The menu for this has been separately mailed and I hope as many of you as possible will be able to come to ensure that it is as enjoyable as on previous occasions.
The Dinner will be at 7p.m. at the Crown Hotel, 51 High Street, Manningtree, Essex, CO11 1AH Tel. 01206 396333 www.crown-hotel.co.uk
I am looking forward to it.
The DVD burning was presented by Gareth, dgs and Peter. Gadgets were described by various club members as detailed below.
Dgs began by showing Martin Würthner's DVDBurn software on the IYONIX under RISCOS. This software was developed from the earlier CDBurn software as the screens displayed show. The program works in a very similar fashion with a few extra functions. This software is fairly new and dgs admitted he had not had much chance to get to know it yet and get it configured properly. There did seem to be some teething problems. Dgs pointed out that DVD burning on RISCOS was confined to data storage and that it was just not possible to use RISCOS for burning Video DVDs. The main reason for this being that rendering of video requires very fast processors and a great deal of number crunching involving many floating point calculations. In PCs this is achieved by using floating point video hardware and even then requires several hours per hour of real time video. [Currently in RISCOS the floating point is a software emulation and is much slower and there are no known plans to change this. Ed.] Video cannot be played back either. [I think this was because of licensing restrictions on the proprietary codecs. Is that right ?Ed.]
However the use of DVDs for backup and storage is very attractive since they are both cheap and can hold 4.8GB in a single layer. Data is saved by creating an ISO image of the files first and then burning this to disk. The software scans and identifies the available drives allowing the user to choose between CD or DVD media. It shows both CD and DVD drives and allows choice of the Joliet extensions, recording speed and tells the user the type of media installed, whether it is recordable, disk capacity free space etc. This apparently allowed choice of up to 32x speed which I don't think any of us believed! Dgs said that he had managed to record some files but that the drive light never stopped flashing at the end of the process, when he expected fixation of the disk to take place, and he was uncertain as to whether it had worked properly since he had had to manually intervene. John Balance (Castle) had assured him that it should all work. Peter said that it was showing many of the symptoms of the earlier CDBurn software which he had personally had great problems with.
Gareth then showed DVD burning on his Mac on OSX. The Mac allows writing of Music CDs and Video CDs and conversion between formats. Several formats are supported and it is very easy to incorporate files from iMovie and iPhoto. Gareth said that there were more features available in the Roxio Toast proprietary software. (Which he doesn't have..yet) He demonstrated saving some files to DVD. This did not quite go according to plan either, I think it was one of those nights!
Peter showed some Pinnacle Instant DVD burning on his PC. In this case it is not necessary to generate a separate ISO image as the drive software works just like a hard drive. He showed how files and directories can be dropped onto the desktop icon and are saved to disk. There is some confusion sometimes on disk formatting since occasionally the message " Cannot write to disk, please remove write protect tab from disk and try again" is displayed instead of " Please format disk" which would have been more helpful. I think the confusion may depend on whether DVD media or CD media is in use. I'll look into this. Once the disk has been used it is fixated before being ejected.
Dgs started by showing his Nintendo dual screen games machine ( 1 is a touch screen ) and sound. This has 4 or 5 games on cards and also allows wireless chat. The graphics were very fast. He also showed the Sony PSP which has impressive processor power but battery power is not up to Playstation 2 standards. It can show UMD format movies which cost £1 more than standard ones. The display is 640 or 800 pixels wide.
Michael showed us his in-car GPS unit Garmin I3. (£159.99 Argos). Unfortunately the Gremlins struck again and his batteries were dead. This is one of the smallest GPS I have seen and apparently it works well in the car and has a good sound output for directions. It will find UK locations by Postcode and can also be set up in French or German. It uses a 250MB SD card for storage.
Gareth showed his Apache server which uses an Xscale processor (132MHz) and runs Debian Linux.
If anyone would like to give me more written details of these gadgets as my notes were not very complete here, I would be happy to reproduce them in the next Newsletter.
On the whole a pleasant evening supplemented by some Christmas refreshments. Many thanks to all who were able to demonstrate and/or who brought along something to eat.
Tony gave me a leaflet on an LCD V1067 projector from 2U computers for £350 with 1100 lumens brightness and a widescreen facility. Please let the Committee know if you see any other advert for a good model.(...er... projector that is!)
There was quite a lot of discussion on formats for DVDs at the last meeting and I thought one or two pointers to further info might be useful. One of the complexities of DVD is that there are several hardware formats DVD + R/W and DVD-R/W and DVD - RAM. These formats require different media to be used. Read compatibility is probably greater than writing compatibility between drives. Some of the software formats are also unreadable on RISC OS machines as they use UDP formats, which I don't think is licensed for RISC OS, neither CDFS nor CDROMFS (WSS) can read them. There are some good articles in Living with Technology magazine and currently in Archive magazine on all aspects of DVDs and Video. Why not take out a sub if you don't already?
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| January 18th 2006 | Social evening at the Crown | |
| February 1st 2006 | JPEG slideshow 10mins per person | Club |
| March 1st 2006 | Outside speaker TBA | TBA |
| April 5th 2006 | AGM + TBA | |
| May 3rd 2006 | Printing with Uniprint and VA & GIMP print | Tony & Frank et al |
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8NP , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
14th February To be Arranged
14th March "Ovation Pro for RISC OS and Windows"
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
Following on from a brief discussion at the last club meeting it has been agreed that I should remove a lot of the old newsletters from the website and archive them to CD/DVD. I'll probably not do this before the end of January. If anyone would like a copy of the CD I'm sure this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new website. Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk