The New Orleans Personal Computer Club Newsletter MotherBoard Volume 28, Issue 12 December 2010 This Month Cyberspace : Smaller Than New Orleans Danny Abel and Chris Yount 6:30 pm Harahan Senior Center Wed, December 1st 100 Elodie St. Inside this issue: A Tribute to Your Board of Directors This month at NOPC A Tribute Con t NOPC Information 2 Hewie s View s & Reviews About NOPC Hewie Con t Can You Really Watch Free TV on Your PC? Sponsors 1 3 4 5-6 Calendar of Events NOPC Directory 8 7 A salute to those who have made NOPC 2009 and 2010 a Keeper 2009 and 2010 have been a challenge and recovering victory for our Board of Directors. Tom Gaffney has kept our membership files in order and our meeting announcements in the public s eye. A special thanks to Greg Wilde and Carl Henderson for their 6:30 Answers with Ray This Month at NOPC 7:00 You Can Run But You Can t Hide! Publicly Available Information About You. Attorney Danny Abel and Chris Yount P.I. They re back with new material. (Continued on page 2) Learn how they -- and anyone can find information about you without your knowing it For more info www.meetup.com/nopc-club Wed December 1st - 6:30 pm Harahan Senior Center 100 Elodie St.
Volume 28, Issue 12 PAGE 2 (Continued from page 1) time and insight. Thanks to A.J. Levy for a year of outstanding guest speakers. Thanks to Bill Howard for taking over the Treasurer's position. Thanks to Mary Prinz, for filling the position of Acting Treasurer in a time of great need. Thanks to Mike York for filling his positions of Vice President, Webmaster, and Programming Sig Sponsor. Thanks to Ray Paternostro for his never ending efforts to the club, including Secretary, New/intermediate User Sig Chairman, and help with Postmaster. Thanks to Kevin Kratzberg for his dual hat for two years as our newsletter Editor and Treasurer. Thanks to Jeff Kaye for his facility gift that was key to our fiscal solvency. Thanks to Walt Christensen for his vision and turning the club around. Thanks to Ed Jahncke, Tom Ford and Don Henderson for their leadership and time in helping us transition to new Officers. NOPC Information Meetings are held on the 1st Wednesday of the month at the Harahan Senior Center. Time: 6:30 100 Elodie St. Harahan, LA 70123 - Programmer s/advance User Special Interest Group Next Meeting scheduled for October 13th 7:00pm Meetings are held the 2nd Tuesday of every month at New Horizons 3rd floor. Please park in rear parking garage (free). Mike York vp@nopc.org 738-5997 - New/Intermediate User Special Interest Group Bring your computer problems to Ray. Send your questions to Ray before meeting via email. new-user@nopc.org Twitter.com Yahoo Groups -nopc_help Look for NOPC www.meetup.com\nopc-club Website NOPC.org
VOLUME 28, ISSUE 12 Hewie's Views & Reviews By Hewie Poplock Central Florida Computer Society Remove Time Stamps from Photos, Rename & Change File Date I am the webmaster for several websites. I have photos submitted to me regularly to be posted. Sometimes the photographer submits the pictures with a date stamp, which is great for identifying your personal photos, but it does not belong on those appearing on the web. In most cases, it only appears on the photo because the camera owner did not realize that it was set that way, or they did not know how or even that they could turn that "feature" off. If you don't have the proper date set in the camera, the date stamp will be wrong, as were several that I recently received. They showed a date that was over 3 years prior to the event, so I needed to remove them from the photos. Have you tried this? It is not easy, unless you continue reading. My first thought is to crop the photos to eliminate the date. Most of the photos would lose some important pieces if I did that. I have several photo editing programs that I could edit the date stamp out. It is very time consuming and while it can be done, it was going to take more time than I wanted to devote to the project. PAGE 3 My next step was to Google the problem. I tried several combinations of terms including time stamp. There were lots of results, but most had little to do with removing the date. Many of them told me how to place it, but not remove it. The most informational results were from forums where users were asking for the same solution. The most frequent response was "change the setting in the camera." DUH! Of course. What about the pictures that were already taken? I did find some good tutorials using Photoshop and other editing programs. I was still looking for a tool or hint to make it easy. Surely, I wasn't the only one with the problem. I figured if there were simple steps to get rid of the red eye, certainly there is a way to get rid of a date stamp. In one of the forums, someone suggested Photo Stamp Remover by http://softorbits.com. This program appeared to be what I was looking for, and then some. According to their website, "Photo Stamp Remover is a photo correction utility that can remove scratches, dust, stains, wrinkles, tears, date stamps and other unwanted artifacts that appear on photographs. With Photo Stamp Remover, you can restore photos with the minimum of fuss." I downloaded, installed, and ran the program, using the pictures that I received. In almost every case, the date stamp was removed and did a reasonable to a great job. The trial version does not do (Continued on page 4)
