 4.0 with service pack 6a, Windows 2000 and Windows XP
Adobe Photoshop 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0 and CS; Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0; Adobe
software
you
are
Photoshop LE 5.0; Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.0; Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0
evaluating. Kodak has
Minimum display resolution: 800 x 600 pixels (Note: small fonts can only be displayed
some sample images that
can be used to test the
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various plug-ins. Kodak warns you not to save any of
your corrected image files because a watermark is
placed on the image. If you do save the image, the
watermark cannot be removed. Registering your plugin disables the watermark. Note, that the plug-in must
already be installed on your computer before you can
register it. Once you have registered your plug-in and
paid for it, you will receive an e-mail with your
registration information. I recommend that you print it
out now and place it in a safe place. I print all my
registration information out, place it in a binder with all
my other information. I also make a Drive Image backup
of my e-mail mailbox. I can’t emphasize this enough;
you cannot have too many backups. Not having a backup
in this day and age is not an option, it’s a necessity. It
should be noted that all of these plug-ins “work with
digital images from slide negative scanners, flatbed
scanners, digital cameras, photo CDs and images from
the Internet.” After the plug-ins are installed they will
appear on the Filter drop down menu in Adobe Photoshop
or Adobe Photoshop Elements.
See Figure 1.
The User Interface Kodak has done a superb job
with the end user interface. All of the plug-ins have a
clean easy to use interface. For example, all the plugins have the Zoom buttons in exactly the same place. If
you use a feature in DIGITAL GEM Professional then
that same feature, for example, the Zoom button, will
be in exactly the same place if in the DIGITAL ROC
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Professional plug-in, the DIGITAL SHO Pro
professional plug-in and the DIGITAL GEM/Airbrush
Pro plug-in. One other button that can be very useful is
the Default dialogue box. If you really mess up and
can’t remember what the original default starting values
were, click on the Default button and the original default
settings are restored. Last but not least, if you need
help click on the Help button for additional information
or if you don’t have the user manual right next to the
computer. Check Figure 1 for the location of the various
dialogue boxes. All the professional plug-ins have a
preview screen. Thus, you know the effect of the change
before you actually make the change. In my opinion, all
image editing programs should have this feature. Just
like the LCD screen on the back of your digital camera,
the preview screen gives the end user instant response
to the editing change. How are updates handled? All
plug-in window screens have a Check for Update
dialogue box in the upper left hand corner. Just left mouse
click on the Check
for Update dialogue
box and the
software will go out
to the Internet and
check if there is an
update. If there is
an update available,
go to the asf web
site, click on the
plug-in you want to
update
and
download
the
update. Note: you
will have to sign in
to download the
update. Here is
where you will
need to type in your
e-mail address and
your password.
The e-mail address
and password are case sensitive and must be typed in
exactly the same as when you downloaded the trial
versions. All the Kodak Plug-ins work with Adobe
Photoshop and compatible programs such as Paint Shop
Pro. Now let’s take a good look at the plug-ins.
DIGITAL ROC Professional plug-in
Most people do not store color negatives, slides
and prints correctly. It is only when they want to make
a print or view a slide that they realize the original is no
longer a true original. That original image will have a
color shift of some kind. Prints, color slides and color
negatives will deteriate over time generally producing
either a blue or red tint or cast. These same images can
have a different color cast if they were made under
incandescent or fluorescent lighting. The DIGITAL
ROC Pro plug in will automatically restore and balance
color in a faded or old image. The ROC plug-in will do
three things automatically: correct color, restore color
and balance the color of the image. The professional
version of this plug-in will let you control image contrast
and brightness. The professional version also supports
16 bit editing of color images. How many of you have
an old color slide that was not taken on Kodachrome?
Recently a user group member brought over some slides
that he wanted to scan for a presentation. The slides
were taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These
slides were shot on Ekatchrome. As expected, all these
slides had a very red cast and were very contrasty. At
the time, I did not have the DIGITAL ROC Pro plug-in.
We spent several hours using Photoshop adjusting these
slides. I was not happy at all with the end result, but he
was delighted. Yes you could see the image but the
quality was far from exciting. These images would be a
good test for DIGITAL ROC Pro plug-in. I opened the
first image and ran the ROC Pro plug-in filter using the
default settings. In less than two seconds I had an image
that was significantly better than the original. Looking
closely at the image, I could visibly see the grain
structure of the original Ekatchrome (remember, the
old films did not have nearly as fine a grain structure as
the current films). I then ran the DIGITAL GEM Pro
plug-in, using the default settings. Now the image was
starting to look really good. I did a few minor tweaks
with the levels and curve settings in Photoshop and had
a terrific image. The question to ask now is “How did
they do that?” The first thing to remember is that Kodak
has a lot of experience in the theory of color, a lot more
than I personally have. To restore an old image, requires
knowledge. The old image will have a definite color
cast or tint. A digital image has three color channels,
red, green and blue. The DIGITAL ROC Pro plug-in
uses proprietary algorithms to analyses each color
gradient for each of the channels. The results of the
analysis are used to restore faded or lost color by
generating an optimal tone curve for each channel. After
analyzing each of these channels, the DIGITAL ROC
Pro plug-in using advanced algorithms, optimizes the
brightness and contrast of the image. The final
adjustment corrects any remaining color tints. The
algorithm is so good that it will even correct some over
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or underexposed images. The DIGITAL ROC Pro plugin does its editing in 16 bit mode while the ROC plug-in
does its editing in 8 bit mode. The plug-in has a few
simple controls that are easy to use. Figure 2 shows
the DIGITAL ROC Professional Plug-in screen. Black
and white images can be restored as long as the original
print is scanned in RGB mode. The resulting print in
many cases will be better than the original print was in
the first place.
DIGITAL GEM Professional Plug-in
The DIGITAL GEM Professional plug-in is used
to automatically reduce image noise and grain. In certain
films grain is visible to the naked eye. In digital images,
noise, the equivalent of grain in film shows up generally
in shadow areas as colored artifacts. A digital image
with either grain or noise will be improved without losing
image detail. There will be no excessive softening or
blurring of the image. The DIGITAL GEM Pro Plug-in
contains two noise suppression algorithms: the first noise
suppression algorithm works on images with extreme
noise. This algorithm works fast and is very aggressive.
The second algorithm is much gentler working “focusing
on removing film grain patterns while preserving image
detail. The professional plug-in has a Noise Preview
Screen which in turn allows the user to define and view
the actual noise/grain they want to remove.” Figure 3
shows the DIGITAL GEM Professional plug-in window.
Note that the suppression type dialogue box is showing
Coarse/Noise. The other option is Fine/Grain Noise.
Notice the little red box in the right hand window. Moving
that box around the image will show the grain or noise
in the preview window. Thus, the end user can see if
there is really a problem or not.
Real-World Testing
A year and half ago, I went to a local Sisters of
the Holy Rock concert. The Sisters of the Holy Rock
are a group of volunteer singers both male and female
who dress up as nuns to give charity concerts. At the
time, I had a Canon G2 digital camera. I sat in the back
row. Flash would be of no use, so I set the ISO setting
to 400. The Canon G2 is very noisy at ISO 400. I took
approximately 125 pictures anyway. I was correct; the
images had a lot of noise, especially in the black gowns
the singers were wearing. I decided to open a few of
the images and apply the DIGITAL GEM Professional
plug-in filter. After playing with the preview screen and
several settings, I applied the filter to the images. The
end result, I now have 125 very nice useable images.
There is virtually no visible noise in the final prints. In
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this case, DIGITAL GEM Professional meant the
difference between having some very good useable
images or just a disk with some images of a concert.
DIGITAL SHO Professional Plug-In
The DIGITAL SHO Pro Plug-In is software that
automatically adjusts the shadows and highlights so that
more detail is visible.” Images typically have three main
areas, shadows (dark areas), mid tones and highlights
(bright areas). The ideal image is one that has very little
difference in exposure between the shadows and
highlights. Light is not always perfect. What sets the
DIGITAL SHO Pro Plug-In apart from all the others is
that the shadows and highlights are adjusted
simultaneously and image detail is preserved and not
lost. This is done by adjusting the Threshold slider. The
Threshold point is the point between what is considered
the shadows and the point that is considered highlight.
In other words, the threshold point is the mid tone of the
image. The individual Highlight Detail and Shadow Detail
sliders will determine the strength of the effect in each
area. Adobe Photoshop CS has its own shadow/highlight
option, but I found that it lost image detail. DIGITAL
SHO Pro preserved image detail much better. The
preview window is invaluable; because it lets you see
immediately the changes you have made. This is
important because if you don’t like the changes you’ve
made, you can make all the changes you want before
applying the plug-in. With real life images I found this
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plug-in worked great. In Adobe Photoshop you typically
use the dodge or burn tool to lighten or darken part of
an image. This gives you a lot of control over the final
image at the expense of time. These tools are based on
the traditional darkroom techniques. Also, I found the
Adobe Photoshop CS filter introduced some noise in
the shadows. Personally, I preferred the DIGITAL SHO
Professional Plug-in. Time is money.
DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional Plug-In
The DIGITAL GEM Airbrush Professional PlugIn is used to automatically smooth skin surfaces without
losing detail in eyelashes, hair or losing the overall skin
texture. Some of the uses of this plug-in would be to
soften lighting in portraits; remove aging shadows etc.
This is an ideal tool for retouching a lot image such as
school portraits, wedding photos and glamour photo
shoots. With real images, I found this plug-in worked
great with noisy images shot at high ISO’s such as 1600
or 3200. Once again the preview window is invaluable.
By checking the before and after buttons you can fine
tune your final results. “The Blending slider controls
the strength of the DIGITAL GEM Airbrush effect.
Setting the blending slider to 100% is the strongest effect
and a setting of 0% has no effect. At 50% blending, the
final image is half of the smoothed image blended with
half of the original image.” More detail is available in
the DIGITAL GEM Airbrush user guide.
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Actions or macros
Kodak has enhanced these plug-ins even further
with four Kodak actions. “These actions provide a
variety of benefits from improving plug-in performance
on certain types of images to optimizing the plug-in for
unique effects to create more beautiful images.” After
your register your software, the actions can be
downloaded. These actions require Adobe Photoshop
CS. The natural question is why Adobe Photoshop CS?
The answer is that actions are a series of commands.
These commands use the Adobe Photoshop CS menu
structure to create the actions. The menu structure is
different in Adobe Elements and Adobe Photoshop CS.
Not all of the menus choices are available or in the
same place. Adobe Photoshop CS is the industry
standard for editing images. What is an action? Adobe
defines an action as a series of commands, i.e. a macro
that you play back on a single file or a batch of files.
For example, you can create an action that applies an
Image Size command to change an image to a specific
size in pixels, followed by an Unsharp Mask filter that
resharpens the detail, and a Save command that saves
the file in the desired format. The above commands are
easy for a single image, but apply these commands to a
large number of image is a big job. Creating an action
and batch processing all the files simplifies the task.
Most commands and tool operations are
recordable in actions. Actions can include stops that let
you perform tasks that cannot be recorded (for example,
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using a painting tool). Actions can include controls that
let the end user enter values in a dialog box while playing
an action. Actions form the basis for droplets, which
are small applications that automatically process all files
that are dragged onto their icon.
Both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe ImageReady
include a number of predefined actions, although
Photoshop has significantly more user-recordable
functionality than ImageReady. You can use these actions
as is, customize them to meet your needs, or create
new actions. I should also point out that actions can be
edited. Actions can be applied to a number of images
such as a whole directory. Doing a whole directory of
images one after another automatically is much faster
than applying an action to images one at a time.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Each of the professional plug-ins cost $99.95 US.
The standard versions plug-ins cost $49.95 US. Trial
versions can be downloaded from http://www.asf.com
and tried to determine which plug-ins serve your needs
best before purchasing. The plug-ins work on both the
Windows and Mac computer platforms. I tested the
plug-ins with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 and 3.0,
Adobe Photoshop 7.01 and CS. They worked great with
the Adobe products. My personal favourites were
DIGITAL ROC Pro, DIGITAL GEM Pro and DIGITAL
SHO Pro. After applying the DIGITAL ROC
Professional Plug-In to a batch of images in a directory,
I often found myself going back and applying the
DIGITAL GEM Professional Plug-In to remove noise
or grain. The noise or grain was in the original image,
but was not visible. To further improve images, I found
myself running the DIGITAL SHO Pro plug-in to open
up shadow areas and improve the image even more.
The other two products DIGITAL SHO
Professional Plug-In and DIGITAL GEM Airbrush
Professional Plug-In worked very well on some other
images. The DIGITAL SHO Professional plug-in that
helps adjust shadows, contrast and exposure worked
very well. Photographers doing a lot of portrait and
glamour photography will appreciate the DIGITAL
GEM Airbrush Professional filter. Personally, I found
the DIGITAL GEM Airbrush filter just a little too
aggressive with the Gaussian blur that is applied at the
end of the action. Remember, actions can be edited to
obtain the look you want. Also don’t be afraid to try all
four plug-ins on an image, you could get a surprise.
Each of these products are terrific. To depend just on
the filters that your software comes with by default
does not give you all the tools that are available. You
don’t know if your images can be made better. Digital
photography is definitely the way of today and the future.
Both the Kodak standard and professional plug-ins are
here today and the future plug-ins will be even better.
Each of these plug-ins whether the standard or the
professional version will help make some of your images
even better. I highly recommend all four of these plugins. The end user interface is very clean and easy to
use. The plug-in default settings work very well on a
most of images. Taking time to use the preview screen
in the professional versions can make those same images
even better. Anything that can make an image better is
definitely worth the money. Kodak with its’ professional
plug-ins are on the right track with full 16 bit editing.
When the 64 bit processors become main stream, Kodak
will be one step ahead with 16 bit plug-in editing because
more image detail is preserved. When a image is
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converted to 8 bit, information is tossed out. I just can’t
wait to see what the next great plug-in will be from
Kodak. I don’t know what it is now, but I would bet
money on it that it will be terrific. These plug-ins are a
must have for anyone doing image editing. Best of all,
using the default settings produce terrific results
automatically. In my opinion, these plug-ins are a must
have product. I would like to thank the good folks at
Kodak and especially Michael Conley for the software
for this review.
Neil’s Rating
***** Plus
Trial versions can be downloaded from: http://
www.asf.com Be sure to attend the May 2005 General
meeting May 19 th to see these plug-ins in action. I will
also be showing Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0.
Helpful Hints
If your computer says, “Printer out of Paper,” the problem
cannot be resolved by continuously clicking the “OK”
button.
No matter how much data you add to your laptop computer,
it will not get heavier.
A bad place to store your emergency backup diskette is on
the underside of your desk drawer, secured by a large magnet.
It’s okay to use the Polaroid Land Camera on a boat.
When the PC says, “Insert diskette #2,” don’t do it
immediately. Remove disk #1 first, even if you’re sure you
can make them both fit in there.
When your PC says “You have mail,” don’t go to the company
mail room and look for a package.
If you go to the computer store to buy a mousepad, you
don’t have to specify whether it’s for a Windows or a
Macintosh.
Exact Audio Copy ver 0.95 prebeta 5
by Roger Buchanan
Portable music is all the rage today. MP3’s, which are
not that new, are gaining a resurgence in popularity
did. After all, if this poor hapless user can do it, anyone
can do it.
When Exact Audio Copy (EAC) is used in conjunction
with the LAME MP3 encoder, and in some cases the
Nero ASPI layer, the results are fantastic. Fantastic
and FREE that is. These results are owing to the fact
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that EAC focuses not on speed, but rather on the
accuracy of the ripping. It verifies each track, and if
something is out of place it reads the audio again. All
the author of EAC asks for is a postcard mailed to
him in return for you using the software.
First off, you get EAC from the website http://
www.exactaudiocopy.de. Don’t worry though, the site
is in English, and there are lots of mirror sites if that
one is busy. Now get the MP3 LAME encoder ver
3.95.1 at http://www.mitiok.cjb.net/. Yep, it is free too!
Extract both of these files to the same folder.
As a precaution also go and get the Nero ASPI layer
(wnaspi32.dll) from ftp://ftp6.nero.com/wnaspi32.dll.
If the burns don’t turn out perfect the first time, then
add this file to the EAC folder. For those
that are curious the ASPI layer is some of
the software working between your
program (EAC) and your drive (CD
burner). If you require more info just
Google “what is ASPI layer”.
If at any time you need to get some help
there are two great sources of information
available to you. First there is the EAC
website
itself,
http://
www.exactaudiocopy.de (figure 1). Or
there is the Chris Myden enthusiast site
http://www.bestmp3guide.com (figure 2).
Upon the first launch EAC runs the Setup Wizard. It is
at this point that you will want to make sure that you
have an audio CD nearby. In my case it was Enya, but
anything will do. The EAC wizard will proceed to
check all your CD drives for the one that it thinks is
the most qualified to rip your audio tracks. After this
process is over the wizard starts searching for the MP3
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 2
encoder. All I did at this point was click on cancel and
chose the standard setting. You then provide your email
address, which is important as you will be provided
with access to the freedb archive of CD listings. At
this point you can then go on to choose the “expert”
interface. Don’t worry though, once all your program
settings have been made it will be as easy as falling out
of bed to rip CD’s with EAC.
