Comp-U-News V1N5

Compunews Vol 1 No 5

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Hi folks.... here it is again.... Number 5 already! How time flies when we're having fun!. Remember that if you have a friend who would like to receive this newsletter, just send me his/her e-mail address and I will add them to the mailing list.

WINDOWS 95 Update....

More and more, people are switching to Windows 95. Is it just hoopla or is the switch worth it? I for one beleive it is but not for just everybody. For example, a law office with several computers running Win 3.x applications such as word processing and accounting, I would think twice (or even three times) before making the big jump. For one thing, most applications such as Word Perfect use several specialized apps such as macros etc which might prove a problem. And there is the retraining aspect of it. Big bucks! But for us homesteaders, I say... go for it!

You will hear a lot of 'mouthing off' about Win95 but in all honesty, I must admit I am a convert. I have used it for over one year (including several 'beta' versions) and I would not go back to the old Win 3.x Sure it crashes. I haven't met a system yet which doesn't crash but the recovery is usually painless and... fast! All this to say that from here on, you can expect much more articles on the Win95 topic!

CHECKING OUT YOUR NEW HOMEPAGE...

You just wrote your first Homepage and would like to have an expert check it out. Simple... Give the Weblint form interface a URL, and it will retrieve the page and check your Homepage. You get an instant report on any problems or inconsistencies detected by weblint. And best of all, the service is free!

http://www.khoros.unm.edu/staff/neilb/weblint/lintform.html

WANT A GOOD GRAPHICS UTILITY?

One of the best graphics utility around is VuePrint., It lets you view, print, and convert graphics files, while at the same time playing sound and movie files.

Point your web browser to:

ftp://www.pcworld.com/pub/win95/mm/vuepro40.zip

WHEN IN DOUBT..... GO FOR THE YELLOW PAGES

Central Source Yellow Pages from this company in Omaha.... Now how long will it be before another small company put up phone numbers for the entire world -- and not just business, everyone?

http://www.telephonebook.com

GET THE WORD!

You can get THE WORD by sending an email to:

[email protected]

with the line:

intro

for example: intro [email protected] Joe Blok

FREE SERVICES PAGE ON THE NET

Here you find hyperlinks to a variety of useful, free services available on the Web. And, they're free (the Magic Word). Lot's of good stuff here. They even include their own "URL-minder"

http://www.netmind.com/

URL-MINDER AVAILABLE FROM 'NetMind'

As you are surfing, you find a great Web page , but you don't want to keep going back until there's something new there. It would be handy to get a brief email reminder when more of what you want to see is available. Netmind provides these kinds of alerts as a free service. You can register at their site for whatever Web pages you want to be notified about. And if you have your own Web sites, you can download a brief chunk of code from Netmind and cut and paste into your pages, so visitors at your site will be able to fill out a short form and get alerted about your pages. Now that's what I call progress!

http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/URL-minder.html

VARIATION ON THE THEME.....

NetBuddy from Internet Solutions

http://www.internetsol.com/netbuddy.html

NetBuddy has a very different approach to finding out when sites you are interested in have been updated. With them, you download a free program (for Windows 3.1 but it might work with Win95), and this software "watches the web for you." It keeps a list of locations which you want it to watch. If any of these sites have changed (have new information), NetBuddy lights up that site in its list to let you know something's different there." I haven't tried it yet but it looks very interesting.

NEW 'EXCITING' SEARCH SERVICE AVAILABLE

Excite!

This is probably the best free Internet search service available today. Besides being easy to use, it is quite powerful. Give it a try at ......

http://www.excite.com

WHAT'S NEW ON THE NET?

One of the best sources to find out what's new and what's happening all over the Internet (not just on the Web). Head for....

http://www.mid.net/NET/

NOW YOU CAN CREATE YOUR VERY OWN NEWSPAPER!

This free service is provided by students from Bucknel and it lets you you tailor your own selection of Internet-based news sources. You can choose from a menu of sites in such categories as: World News, Weather, Business Reports, etc. You immediately see a hypertext list of the sites which you have chosen -- a list you can then download and file locally for your daily use. Go to...

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~boulter/crayon/

NOW THAT YOU HAVE YOUR HOMEPAGE, WHAT NOW?

You have spent hours, days, weeks? working on the masterpiece... your very own Homepage. Now you want others to partake of all that good info you have spent ages to collect. But what to do? No problem: Submit it!

A good place to start is at the following address. This FREE (again, the magic word!) service lets you, in one shot, submit information to a dozen major Internet search sites such as: Yahoo, Starting Point, Web Crawler, EINet Galaxy, Lycos, Harvest, and more... Now, ain't that somethin? Go to:

http://submit-it.permalink.com/submit-it/

ANOTHER SUPERB GRAPHICS VIEWER

How would you like a viewer which can do all of the following, and, for free (that magic word again):

View and Convert Images - BMP, Fax G3/G4, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, SunRaster, TARGA, TIFF, and XWD. Plus, export to Postscript.

Encode and Decode Files - Single and multi-part files, UU or XX, "smart" decoder for combining multi-part files without using a text editor.

Work with Mosaic and Netscape - Defined as an image viewer, GraphX Viewer communicates directly via the Enhanced Mosaic and Netscape SDI.

Visually Manage Images - Create and maintain thumbnail catalogs for all your images. Visually peruse, rename, delete, and load images.

Edit and Enhance - Cut and paste, modify selected areas, crop, color reduce, resize, rotate, mirror, brightness, contrast, sharpness, gamma, remove noise, invert, and emboss.

Printing - Print single images, catalogs of images, or ranges of images.

I did try that program and was really impressed. Especially the catalog portion of it. Where's the catch? None that I could see so far. Worth the effort. Try it at:

http://www.group42.com/graphx.htm

A WINDOWS EDITOR THAT FITS ON A WHAT?

Now folks.... you won't beleive this but I swear... it's true! I found a text editor for Windows that's so small, you could cave ten copies of them on one floppy disk (low 360K density disk too). It's faster than Notepad and has more features. No kiddin! Including the help file, it takes all of 35K (no type error here)

It's called Windowss Editor. With it, you can choose whatever font you would like it to display. This has yet to be the best freeware Windows Notepad replacement that I have found. Honest... that programmer deserves a medal! The Filename is: WED201.ZIP

You can obtain that program at the following address:

http://www.execpc.com/

By digging in a little, you can find other superb little apps at the same site. Try their Task List, Tape Calc and Office Dart (that's a game).

About the TaskList program (FTASK123.ZIP)

This is a replacement Windows Task Manager. Although probably written for Win 3.x I have used it with Win 95 and like it a lot. The two features that make it a big improvement over Windows Task Manager are that it displays the icons of each running program and it enables you to "multi-select" running programs. For example, you could select three of your running programs and then minimize them all with one click on the minimize button. The fact that it displays the icons of the running applications is helpful to more quickly single out the program you want instead of just looking at a long list of file names. It also has a few other features that the Windows Task Manager does not have.

As for DOGCOW.ZIP, it is an icon of a dog/cow (?) with a wagging tail. You are able to control the tail wag speed. Slower speed is a sad dog and faster is a happy dog. Included is a humorous .wri file. Make sure to read it the .wri file. It is humorous (and we all can use a laugh, right?).

see you next week, or whenever.......... John

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