VOLUME 28, ISSUE 12 PAGE 4 (Continued from page 3) batches, but the paid version does and it works well, with 2 settings, quick, or thorough. The latter did a better job. The program is a bit pricey at $40, but well worth it. A normal procedure for me is to search for coupons before making a purchase. I did so for this program and found a coupon at http://www.tjoos.com/ which is a coupon posting site. It was a 20% off code, which saved me $8. While removing the date stamp, I also wanted to change the file names and not use the ones that the camera uses. For that I use a tool that I wrote about in a previous column, Lupas Rename http:// rename.lupasfreeware.org/ which is free. It is an old program going back to 2005, but it still installs and works on my Windows 7 computer. You can rename batches, changing, adding to, or numbering sequentially. You can change the case of the file filename and extension. I prefer to have my photos all in lower case. Attributes." Its dialog box opens and you make your changes. With these tools, I can make changes to several photos at once. I can change the file names using a title and numbering them sequentially, remove the time stamp, and then change the file date attribute. Now that's what computers were designed to do. Make tasks simpler. Humor: However, Lupas Rename does not change the file date. I had all of these pictures with the wrong date stamp, but also the file date was wrong. While there are ways to change file dates, there must be a tool to do this in a batch. Back to Google. I found Attribute Changer from http://petges.lu [4] which is a free tool. It is a power user tool to change file and folder attributes, date, time, NTFS compression, and even changes the Exif information. It runs in the Windows Shell, which allows you to right click in Windows Explorer and choose "Change
VOLUME 28, ISSUE 12 PAGE 5 Can You Really Watch Free TV on Your PC? by Ira Wilsker WEBSITES: http://toolbar.tv-fox.com http://www.watch-live-online.tv (Live TV) http://www.hulu.com You may have seen ads on the internet or on TV that tell you that you can watch free TV on the internet, and that you do not need cable or satellite to watch thousands of TV channels. Some even go as far as to say that you should cancel your cable or satellite, and use the free services, rather than paying for expensive TV service. Several others advertise software or hardware devices (for a fee) that allow you to watch hundreds of TV channels online for free. There are even websites that allow you watch TV in your browser or on your desktop, either for free, or for a subscription fee. While these offers are generally real, they should not be confused with the selection of channels available on your local cable system or satellite service as they generally do not offer the major commercial channels, and rarely offer the major local channels. Some services, generally located overseas, offer illegally pirated feeds for a fee, and should always be avoided. Other services, such as the well respected Hulu (hulu.com) legitimately offer thousands of already broadcast and older TV shows and movies provided by the networks and movie studios that are either advertiser supported (for free), or without commercials (by subscription, sometimes for a fee). One service that I frequently use is TV-Fox, or its sister product, LIVE TV. The selection of channels on LIVE TV is virtually identical to those on TV-Fox. Alternatively, for those who do not want to download a toolbar or plug-in, these same channels can be viewed directly online at watch-live-online.tv. It may be necessary to have Windows Media Player (or some similar compatible player) installed to view these stations. Most of the stations can either be viewed in a small window, or opened to full screen by double clicking on the video. TV-Fox is a free plug-in for the Firefox browser (toolbar.tv-fox.com), and currently offers "2780 Live TV Channels sorted by country & category, the TV- FOX allows you to watch thousands of TV channels freely available on the internet." It is installed as a short toolbar, and includes a pair of directories that display the available channels. The first icon (purple) opens a directory containing a listing of about 100 countries; moving the mouse cursor over the country displays the currently available TV stations that stream online. If the selected station has a circle icon with a right arrow (triangle), that indicates that the selected station is always online; if the icon is a small clock, that means that the station is only available for specific hours. The viewer should be aware of the time differences around the world, as what is prime time in the mid-east, for example, may be the early morning here. While I enjoy watching live foreign (Continued on page 6)