You should configure EAC as follows. From the EAC
menu choose EAC and then EAC Options. On the
“general” tab make sure that the “on unknown CDs”
box is checked and then click on “automatically access
online freedb database” button (figure 3). After you
have done that choose the “filename” tab and file out
the “naming scheme” field as shown
(figure 3b). Now go to the directories
tab and direct EAC to directory where
you want your MP3s stored. When that
is completed go to the EAC menu and
choose the Drive Options menu. You
want to be sure that under the
“extraction mode” tab you have EAC
using secure mode. We’re almost done
now. With EAC Compression Options
you do your final bit of configuring
(figure 3c). All that is left is to go to EAC -> freedb
Options and get the active freedb server list. Now
you are ready to let it rip!
The process of ripping requires you to insert your audio
CD in the appropriate drive and then click on the
button “MP3”. EAC will first access the freedb and
get the album and track
information (figure 4)
after which it will start
ripping. The progress of
the ripping can be
followed with the track
“Status & Error
message” dialog box
(figure 5). For each
track you will see listings
for “suspicious position
hr:min:sec” as well as
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 3
ASPI layer things were perfect. It took
EAC 8 minutes and 27 seconds to rip and
encode a ten track audio CD with 46min
and 51sec of music on it.
If you don’t get good enough results with
this configuration go to the Chris Myden site,
www.bestmp3guide.com and follow the
simple seven step process to providing EAC
with a great ripping profile.
CD’s and put the resulting MP3’s into album
folders. If you have multiple CD’s from the
same artist you will
find that EAC will
create a folder for the
artist, and then put
each albums worth
of MP3’s into an
correctly labeled
sub-folder. How
great is that???
Lastly here are some
tips that I’ve found.
Burn at 24x for home
and 4x for your car.
For best audio results
don’t forget to “normalize” your MP3s with
something like MP3Gain. Doing so will
prevent those annoying changes in volume
when you go from track to track. When you
go to burn your MP3s to disc be sure to do
so in “disc-at-once” mode, and “finalize”
each CD you burn. Have fun!
Requirements: Windows XP or Windows
2000
Roger Buchanan is a long time member of the
WPCUG. He has written for the newsletter in the
past. Owing to his long term standing as a “poor
misguided user” he can often be heard muttering
“what did I do wrong this time” over weekend
lunches at the Park Tower restaurant.
“peak level %” and “track quality %” which tells you
how much of the track was ripped without having to
use error correction. The entire process that you will
have ripping your music will look like this (figure 6).
Don’t be alarmed by that DOS box, after all, the LAME
encoder is a program “external” to EAC.
At first I got some errors, but after installing the Nero
See next page for other screen shots
Tid Bits N’ Bytes
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 4
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 5
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 6
Which is the Best Optical Character
Recognition Program for You?
by John Robin Allen
This article is dedicated to the memory of Jef Raskin, author of The Humane
Interface (Addison-Wesley 2000), creator of Apple's Macintosh, the Canon
Cat, click-and-drag selection and other inventions. He coined the term and
the concept of "information appliances." for more information see
http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/
Software reviewed in this article
* Abbyy FineReader, Professional Edition, Version 7.0. Can$ 381.94 (from Programmers Paradise);
US$ 299.00 (from Amazon.com).
* I.R.I.S. ReadIris Version 10.0. Can$ 148.99 (from TigerDirect, Canada). US$117.99 at Amazon if
shipped within the U.S. Corporate Edition, US$ 399.99. (no street price available at press time).
* ScanSoft OmniPage Pro Version 14. Can$ 149.00 (at Software Gazette). US$ 129.99 (at
Amazon.com).
Several years ago, before the ubiquitous PC in purchasing such a program is its relative accuracy.
existed, I was the editor of a journal devoted to medieval Other features may also be important, such as how
romance epic poetry. To save money on typesetting, many different languages the program can decipher in
we transcribed everything we published into a a single document or how well it can reproduce the
mainframe computer and had it generate magnetic tapes format of the original, but accuracy is the prime goal.
to bring to a typesetter who would then produce In light of that, this review then will try to answer the
camera-ready copy. The system worked slowly but question posed in the title above. Three software firms
well. The main problem was accuracy in keyboarding from three countries are currently competing against
the texts into the computer, but technology came to each other to produce the best program. Listed
the rescue. For a bit more than $150.00 we purchased alphabetically, the firms are:
*Abbyy Software (formerly named Bit
a “Dentex”, a Danish machine that could hold a sheet
Software), from Moscow, Russia, but with offices
of paper, put a magnifying glass over it and a line
through the current line to copy, so that it was easy to
worldwide: FineReader, currently in Version 7.0.
type what was written. A foot pedal controlled a tiny
* I.R.I.S. (Image Recognition Integrated Systems,
motor that moved the paper up or down as needed as
S.A.), from Louvain-la-neuve, Belgium: ReadIris.
one transcribed the words. Today, such processes from
This review here is based on version 9.0,
the last century all seem so primitive. In a garage sale
Corporate Edition, but they are currently at version
a few weeks ago I tried to sell the $150.00 Dentex for
10, which we could not obtain for this review.
five dollars, but of course no one wanted it. That sort
* ScanSoft, from Peabody, Massachusetts.
of work is done far more easily with a scanner and a
computer using optical character recognition (OCR) This company produces several OCR programs, the
software. The problem is that despite major advances best of which currently is OmniPage Pro Version 14
A few years ago, when ScanSoft was called
made during the past few years, OCR programs are
far from accurate. Whatever is scanned and processed Caere, it bought out another OCR company,
must be carefully proofread to correct the inevitable TextBridge, and used its engine to improve their
errors the software makes. It follows that a major goal OmniPage program. They then made further
refinements and changed their corporate name to
ScanSoft. They still offer the old TextBridge
program as a low-level OCR program. Of all the
ScanSoft products, only OmniPage, Version 14 is
reviewed here.
Before we see how the programs did when
competing against each other, we should first
examine them individually to note some of their
significant differences and “features”. Some
“features” are common to all three programs. For
example, if some of the scanned pages have been
recognized (i.e., analyzed and ready to save as a
normal text document) and some pages have not
been analyzed, no program lets you specify that it
should analyze only the pages still not done. You
have to figure out for yourself which pages are done
and then choose the remaining pages. It is usually
easier simply to tell the program to analyse all the
pages over again and then do something else while
the computer repeats steps it has already done.
Now let’s look at the pros and cons of each of those
OCR programs. BYY FINEREADER,
Best features: If you have to work with languages
other than English, this program could give you the
most satisfaction, particularly if you deal with many
different languages. Not only can it handle multiple
European American and African languages, but it also
puts no restrictions on how many of those languages
can appear in a single text. Its language editor divides
the languages it handles into two groups: under “Main
Languages” it lists such languages as English, French,
German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish,
Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, and many
similar languages, but then adds refinements such as
English Legal Terminology, English Medical
Terminology, or German New Spelling, German New
Spelling with Legal Dictionary and Terminology,
German New Spelling with Medical Dictionary and
Terminology and so forth. It also lists as main languages
such things as Armenian (Eastern [spoken in Armenia]),
Armenian (Grabar [i.e., for clerics]), Armenian
(Western [spoken in Europe]), Bulgarian, Catalan,
Croatian, and on and on. I personally have no need to
scan three different dialects of Armenian, but it is nice
to know that the potential to do so is there should I
ever need it. Those are just the “main languages. Under
“Additional Languages” one finds such things as
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 7
Abkhaz, Adyghe, Agul, Altaian, Avar, Aymara (I’m
skipping the better known languages such as Albanian),
and on and on through the alphabet until we get to
Zapotec and, of course you guessed it, Zulu. If you
need those languages, you need FineReader, regardless
of how well it does with the more familiar languages.
Of more practical use for most persons is a feature
FineReader shares with OmniPage: If you are scanning
pages from an open book so that each image consists
of two facing pages, both programs optionally split
the images in two. That is important. Almost any image
will be tilted (skewed) slightly to the left or right, but
when you copy an open book and accidentally press
slightly harder on one end of the binding than on the
other end, the resultant image will show the left page
skewed a small amount one way and the right page
tilted the same amount in the other direction. All OCR
programs try to adjust for skewing, but if two pages
are skewed in different directions, all the program can
do is to compromise between the two. That leads to
greater errors in the scanning. If, however, the pages
are separated into two images before being recognized,
then each can be corrected individually and the scanning
becomes significantly more accurate.
Abbyy FineReader
Problematic features: In an attempt to reproduce
the format of the scanned page, words in the original
document that appear centered or flush right will have
multiple spaces in front as FineReader tries to push
text into other positions. It may look right initially, but
if one changes to a different font or point size, the
spacing will not be accurate. To correct for that you
have to massage the output a bit,
(a) to change all triple spaces to tabs repeatedly
until there are no more triple spaces,
(b) remove all spaces before or after tabs,
(c) change all multiple tabs to single tabs,
(d) set tabs in the ruler at the top of a page to
where you want tabbed text to appear.
