Archive for the Category ◊ Meetings ◊

Backup, Backup, Backup! This week, ZumoDrive
Sunday, January 10th, 2010 | Author: motorbelly

ZumoDrive – Enjoy your media and documents from every device

It can never be said enough. Backup your files. But how many of us are really protected this minute? There are now three good services for online backup for Windows and two of them work on other platforms as well and can sync files as well. We’ll look at Dropbox.com, Mozy.com, SpiderOak.com and ZumoDrive.com and what we can do with them to protect ourselves. Join us at the Monday January 11, 2010, 5:30pm meeting at Aqilla & Pricilla’s Cafe at Poineer Pkwy and Q St.

Sharedview.com Presentation Tomorrow
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Welcome to Microsoft SharedView | Microsoft Connect

(Click graphic or link above to visit their site)
This tool by Microsoft (Yes, can you believe I’m recommending it?) requires a Microsoft email address (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) to begin a meeting but it is not required for viewing. Install the software if you would like to be able to see the presentation tomorrow with us on your own machine whether you come to the cafe or not. (If you don’t have it already it may install MS .NET software it runs on)

If there seems to be interest we will setup a conference call for the folks not at the cafe. Call or write us ahead of time if you are interested in this tomorrow.

-=Larry Cotton=- webmaster@epcug.net

November 23, 2009 Meeting – Windows Optimizing
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Since there has been a fair amount of mail list discussion about speeding up Windows I thought it would be a good chance tomorrow night to go through a presentation about what can be done and some free tools to do it. This is the presentation I plan to use. If you would like to preview the show, go right ahead, bring your thoughts or questions:
Windows Xp Optimization

Online Graphics Editor – Sumo Paint – and Aviary
Saturday, September 19th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Update: We may not be able to use the cafe’s meeting room this week, Mon the 21st, in which case this show will be done Mon the 28th. Sorry folks…

Sumo Paint :: Online Image Editor :: Home

We had a great time last week just doing problem solving, but the consensus after the meeting was to try to do the graphics demo we had planned weeks ago. So this week for sure we will watch ways to ‘tune up’ photos and just plain have fun with graphic editors online.

For years graphic editing had been the ‘Mac” thing, Mac’s had more memory than PC’s and tended to crash less so folks in the know used them and software programmers wrote for them and the best graphic programs were Mac. But as PC’s improved and programming advanced these same programs became available for PC’s. Coreldraw for vector images and Photoshop for bit images became the standard, but they are expensive.

Now there are some very good Open Source alternatives, Gimp for bit images and Inkscape for vectoring and there are versions (ports) for Windows PC’s, Mac’s and Linux operating systems. If you really want practise graphic editing I recommend these programs. (And I recommend the commercial programs if you have the money.)

The latest advancement is now ‘Online’ programs that do the functions of the editing programs from in our web browsers. No need to install a program on our hard drives and not even to store our images. Websites now offer both from any browser, any computer, wherever we are we can access our work and edit it. And this will be our demo this coming Monday using the site linked at the start of this post, Sumo Paint. Come join us and learn what is available.

If you want a look in advance visit their site and view the video and read about its Features and FAQ’s.

If you want to see other sites with similar features check these out:

Another great review of these sites is at Lifehacker.com, let me recommend it as well.

Update: I can’t believe what is available these days! Just while writing this post I rediscovered Aviary.com. I’d looked at this before and not understood it all, but on second glace today I found it to be incredibly complete. So it and its tutorial videos will be part of our show.

Note to John – remember to bring the projector, this will be a good chance to make good use of it!  :)

Want a free copy of the new Windows 7?
Thursday, August 27th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

If you have been wondering about spending $200 for the coming upgrade to Windows, Microsoft has made a method available to get a copy, FREE!

They are holding meetings in cities across the nation and Portland will have one on Oct. 14.

If you can make it just sign up and be there for your copy.

Just follow this link: http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/Portland/default.aspx

Windows 7 RC vs. Ubuntu 9.04
Sunday, July 19th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly


This week’s meeting is not our normal presentation night, that would be the second week of the month. But your group president experienced a laptop loss due to his cat’s getting spooked and kicking it off a table. So after making a purchase from Craigslist.com and finding the operating system was pirated I wiped it clean and installed the Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) to try it out and give my two cents to M$ about it.

Then, I made a new install CD for Ubuntu 9.04 and installed it to dual boot on this machine. Being able to compare the two systems on the same machine like this has been a lot of fun. If you join me at Monday, July the 13th’s 5:30 gathering at Aquilla & Priscilla’s Cafe (I had some *excellent* soup there last week!) I’ll be happy to demo these two ineresting systems on a new (used) $200 laptop. This is a Toshiba Satellite Celeron 1.6 with 1.3GigB RAM. Nothing too fancy so many of you may be able to get a reasonable comparison of what your own machines would be like with them.

Face to Face with Facebook
Sunday, July 12th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

The plan is to share experiences with Facebook’s social networking site. Stats suggest 100 million folks log in to Facebook every day!

WHY!

For those of us who still enjoy real time sharing, in person, LIVE, we’re going to look at this phenomenon and see what we can do to use it or not miss it.

Everyone is welcome. Come join with us at Aquilla’s and Pricilla’s Cafe Monday at 5:30-7:00pm.

No Meeting on Memorial Day
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

Let’s spend Monday celebrating and remembering all that made this country great.

United we stand.

We can meet at the cafe again next week.

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March 9, 2009 Meeting
Sunday, March 08th, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

We have reserved the meeting room at Aquilla & Priscilla’s and will have the projector if there aren’t enough laptops to go around.

The topic is Facebook for beginners. If you use it a lot come tell us what you have learned, if it’s something you have wondered about, come learn from the others.

As always, the meeting is free, come one, come all!

Facebook

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Enjoying the new location
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | Author: motorbelly

We had our first gathering at Aquila’s and Priscilla’s last Monday and some of us will be there again tonight. We decided to only reserve the meeting room for presentations and since we don’t have one tonight, we’ll just sit socially.

I would like to begin opening to folks who would just join us online while we meet at the cafe, it’s been requested in the past so I hope to show some collaboration sites that may be useful to us for this.

Vyew.com

Zoho.com

This is just to get the discussion going. Do you have suggestions?