VOLUME 28, ISSUE 12 PAGE 6 (Continued from page 5) TV, I am not capable of understanding all of the languages, so I prefer the English language stations available in many of the countries listed. Under the listing for the United States is approximately 60 stations, all but a few being broadcast in English. These US based stations include such well known stations as Bloomberg Business, CBN, CNBC, Home Shopping Network (HSN), Fox News, MSNBC, NASA, NBC News, and several prominent local stations from a variety of cities. The second icon (green) on the TV -Fox toolbar opens a directory based on genre'. Categories include sports, news, business, music, kids, lifestyle, government, religious, education, shopping and weather, as well as a listing of about 50 live web-cams from around the world. Personally, I am a news and information junkie, and spend significant time on the news listing, which has live news feeds from about three dozen news sources from about 20 different countries, many of which are in English. Sports fanatics may enjoy the sports selection, consisting of 28 stations from about a dozen countries. While I may not understand the announcer on many of these sports stations, the live or recorded sports events are often quite understandable to the viewer. Music fans would appreciate the almost 50 TV stations that stream music. While many of the music stations are from France, Italy, Poland, and India, the viewer will almost always find music of interest. I have found that many of the foreign music stations which play their native music are very intriguing and entertaining. Investing and business is of universal interest, and TV-Fox offers 19 business channels, including Bloomberg -UK, Bloomberg-Asia, and Bloomberg- USA. Those stations, along with CNBC and NBR can provide business and economic information for the majority of investors and others interested in business. Sometimes we need content to entertain our children, or the child in us adults. The kids section contains a dozen channels, three of which are American, two of which are cartoons. My favorite kids channel is the "Classical Cartoons" which shows old time cartoons, many of which are from the 30's and 40's, most of which today's children would not otherwise have an opportunity to view. There are 22 movie channels listed, of which eight are from the US, and include sci-fi, comedy classics, thrillers, and WSTV (White Springs TV, also known as "The Golden Age of Movies Channel") which is a Florida and Oregon based network that streams old movies over satellite and on the air in about a dozen cities, as well as online. If I feel like watching a movie stream on my computer, I can usually find something of interest on one of these movie channels. The two dozen religious TV channels that stream over the internet cover almost all of the world's major religions, in a variety of languages. There are 27 educational channels available, many from major universities around the world, including Texas A&M's KAMU-TV. Shoppers may like to see what the 22 shopping channels offer, including the six
V O LU M E 2 8, I S S U E 1 2 MO T HE R B O A R D PAGE 7 CLUB SUPPORTERS A reminder for the new /Intermediate user special interest group: Please email your questions to Ray prior to the meeting. Wisdom: "Those that deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." Abraham Lincoln
December 2010 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 1 Genreral 2 3 4 Meeting 6:30 5 6 7 8 New/ 9 10 11 Interm. Sig 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 The New Orleans Personal Computer Club (NOPCC) is a private non-profit organization chartered under the State of Louisiana. Its purpose is to provide an open forum for discussion and education of the membership in the use and application of PCs, peripheral equipment and software. The opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the author (s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the NOPCC, its members or its officers. The club does not verify for accuracy the articles in this newsletter and leaves verification of accuracy to its readers. Articles in this newsletter may be duplicated as long as credit is given to the author (s) and the NOPCC. Annual Dues Schedule: Regular Member, $40/yr.; Family Membership, $60/yr.; and Students (under 21), $20/yr. Meetings are held at 6:30 on the 1st Wednesday of each month at Harahan Senior Center, 100 Elodie, Harahan, Louisiana. NOPCC Directory Elected Officers President Walt Christensen president@nopc.org 982-3705 Vice President Mike York vp@nopc.org 738-5997 Secretary Ray Paternostro secretary@nopc.org 287-4780 Treasurer Bill Howard treasurer@nopc.org 831-1279 Director At Large Tom Gaffney director1@nopc.org Director At Large Kevin Kratzberg director2@nopc.org 460-9337 Director At Large Mary Prinz director3@nopc.org Standing Committees Newsletter Kevin Kratzberg editor@nopc.org 460-9337 Publicity A J Levy pr@nopc.org Webmaster Mike York webmaster@nopc.org 738-5997 Special Interest Groups Computer Programming Mike York 738-5997 New/Intermediate Users Ray Paternostro newuser@nopc.org 287-4780 Other Important Numbers / Addresses Club Hotline Recorded messages. Meeting Information. 454-6050 NOPCC Web Site On the World Wide Web. Our own home page and club information. www.nopc.org