Since those steps are fairly routine, I did them
to all the FineReader output before testing for the
accuracy of the words it read. Another slightly annoying
“feature” of FineReader is that you cannot tell it to
ignore running heads, the words at the top of each
page in a book that tell you what you are reading and
what page you are on. One usually does not want
running heads in the text since the purpose of scanning
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is to put the words into a different format, and that will
have running heads in different places. It would be
good if OCR programs could not only recognize
running heads but could then put those words into
running heads in the new document, including
automatically adding the correct current page. That
will probably not come for another ten or twenty years,
if ever. For purposes of these tests, in order to put all
the programs on an equal footing with respect to
accuracy of the important words, I removed all running
heads from the output of all the programs reviewed
here.
ReadIris,
Best features: This program, like FineReader, can
handle multiple languages, although not as many as the
latter. The problem, however, is that unless you
purchase the “Corporate Edition”, you cannot handle
more than one language in a single document. The multilanguage features of ReadIris, Corporate Edition, put
it between FineReader and OmniPage. FineReader
allows an unlimited number of different languages in a
single document. OmniPage allows for up to only four
different languages. ReadIris allows one major language
and four other languages, for a total of five languages
in a single document. Another good feature of ReadIris
is the way it handles zones. All OCR programs work
with zones on a page, areas which are read separately
as either text, a table, an image, or something to ignore.
You can either let the program find those areas or you
can specify them yourself. If you choose the latter, an
initially disconcerting feature of ReadIris turns out to
be one of its best features: All other OCR programs
have one draw a box or zone by clicking at one corner
and then with the mouse held down one drags the mouse
to the opposite corner of the zone. When one lets go,
the box is fixed on the screen. If there are any
corrections to make, one can drag corners or sides to
new locations. ReadIris, however, uses a faster and
better method for drawing the box, a method that the
other programs could well adopt. You do not drag the
mouse across the text but simply click once in one
corner and then, without pressing any button, you move
the cursor to the opposite corner. It forms the box as
you move, with no need to hold the mouse button
down. After you have clicked the opposite corner to
freeze the box, you can still adjust the zone dimensions
if you need to do so. It gets better. All OCR programs
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 8
can draw zones on a page automatically and more
accurately than any person can. The problem is that
they usually draw zones around additional areas that
one wants the program to ignore: the edge of the paper,
the spine down the middle of an open book, the running
heads at the top or bottom, a check mark written in
the margin. and so forth. If you want to copy pages
from an open book, you want one zone for the text on
the left page, another zone for the text on the right,
and nothing more. If a program is enthusiastic about
drawing zones, you may end up with eleven or twelve
zones on an image rather than just the two zones you
want. You have to decide whether it is more trouble to
delete unwanted zones (or convert them to “ignore”
areas) or whether to delete all the zones and then
manually draw the two you need. However, help is on
the way! You do not need to delete zones with ReadIris.
There is a much better solution, for ReadIris has the
best system for drawing zones of all the programs
analyzed here. It is extremely fast and accurate. You
first let ReadIris draw the zones itself. Then you click
on a button marked “Select and Sort Text Windows”
and just click, in sequential order, the zones you want
to keep. The program ignores the zones you do not
click. The lines around those areas just disappear
automatically, and the program will then read only the
zones you chose, in the order in which you chose them.
That method is by far the easiest and fastest way I
have found for handling zones or fields. Some other
features to mention are that when one is in a learning
mode to teach ReadIris how to interpret certain letters,
it shows a clear graphic of the word in question, and
immediately below the letter giving problems is the
ReadIris interpretation of the letter. It is very easy to
compare the interpretation to the graphic immediately
above, each so close to each other. If one needs more
context to interpret the letter, the program also shows
a few more lines of context in a third, text window.
The dialogue box that shows those three windows and
the buttons to let you tell the program to learn or ignore
the letters never moves, so that you can leave your
cursor in the same place, on the “Learn this” button
and keep clicking on it unless the program has made a
wrong decision. A further gift, not found in the other
programs, is that if you realize you may have made a
mistake in what you told the program, you can undo
your last few steps to go back to the error and correct
it. With other programs you have to write down what
you think your error was and then, after you finish the
training session, you have to go back and manually
correct errors you made.
ReadIris,
Problematic features: As a Belgian program,
ReadIris defaults to European-sized paper, usually
“A4”. You can change that to “letter” (8 ½ x 11 inches),
but you cannot make that the default. If you work in a
North-American environment, you must reset the
paper size each time you use the program. In theory
you can set defaults with the program, but I could never
find out how to do that. All I could find is how to load
default specifications. The limit on the number of
languages that can be in a document gives special
problems. For the work I do, I specify the four
languages besides English are French, German,
Spanish and Danish to give the maximum number of
different characters in what I scan. It then becomes
impossible for the program to recognize or handle
letters like “?” (“e” with a hook under it, as in
“Pami?tnik”) or “?” (“l” with a slash in it, as in
“Wroc?aw”).
Two other trivial annoyance is first that ReadIris
does not generate Word “.doc” documents
automatically. It creates RTF files, but those are easy
enough to convert to “.doc” files. Second, when one
has an OCR program scan pages with an automatic
document feeder on the scanner, one often wants to
do other work on the computer, and one can do so
with all the programs discussed here. The problem is
that with ReadIris, each time it finishes work on a page
it interrupts you to let you know that fact. You have to
click on the “O.K.” button to be able to get back to
your work. One often scans a hundred pages at a time,
and thus one has to click “O.K.” one hundred times in
such a session. I tried to send an E-Mail to the I.R.I.S.
Press Office in Louvain to ask them to verify the
accuracy of these comments, but after two days of
trying with no response from them, I gave up. One
other final matter to note: after ReadIris has analyzed
a text, it does not let the user confirm the results within
the program. The closest one comes to that is its
“learning” process whereby one can confirm readings
of questionable letters. The lack of a confirmation mode
is not important. When other programs put you in that
mode, they ask you to confirm so many hundreds of
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 1 9
words that the advantage of speed and convenience
in using an OCR program is lost. Most users simply
let the spell check of a word processor look for errors
If there is no spell check for the language, then a simple
comparison between the original and the output has to
suffice.
OmniPage
Best features: In a North American context,
OmniPage Pro is probably the best-known product
for OCR. It has an excellent reputation and many
persons believe it to be the best OCR one can have. It
also works very quickly, and the current version
(number 14) is a definite improvement over its
predecessors.
OmniPage,
Problematic features: Formatting pages can be
difficult with OmniPage Pro. It likes to change font
size and positions of words arbitrarily on the pages it
creates. The page sizes it creates are unique for each
page scanned, and there is no relation between the
original and what you wanted for your output. You
can tell it to look out for running heads, and it will do
so, but you cannot make the program ignore them.
You therefore have to delete the incorrect zones it
makes. Without the advantages of ReadIris, that is a
chore. The simplest way is usually to delete all the
zones from each image. That involves, for each page,
a right click on the mouse to choose “Select All”, then
another right click to choose “Clear”. Then you have
to click on a “Draw Text Zone” button, click on the
upper left corner of the first zone you want, drag the
cursor to the lower right corner, and let go of the button.
Do the same with any other zones needed, then click
on the next page and start the procedure over again. It
takes much more time than the ReadIris procedure.
OmniPage is the only program of those I tested that
will not let one draw a table zone directly, although
one can draw text zones and ignore zones easily. To
draw either a table or an image zone, one has to draw
a “process zone” and when that is done, one has to
specify, for each “process zone” what sort of zone it
should be. I tried to find a faster method of indicating
which zones counted in OmniPage Pro, but to no avail.
They have a bank of “Frequently Asked
Questions” that I queried with a question as to how to
change the order of zones. They had an answer for
the question, but it was useless. It referred to a button
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that does not exist in their current version. If you would
like to see some other (unfavourable) comments from
users about OmniPage, locate to http://
software.stylegala.com/B0000ZG0W2/
Omnipage_Pro_14.html. I did not read those remarks
until after I finished writing this review. I tried to phone
ScanSoft to confirm the comments above with them.
That was impossible, but the nightmare of their system,
in retrospect, was amusing. To get a phone number to
call, you have to provide all sorts of numbers you do
not have. It is not just the product number or a number
they send you when you register the product. They
want more, on the philosophy that if they make it hard
for you to ask questions, maybe you will just go away.
Eventually I got a number which, when called, took
me to a computer that used voice recognition to
pretend it was a human being. It would listen to what I
said, pause for about two seconds, sound a click, and
then say “Tell me more.” Nothing got accomplished
until a human took over and gave me an E-Mail address
to use for contacting them. I sent them an E-Mail and
am still waiting for a reply. It is like Waiting for Godot,
the character who never comes in Beckett’s play,
which, by the way, is quite amusing.
-o-oOo-oThe pros and cons of the individual OCR
programs are of minor importance when compared to
the most important question: which program does the
best job, as defined by accuracy, specifically the words
and letters identified? Of much less importance is the
formatting of the output: it is far easier to correct bad
formatting than it is to find and correct errors in texts
of thousands of words. I decided to put each of these
OCR programs through four tests, count the errors
made, and find out which program did the best job on
each test. Here are the results:
Test one:
Reading a text in English. This is the simplest
of all the tests performed. To avoid using jargon from
something written recently, I chose the first three
chapters of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield as
downloaded from Project Gutenberg (http://
www.gutenberg.org/), for a total of 17,213 words or
91,552 letters and spaces. I processed the source text
as follows:
1. Extraneous material not written by Dickens
was deleted.
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 0
2. All multiple spaces were changed to single
spaces.
3. All apostrophes and quotation marks were
changed from straight up and down marks to “smart
apostrophes” and “smart quotes”, i.e., to be curved
to distinguish between opening and closing marks.
I then printed the text in ten-point Times New
Roman font on separate pages with no running heads.
Paragraphs were separated by six points of leading.
Each program scanned those pages at 400 d.p.i. (dots
per inch), a slightly higher than normal scanning to try
to achieve the best results. Since OmniPage Pro
appeared to scan more quickly than the other programs,
I also made one test with it at 600 d.p.i. to see if it
improved the accuracy, but the results were poorer
than at 400 d.p.i., so I discarded those results and
stayed with the 400 d.p.i. for all tests. I also specified
that the output was to be pure, unformatted text, since
this test was to measure the word recognition alone
rather than any formatting. Before comparing the results
to the original file, I changed the output to eliminate
unimportant differences:
(a) all multiple spaces again became single spaces;
(b) all the apostrophes and quotation marks were
made “smart”, to conform to the original;
(c) since division breaks marked arbitrary page
breaks not marked in the original file, all division breaks
were removed;
(d) since formatting was not part of the test I
converted each file, including the original text, to text
files.
In theory that was the output of the scanning, but
MS Word automatically gave its own formatting to
the output. This step simply removed MS Word’s
formatting. I then used MS Word’s “Compare and
Merge Documents” to compare the original text to
each of the massaged output files from the OCR
programs. The output from that comparison marked
each deviation between the two texts. It was then a
simple matter to write a macro that would take each
deviation from the original, count it and copy it to
another file. Once I knew the number of deviations, I
had MS Word count the number of characters it had
marked as deviations, but that figure appears to be
less important than the number of deviations. For
example, if “Gummidge” (a name) was transcribed as
“Gurnmidge”, that is only one error, the change of the
single letter “m” to two letters “r” and “n”. Word counts
it as fifteen characters: (GummidgeGurnmidge), but I
counted it as one incident.
With those caveats, here are the results from the
first test where, for each program, the first number is
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characters that would have to be changed to correct
the errors:
In this test, ReadIris gave the best result, with Abbyy
a close second. The single error ReadIris made was
to insert a hyphen after the number in
one cell. Abbyy’s three faults were
misreading two digits in two cells with
a third cell having one too many digits.
The program marked the first two errors
itself, which would make it easy to find
and correct the errors. It did not catch
the third error. The main error
OmniPage made was to add 12 extra
the number of places where the program read something empty cells in 9 different rows, i.e., 108 errors. It also
incorrectly, and the second is the total length of all the added a hyphen after two different numbers. The empty
errors thus found:
cell error took a fair amount of time to correct.
In that test, the lower the number of errors, the better
the score. Abbyy is the clear winner, while
ReadIris had the highest number of errors.
Test two:
Reading numbers in a spreadsheet.
Checking for numbers in a spreadsheet is one of
the hardest tests one can do. There is no context
to allow a spell check to find errors. One simply has
to check each case individually. In this test I created a
table in MS Word in ten point Times New Roman,
filled with 384 rows (eight pages) and 12 columns (the
width of the page). Each cell contained seven random
digits in numbers from 1,000,000 to 9,999,999. (To
leave room for the maximum number of digits, none of
the numbers had commas or decimal marks.) It came
to a total of 4,608 cells or 32,526 digits. The printed
sheets were scanned by all three programs at 300 d.p.i.
in a black and white bitmap, and the output was set to
skip graphics, retain word and paragraph formatting,
but not to merge lines into paragraphs. All of the
programs inserted an extra blank paragraph at the top
of each page. OmniPage also added section breaks
between pages and made some of the numbers appear
as bold. Perhaps because of the formatting of the
original document ReadIris added a space after each
number. None of those differences were counted in
the test results shown below. The first digit under the
results shown below indicates the number of cells
incorrectly read. The second shows the number of
The next test addresses two other problems.
Test three:
Formatting problems and text from a
newspaper. Except for handling multi-languages in a
single text, the hardest task for an OCR program is to
read newspaper texts. These are almost always printed
on poor quality paper that tends to bleed the ink and
distort the letters. There is also the problem that words
on the opposite side of the page may show through
the thin paper. This third test puts the programs through
that test but also covers relatively difficult formatting.
Our goal this time was to take a recent article (to
minimize excessive bleeding) from a newspaper, the
National Post, an article with difficult formatting
problems:
(a) three columns with a single headline
stretching across the top of the three columns;
(b) two images (one a photo, the other a line
drawing); (c) an initial drop capital letter;
(d) an in-line quotation (i.e., an eleven-word
excerpt from the article printed in larger type and
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 2
inserted in the middle of the text to let readers see at a
glance something important from the article);
(e) four horizontal bars; and
(f) eight typefaces (i.e., variations in fonts, points,
and normal / bold / italics differences). The following
measures how well the different programs for ReadIris read “Lorne” as “Lome”, an error that
formatting. The table shows the number of errors, so OmniPage avoided. Once again, Abbyy was the
clear winner:
Test Four:
Reading different languages simultaneously.
This is the most difficult test of all for an OCR
program, but one that few persons ever need.
Nonetheless it should be a part of any evaluation.
This test consisted of a thirty page extract from
Otto Klapp, Bibliographie der französischen
Litteraturwissenschaft, Vol. 41 (Frankfurt am Main:
V. Klostermann, 2004): the Liste des périodiques
dépouillées, the Sigles et Abréviations, and the first
32 listings, for a total of 11,256 words or 79,978
characters including spaces. The languages in that
are varied, mainly French but also Danish, Dutch,
English, German, Italian, Italian, Latin, Polish,
Portuguese, Spanish, and a few other less important
a lower score is better.
languages.
Abbyy is the clear winner for difficult formatting.
Counting the number of errors and their length
OmniPage’s failure to recognize three columns was too difficult to do by hand, so I wrote a quick
(it put two on one page and the third one on another and dirty VBA program to do the work:
page) made it split the headline, thus leading to
Dim Count, Length As Integer
errors in accuracy.
Do
The ReadIris in-line quote error was that it
WordBasic.NextChangeOrComment Count =
could not understand the text in a different typeface
Count + 1
and so made several errors. One could easily move
Length = Length + Len(Selection)
that “1” to add it to the 3 other typeface errors the
Loop
program made. The horizontal bar errors two of the
The results are somewhat surprising given the
programs made were that those programs simply did previous results. The first figure beneath a program
not recognize some of those lines.
are the number of errors in interpretation the
Of greater importance is the accuracy of the
program made, while the second figure shows length
transcriptions, and the results are equally revealing.
of the errors in the number of characters that
There were 887 words in the article, or 5,486
comprised each instance. Each error involved
characters (counting spaces). The length of the
several characters missed. The lower the numbers,
errors noted below was insignificant: each was just
the better the results. Differences in format were
one or two characters, often just a
missing space between two words or,
on occasion, slightly longer, such as
when ReadIris interpreted “Truman” as
“1hnnan”, or when both Abbyy and
ignored for this test.
They are surprising because in all the other tests
OmniPage never did better than the other two
programs, but here it showed the best results. It is
exceptional also because OmniPage allows only four
languages to be in a text. The languages I chose for
the OmniPage test were English, French, German, and
Spanish. Not surprisingly, it failed to recognize the
Polish letters mentioned earlier.
