Nada! Apparently the officers do not have time to arrange meeting content? If you have nothing to do this evening, once again, this is a perfect place to do it in! Help other like-minded individuals contain their enthusiasm. At this rate, a meeting each week would be in order, just to cover all the material! I may not bother to create a 2009 page, as what is the point? You tell ME! The way it is going, no one will bother to renew the domain registration, so this will disappear, anyway! Happy Holidays...
None listed! If you have nothing to do this evening, this is a perfect place to do it in! Help other like-minded individuals contain their enthusiasm.
The November meeting should be the MPCUG's Annual Meeting! Elect a full slate of the same old officers.
The benefits and services of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups will be discussed at the Madison PC Users Group monthly general meeting. APCUG Region 7 Advisor Roger Tesch will speak on “What Is APCUG and How Does It Help Computer User Groups Offer Better Services to Their Members?” APCUG is an international association with the mission to facilitate communication among computer user groups, the community, and the technology industry. Tesch will give a sneak preview of some new benefits that APCUG is announcing in October and coming months. He will also give highlights of the APCUG Midwest User Group Conference that just completed in September in Chicago Heights, Illinois. In addition to serving on the APCUG Board of Advisors, Tesch is an officer and past president of the Madison PC Users Group.
The September general meeting will be held at 7 PM on Wednesday, September 10, at our usual place, the Village CoHousing Community, 1104 Mound Street, at the corner of Milton and Mound streets behind the Meriter Hospital. It will be in the Community Room, which is is set back behind a grassy courtyard. The presenter will be our own Treasurer, Garth Yeazel. He will be talking about home networking.
Many people have more than one computer in the house. In the old days, the simplest form of networking was called "sneaker net": one would simply copy files from one computer onto a 5.25" floppy disk and walk over to another computer and insert the disk. Even now people can do this, by hand-carrying a 3.5" floppy disk or CD or DVD or flash drive from one computer to another. You could even use an external hard drive or IPOD or other MP3 music device, or digital camera, or various camera memory cards, or cell phone, for your "sneaker net" network. Garth will talk about some more sophisticated methods, both wired and wireless, as solutions to the networking problem.
There will be an overview of text- to-speech software and voice recognition software for the home user, presented by Bhim Nimgade. The leaders in the field are Dragon Naturally Speaking and Kurzweil. We will demonstrate some of the capabilites of these instruments, including a man-against-machine challenge where we will try to beat the Dragon software in typing a spoken sentence. It was no contest; the software is over three times as fast and much, much more accurate. Dragon has extensive uses in the medical field and several others; a physician can just speak the observations and orders, and the computer delivers accurate text!
Kurzweil serves the visually impaired with its text to speech software, reading from the screen, with a choice of voices. Kurzweil also serves the educational market, with tools to help the student who may be having difficulty with reading.
We will also look at Narrator, the rudimentary text to speech tool built into the Windows XP operating system.
In June, the Madison PC Users Group discussed useful websites, for reference and general purposes. In July, we will drill down even deeper into the world of websites, looking at sites that are useful to us in terms of keeping our computers running well and helping friends (and ourselves) with computer problems. This is the stuff that User Groups were created to do.
Can people just go on their own into the wilds of the World Wide Web and find the computer help they need? Yes, to some extent. But the experience and collective wisdom of the User Group community is still important in guiding people to the most helpful websites and steering them away from the dangerous and dubious ones. Come prepared to share some of the resources that you have found valuable for computer support, and we will all learn something useful at our meeting!
Put on your cowboy hats and practice your roping tricks! First Vice President Bhim Nimgade will present a "Round-up of Useful Website " to showcase several of the websites he finds useful for general computing. Attendees are welcome to chime in with their favorite websites that help in getting something useful done. And also, pipe up if you have a favorite website that is not so much useful, but is a lot of fun. Like maybe how to do cowboy rope tricks, or how to yodel like the Sons of the Pioneers. Sometimes when you're working hard and getting something serious done, it's good to pause for a bit of inspiration or distraction every once in a while.
Our speaker this month is our very own Jim Gussert, Computer Geek Extraordinaire. Jim is a long time enthusiastic member of the MPCUG who has kindly hosted our meetings at the Village Co-Housing Community for the past several years. He will present us with common-sense approaches to maintaining a home computer, both cleaning the machine physically, and working at the software and system level to keep everything running smoothly. He will demo some low-cost and free tools to get the job done.
exp design is a company that takes a reality-based approach to web design. The motto of the company is "exp design: good ideas for the web." Ben Siegel, principal of exp design, will be speaking on aspects of content management and effective web design for practical results. We look forward to an informative and artistic presentation from Ben!
The topic for the month will be a Guided Tour through the Wonders of Yahoo, with Bhim Nimgade as presenter. Last year we took a look at the Wonders of Google, and now it is time to see another company that gives stuff away free all the time, and yet has a very healthy income. How do they do it? What sort of tools do they offer? And, can Yahoo continue as it has, or will it succumb to Microsoft? We will take a look at what Yahoo has to offer - chances are good that they offer something for free that you might find useful. And then we can speculate on the future. All are welcome to attend.
None listed! If you have nothing to do this evening, this is a perfect place to do it in!
None listed! If you have nothing to do this evening, this is a perfect place to do it in!