-o-oOo-oWhat can we conclude from all of this? First, it
seems clear that the choice of program for doing OCR
work should be largely influenced by the sort of work
one is doing. If one’s work is mainly transcribing English
texts, then Abbyy FineReader gives the best results. If
formatting is a major concern, Abbyy also scores the
best. For transcribing numbers in spreadsheets, it is
virtually a tie between Abbyy and ReadIris, with the
latter very slightly ahead. For keeping track of multiple
languages in a single text, then OmniPage Pro makes
the fewest errors. In every case, however, the user
has to do a lot of work correcting errors. To revise
30,598 characters in 913 places in a text of just 11,256
words is not a trivial task. In that test the errors were
so many that I could not even count them reliably. I
thus had to write the program above to do the actual
work. However if accuracy is important in transcribing
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texts, using an OCR program — even with its flaws
— is more accurate and far less trouble than retyping
the material manually. Yet there is an even better solution
for the task than to use any one of these programs. In
almost every case the errors made by one program
were not the errors made by the other programs. (The
fact that, as described above, two programs transcribed
“Lorne” as “Lome” was a rare exception.) That means
that one can find errors fairly quickly by using two (or
more) of these programs together. You can (a) start
with one program and get its transcription, (b) get the
same from a second program. You can then (c) use
the same technique for finding errors that I used for
writing this review: use MS Word’s “Compare and
Merge Documents” feature to determine and correct
each instance of where the two outputs differ. Your
results will be better than any of the results shown
above, no matter which programs you use.
___________
Professor John Robin Allen, Department of French,
Spanish, and Italian at the University of Manitoba,
has lunch with other members of the Winnipeg PC
Users Group each Saturday at the Park Tower
restaurant on Portage Avenue (Winnipeg), just east
of the footbridge to Assiniboine Park. You are
welcome to join the entire group there or you can
contact Allen by E-Mail at [email protected].
You can also phone him at his home at (204) 889-
Another Silent Attack on Our Computers
by
Ira Wilsker , APCUG Director; Columnist, The Examiner, Beaumont, Texas’ Radio Show Host; Police Officer
WEBSITES: http://research.microsoft.com/rootkit, http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/rootkitreveal.shtml
http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/rootkit.shtml
At the recent computer security symposium in
Corpus Christi, one of the speakers mentioned
something that I was vaguely aware of as a threat.
The threat is considered as a silent attempt to invade
our computers for the purposes of installing viruses,
Trojans, worms, or other malware devices. This
silent threat may be used by terrorists to launch a
coordinated attack on our infrastructure, steal our
personal information, or otherwise wreak havoc. So
insidious is this threat that it would sound like the
content of an urban legend, yet it is documented as
real. Imagine a threat that would be undetected by
the current antivirus, firewall, and anti-spyware
software, yet be so powerful as to effectively take
over our computers, without our knowledge. This
threat, formerly considered solely as an unproven
concept, is now known to be real. This threat is also
now implicated in taking over countless computers.
This contemporary threat is known by the innocuous
term “Rootkit”.
A rootkit is defined on the Sysinternals website
as, “ … the mechanisms and techniques whereby
malware, including viruses, spyware, and trojans,
attempt to hide their presence from spyware blockers,
antivirus, and system management utilities. There are
several rootkit classifications depending on whether
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the malware survives reboot and whether it executes
in user mode or kernel mode.” The security software
company F-Secure expands the definition with,
“Rootkits for Windows work in a different way and
are typically used to hide malicious software from for
example an antivirus scanner. Rootkits are typically
not malicious by themselves but are used for
malicious purposes by viruses, worms, backdoors and
spyware. A virus combined with a rootkit produces
what was known as full stealth viruses in the MSDOS environment.”
Because rootkits are currently very effective at
hiding malware from our antivirus and anti-spyware
scanners, it is quite possible or even probable that our
computers are infected, despite repeated scans with
properly updated software. Microsoft, and other
vendors, have acknowledged the threat and are now
beginning to produce software that can detect and
destroy the rootkits on our computers. The software
is still in its infancy, and lacks the ease of use,
automation, and attractive graphical interfaces that
we are used to with our antivirus software. It is
inevitable that as word of the rootkit threat spreads,
and more computers are identified as having stealthy
rootkits hiding viruses and other threats, that the small
current crop of rootkit detecting software will
improve, and other competitors, probably the major
antivirus vendors, will join the fight. If rootkit
technology continues to spread, the current crop of
generally excellent computer security suites from the
likes of Symantec (Norton), McAfee, Panda,
TrendMicro, and others will be forced to add rootkit
protection to their respective suites, or face
competitive obsolescence.
Fortunately for us, there are a few rootkit
detectors already available, mostly for free! This first
generation of products still needs much refining to
enable the average person to scan for rootkits with
ease, but they are still a very good first step. There
are a few rootkit detectors available which are
currently free. One “RootkitRevealer” is from a
company known for its excellent and often free
software, Sysinternals. This software uses a patentpending technology to detect rootkits, and is currently
available for download at www.sysinternals.com/
ntw2k/freeware/rootkitreveal.shtml. RootkitRevealer
will run on almost any Microsoft operating system,
NT4 and later, which includes Windows 2000, and
XP.
Another rootkit detector is from F-Secure, a
well-known computer security company
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 4
headquartered in Finland, with offices in the US and
elsewhere. F-Secure’s product is “Blacklight”,
available as a free beta (pre-release) version until
July 1. Blacklight can be downloaded at www.fsecure.com/blacklight. I have recently tried both
products, and I personally found Blacklight the easier
to use. It seemed effective at detecting and
eliminating rootkits.
Microsoft will shortly be making available its
rootkit detector, the “Strider GhostBuster”, details at
research.microsoft.com/rootkit.
Persons unknown who wish to do us harm,
either at a personal level such as stealing our account
information and committing the crime of identity theft,
or the impersonal level, such as cyber terrorists intent
on shutting down our critical infrastructure, may use
the rootkit technology to bypass our otherwise
necessary defenses.Until such time as the integrated
computer security suites catch up with this threat, I
will now have to add a rootkit detector to my
recommended list of essential computer security
utilities, alongside antivirus software, a good firewall,
and a spyware detector. It is also imperative that all
four of these utilities be frequently updated to ensure
a reasonable degree of personal security. We will
also have to add rootkits to our vernacular of cyber
threats, along with the now ubiquitous terms “virus”,
“spyware”, and “hacker”.
I shudder to wonder what may be coming down
the pike next.
There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article
as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The
Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User
Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group
is a member, brings this article to you
continued from page 26
(Oops… that spell chequer again).
— This copy of The Reviewer was installed in
the WPCUG many years, and many upgrades ago.
The Reviewer has written for the newsletter
several times in the past. During the weekend
lunch at the Park Tower restaurant The
Reviewer can often be heard talking about
reviews and commenting on his various
C.R.A.S.H.’s and M.E.D.’s.
Rules of Work
It doesn’t matter what you do, it only matters what you say
you’ve done and what you’re going to do.
When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are
never talking about themselves.
Everything can be filed under “miscellaneous.
” Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the
work he/she is supposed to be doing.”
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 5
Note: The data on this page can change at the last minute.
Please check website, the weekly bulletin or phone before going to the session.
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 6
Reviewing “The Reviewer” ver 1.0
by– Roger Buchanan
Review articles, what would we do without them?
Games, Faxes, Graphics Cards or Windows XP utilities,
the list goes on and on. Yet the one constant in all of this
is “The Reviewer”.
It is The Reviewer who, emboldened with great
curiosity, the desire to help others, and the pragmatic
drive to accumulate complimentary products, tackles
these newly released or upgrades items. Yet not much
is actually known about The Reviewer. This article is
being written to help give some insight into one of the
most often misquoted, maligned and just plain
misunderstood factors in the computing world. Meet
The Reviewer!
From a hardware perspective The Reviewer is quite
ordinary. The Reviewer interacts with the computing
environment through the use of an Organic Interface.
It should be noted that it is the Organic Interface that is
at the root of most computing errors or system
malfunctions, but I digress. System architecture is
standard industry issue with a Basic Input Output
Subsystem (B.I.O.S.). The Central Processing Unit
(C.P.U.), though not the fastest, often employs
Tangential Hyper Threading to such a degree that the
C.P.U. itself often looses track of its own computations,
but I digress. The Reviewer really does have Random
Access Memory (R.A.M.), but I digress. The storage
system is almost limitless, though it is often subject to
selective retrieval and corruption. The graphics
subsystem is still original, though it has recently been
upgraded with an eyeglass patch. Power comes from
that industry standard, Tim Horton’s, and The Reviewers
cache is, needless to say, substantial. For the initial beta
of the review article The Reviewer uses a hand held,
retractable, pigment based word processor developed
by Parker. Once completed, the beta is then converted
from analogue to binary format using the newly upgraded
graphics subsystems Optical Character Recognition
along with Word 2003.
Reviews are not created by hardware alone! The
Reviewer a lot of software and associated protocols.
One of the most important protocols to The Reviewer
is the use of Temporal Response Using Selective
Transcription (T.R.U.S.T.). The Reviewer must develop
a consistent style of writing along with the ability to
meet publication deadlines objectively and on time.
Wireless Insight Transfer (W.I.T.) enhances the
originality function of The
Reviewer.
Together,
T.R.U.S.T. and W.I.T. work
to provide stable Linear
Augmented Understanding
Given Helpful Software (L.A.U.G.H.S.). By providing
enough L.A.U.G.H.S. The Reviewer ensures that the
end user can make a more informed purchase. To that
end The Reviewer has reasonable scores with the
benchmark Graduated Relative Objectiveness Analyzing
Neutral Systems (G.R.O.A.N.S.).
The Reviewer is not infallible however. Occasionally
there can be a Comprehensive Reduction Allocating
Syntax Heuristics (C.R.A.S.H.). At that point it may
be necessary to employ Multiple Enhancement
Development Supports (M.E.D.S.). It should be noted
that the use of M.E.D.S. should only be undertaken in
the most dire of circumstances, and always under the
support of a specialist. As well, the use of M.E.D.S.
requires a T.R.U.S.T. and W.I.T. service pack
authenticated by Microsoft. Backup and Support is
provided by a peer-to-peer connection with a logic chip
known as the Wholly Integrated Function Encoder
(W.I.F.E.).
Each article produced by The Reviewer goes
through many versions and formats. The original beta
is stored in an Analogue Calligraphic Kinesthetic
(A.C.K.) format. Using the previously mentioned
O.C.R. subsystem the A.C.K. file is converted into a
binary file for the purpose of spell chequing and grandma
chequing. The spell chequer is holy upgradeable, and
since my brother had his kids I use a great grandma
chequer! To get the article to the Editor on time the file
is then converted back to A.C.K. format and through
the use of a hardware “envelope” the file is then
converted into a Portable Document Format or P.D.F..
Then, using the Wireless Ambling Linear
Kinesthesiology (W.A.L.K.) protocol the file is taken
to the nearest Canada Probable Originating Sending
Transport (P.O.S.T.) server where it will be forwarded
and uploaded to the Editors mail client inbox. The whole
transport process is blindingly fast!
(Note the effective use of L.A.U.G.H.S. and
G.R.O.A.N.S. in the above statement).
Owing to the development process, production
issues, distribution and use, each copy of The Reviewer
is truly unique. However, the one constant among all
copies of The Reviewer is the hope that the reader
finishes each article feeling that they enjoyed reading
the article, and that their time was well spent doing sew.
continued on page 24
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 7
Daves Quick Print AD
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 2 8
map is huge, taking up more
than half the screen, and
by Richard Johnson, TUGNET, Granada Hills CA www.tugnet.org
expanding to fill any additional
space (for example, if you
move to a full-screen view).
Part 1: Google
Zooming (in or out) is very quick, and re-centering is
I don’t have to tell you about Google, which has
instantaneous. A new feature brings up a birds-eye view
for many years been the search leader. Aside from the
if you click on “Satellite.”
quality of its searches, a big plus is that all Google’s
Google Maps and Google Local are now pretty
paid listings are clearly distinguished, and do not even
much the same service: A page brought up by Google
appear in the same part of the page. This is
Maps has a link to “Local Search,” which provides the
unfortunately not the case with other search services
local data on the same page; and a page brought up by
such as Yahoo, which intersperses undifferentiated paid Google Local includes the map (which, although
and unpaid listings. Newbies will want to know they
smaller, can be expanded with one click). The local
can initiate a Google search at www.google.com. All
data includes the names, addresses, phone numbers,
the services I’m recommending here, most of them
and websites of businesses, and, often, third-party
from Google but a few from other sources, are entirely reviews (like restaurant reviews). You can now get to
Google Maps by typing a location in the standard
free.
Google search bar. And you’ll find a link to Google
Google Toolbar
Local at the top of every page of Google search results.
If you don’t already use the Google Toolbar,
The best of the rest.
you’re missing a terrific navigational aid. Its features
The following are, in my experience, the most useful
are really too numerous to detail here, but I find
(or most interesting) of Google’s non-standard services.
especially useful its ability to readily bring up a parent
You do not need the Google Toolbar to employ them:
Web page, search within a website, find pages similar
Google’s image search at www.google.com/imghp,
to what you’re looking at, find sites linking to that
touted as the Web’s most comprehensive, indexes
page, translate a page into English, browse by name (if
(according to Google) over 880 million images. Google
you don’t know the URL), highlight search terms on
will give you a business address and phone number. The
the page, find on the page your search terms or any
easiest way is through the ResearchBuzz! form at
other terms (more handily than with your browser’s
“Find” function), fill forms, and block pop-ups. (There www.researchbuzz.org/archives/001408.shtml. Google
will bring up one or more definitions for nearly any word.
are better pop-up blockers and form fillers, but
In the Google search box just type “define:” (without the
Google’s may suit you fine.) The toolbar enables most
of the standard Google tasks, including some described quotes), followed by the word of interest. This service is
now multi-lingual.
in the next section. Not only are all these tasks easily
Reverse phone directory. In the search box type
accessible, but also you won’t have to re-type your
the
area
code and phone number (with a space between
search terms (for example, when you search for an
them), and there’s a good chance you’ll bring up at the
image after a standard search).I strongly recommend
top of the results page not only the person or company
version 3, which adds many useful tools, the best of
which will allow you to spell-check what you’ve typed name for that number, but also the address.
Google offers special searches, limited (for example)
on a Web form by clicking a toolbar button, bring up a
to
U.S.
government or to Microsoft. Go to
map page (using the impressive new Google Maps—
www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html.
For
see below) just by clicking on an address, and track a
those who like to purchase through the use of catalogs,
delivery by clicking on its tracking number. Since it’s
Google’s catalog search is at http://catalogs.google.com.
still in beta, version 3 is not publicized, and won’t
Google will enable you to view a page that’s been
automatically replace your present Google Toolbar. To
removed from the Web. Look for the “Cached” link after
get it, go to www.toolbar.google.com/T3. Other
the description of the page in a search result. (Or click
Google Goodies Google Maps and Google Local
the Page Info button on the Google Toolbar.) This function
Google has recently introduced its own map
will give you access to many closed-down sites not yet
system, that’s head and shoulders above the
available via the Internet Archive. (The Internet Archive
competition. It’s available as a stand-alone service at
— not a Google service — is at www.archive.org.)
http://maps.google.com and as an adjunct to the more
The
Google
Directory
at
http://
established Google Local, at http://local.google.com.
directory.google.com combines the Open Directory
Compared to other online maps, the area of a Google
Search Engine Tips and Tricks
Project (the Web’s largest human-edited directory) with
Google’s proprietary ranking system. Use of the directory
is helpful to narrow down what might otherwise be an
overly broad search. (This tool is also available from the
Google Toolbar.) Google Answers at http://
answers.google.com/answers is a paid research service—
but users are free to browse previous answers, which
can be quite helpful.
Weather forecasts are easily obtained by typing in
the Google search bar the word “weather” followed by
the city of choice (for example, “weather canoga park.”)
The forecast will speedily appear at the top of a page of
search results.
Froogle, a comparison service for online shopping
whose listed vendors pay neither for inclusion nor
placement, is at http://froogle.google.com/froogle.
Google Print gives you access to books’ contents
and lets you search within those books. Look for the
“book results” entry in standard search results,
accompanied by the Google Print logo.
Google Suggest, at www.google.com/
webhp?complete=1&hl=en, appears and acts like the
standard Google search, except that as you start typing
your search request, Google types its own suggestions.
These could save you time and also point you to related
searches.
Google Desktop, to search files on your own
computer, can be downloaded from http://
desktop.google.com. Unfortunately, it’s available only for
users of Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Gmail, which on March 31 started offering rich
text formatting, has as of April 1 doubled its storage
capacity to a whopping 2 gigabytes. Gmail is not yet open
to the public, but invitations can be obtained from various
sources, including this writer.
Note that without re-typing you can extend your standard
Web search not only to Google Local but also to Google
Images and Froogle (as well as to Google Groups and
Google News), by clicking on links at the top of every
results page. Or you can skip the Google entry page and
go to Xtra Google at www.xtragoogle.com for a selection
of twenty Google tools, all tied to one search box.
Google Tips
Toolbar tips Use Alt-G to enter search terms in the
search box. For your news search, don’t enable the
separate news button, but instead use the Search News
option in the drop-down Search the Web menu. That way
you’ll be able to use the Alt-G shortcut to enter your
news search query, and to use the same query for news
and general Web searching, without retyping. When using
the word-find function, hold down the control key to
find the exact whole word, and similarly use the shift key
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to move backwards. Other Google tips For academically
oriented results (often the most useful), try typing site:edu
either before or after your search terms. This will
eliminate commercial sites, and limit results to those
from educational institutions. Although Google now
implements “stemming” (automatically searches for
variants of words as well as the words themselves),
you can cover still more bases by using the tilde [~]
symbol right before a search term (leaving no space).
This will tell Google to use synonyms as search queries.
For example, a search for ~food ~facts will turn up
cooking information. Don’t worry too much about
misspelled words. With any search engine, a search
query with a misspelling might get you some good results
that you wouldn’t see otherwise! Google will suggest a
corrected spelling along with its search results, but if
the initial search comes up empty will correct the spelling
on its own and re-run the search. Google will ignore
some common short words (like a, on, and by) in your
queries. The best way around these so-called stop words
in most cases is simply to enclose the phrase in quotes,
which will force Google to search only for the phrase
as given. (A phrase search will of course come in handy
on other occasions as well.) Otherwise, you can precede
a suspected stop word with the plus sign (for example,
+on). Google recognizes the OR operator, or, in its stead,
the vertical line. So if you’re seeking search results
concerning cats or dogs (but not both), you could type
“cats OR dogs” or “cats | dogs” [without the quotes].
Use the minus sign right before a search term for “not.”
(“Animals -dogs” [without the quotes] would ignore dogs
in the search.) For complicated queries, you can if
necessary group search words within parentheses.
Instead of clicking on the main link at the top of
each Google search result, try clicking on the word
Cached. The page that will come up will now have
your search words highlighted. (Don’t use this
technique if you need to see the most recent page
revisions.) Google supports word wild cards. That is,
you can in your query use the asterisk [*] as a standin to represent any word. (This won’t work in Google
for parts of words.)
Richard Johnson is a writer and editor, and founder/administrator of
FREE FOR ALL The Skills Pool, a 29-year-old membership
organization (http://theskillspool.org). He is a volunteer with
TUGNET HelpContact for assistance with Internet Explorer,
Outlook Express, and Gmail. You may reach him at
[email protected].
There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article
as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author.
The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer
.
User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this
group is a member, brings this article to you
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Group Meeting Schedule
Regular meetings are held on the 3rd Thursday (2nd Thursday in December) of each month. Mark your calendar now
so you don’t miss any of the great sessions that will be
“happening” through all of 2003 & 2004.
Meetings are held in the Montrose School -- located at
691 Montrose St at Grant Avenue. Free parking,
wheelchair accessable. Call any member of the executive
for more information.
The General Meeting format is as follows:
Report on the General Meeting April 21, 2005
1000th of a second. Adding captions is a breeze and
you can even add a global caption that appears on every
slide (in case you’re worried about someone
‘appropriating’ your work).
Once the show is complete there are several choices
of how to package it. If you’re entertaining friends at
home you can make a video CD that will run in your
DVD player so you can watch the show on your TV.
Or you can make a self-contained file of your
presentation that you can send to a friend. They don’t
need any special program to view it. Take that a step
further and create an autorun CD that will play as soon
as it’s loaded into a computer.
If you’d like to try the program out, you can download a
trial version from www.photodex.com. Purchasing the
program (US$69.95) can be done the same way and
updates can also be obtained from the Internet.
We thanked Neil with a warm round of applause and
look forward to his visit next month (May) to show us
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 and four Kodak image
correction plug-ins.
The meeting started off on an uncertain note. We arrived
at Montrose school to be told that the gymnasium would
not be available to us due to parent-teacher meetings
that were in progress. Apparently we had been
informed of this several months ago in a letter (which, it
turned out, was undelivered). Paul Kesson and Doug
Hutsel spoke to the principal, Mr. Jim Stefaniuk, and
pleaded our case. Mr. Stefaniuk did some checking
and determined the gym would not be needed. He kindly
allowed us to use the facility thereby saving us from
having to cancel the meeting. Our thanks to him!
Paul Kesson opened the meeting with general
announcements, one of which concerned a possible
group buy on CorelDraw. Interested members were
encouraged to send E-Mail to our Group Buyer and let
Rodd know they’d like to participate.
Paul then introduced our presenter for the evening, Neil
Longmuir.
Neil was here to show us a program he’s very
enthusiastic about: ProShow Gold v2.5.
This product is intended to give the home user an easy
way to create a professional-looking slide show.
The easiest way to start assembling your presentation
is in Light Box View. This lets you look at many images
simultaneously so you can decide how to order your
slides in the show. Neil demonstrated how simple it is
to drag-and-drop images from anywhere on your
computer, on the show. You can then add a voice-over
or select some music for the background. Choosing
some of the more than 280 transitions supplied with the
program lets you provide interesting visual effects to go
from one slide to the next. In addition, you can have the
images fade-in and fade-out and you can control how
long the image is on-screen with an accuracy of 1/
6:30 p.m.
7:15 p.m.
8:30 p.m.
8:50 p.m.
9:30 p.m.
Doors open -- get aquainted
Main Presentation
Break
Question/Answers
Adjourn
FORALLWHO REED AND RIGHT
We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; but the plural
of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, yet the plural of
moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice; yet the plural
of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men, why shouldn’t the
plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet, and I give you a
boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, why shouldn’t the
plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those, yet hat in
the plural would never be hose, and the plural of cat is cats,
not cose.
June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 3 1
Internet Access Form
Complete and return with $15.96
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To:
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Winnipeg, Manitoba R3L 2E4
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June 2 0 0 5 / July 2 0 0 5 P a g e 3 2
TECH NEWS
By Sue Crane,
Now You CAN Return Unwrapped Software
Vice President / Editor, Big Bear Computer Club, In the settlement of a California lawsuit Microsoft,
CA www.bigbearcc.org [email protected]
Symantec, Adobe and others have agreed to publish
EULA agreements on their websites for their respective
Traditional 911 Services not available from VOIPs products, while CompUSA, Best Buy, and Staples
The Texas attorney general filed a lawsuit against agreed to allow consumers to return unwrapped
Internet telephone service Vonage, saying the company software for full monetary refunds, even if the shrinkfails to clearly tell consumers about the limits of 911 wrap has been opened. Details of the settlement can
emergency calling over its service. The suit stems from be found at: http://www.techfirm.com/
a incident last month in Houston where a husband and AmendedComplaint-Filed.pdf
wife were shot by burglars while their daughter tried
to call 911 on a Vonage line and reached a recording. Great New Escape Virtual reality,
Independent VOIP providers typically do not have technology that gives users the feeling they are
access to the traditional 911 system which carries calls somewhere else, can be of great value in treating
to emergency dispatchers and transmits data about people suffering from a variety of physical or
the caller’s location. As a work-around, Vonage tells psychological conditions. Therapy based on the
customers they need to activate a 911 service, but technology is being used in a small number of U.S.
that service directs calls to administrative telephone clinics to treat burn victims and people with phobias
lines that in some cases are unanswered.
such as the fear of flying, spiders, and heights.
MRI in a Pill
A South Korean semiconductor manufacturer has
announced an image sensor for pill-size cameras that
doctors can use to obtain accurate information about
a patient’s digestive tract. The image sensor can take
up to 50,000 photographs in an eight-hour tour of the
patient’s insides by taking two pictures a second. Mass
production will begin in the second half of 2005.
Mouse Adaptor for Shaky Hands
IBM has developed an adjustible mouse adapter that
compensates for the shakes of patients with hand
tumors and other causes of uncontrollable shaking.
According to the International Essential Tremor
Foundation, in the US alone nearly 10 million people
are affected by essential tremor, the most common
form of hand tremors. This adapter will plug in between
the mouse and computer and is compatible with existing
mice.
Researchers say the technology holds enormous
promise for treating PTSD, addictions and for use as
a distraction technique in painful dental and medical
procedures, including chemotherapy and physical
therapy.
Creative Commons Rewrites Copyright
When Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia released their
latest single, “No Meaning No,” They encouraged
everyone to view, copy, mix, remix, sample, imitate,
parody and even criticize it under a new licensing
scheme called Creative Commons that some say may
be better suited to the electronic age than the
controversial copyright license. More than 10 million
other creations — ranging from the movie “Outfoxed”
and songs by the Beastie Boys to the BBC’s news
footage and the tech support books — have been
distributed using Creative Commons licenses, which
allow artists to keep “some rights reserved” rather than
“all rights reserved”. Online users can go to
www.CreativeCommons.org and search its archives.
Cell Phone Helmets for Bikers Motorcyclists are
now able to talk and ride by using a mobile-phone There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article
headset for crash helmets, demonstrated at the CeBit as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author. The
trade show. The headsets (full-face, open-face and Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User
Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is
flip-up), have audio capabilities at speeds up to 62 a member, brings this article to you.
miles per hour.

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Transcription

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