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TThhee CCuurrssoorr Monthly Newsletter of the Washington Area Computer User Group Meeting Location: Next Meeting: OLLI, 4210 Roberts Road June 18, 2011 Fairfax, VA Presidential Bits by Geof Goodrum President, Washington Area Computer User Group In May, Paul Howard and Bill Walsh demonstrated the Skype videoconferencing and PC screen sharing system with help from Mel Mikosinki, Roger Fujii and others. Paul showed how the free Skype software (http://www.skype.com/) on a PC allowed several people to make video phone calls and have a meeting over the Internet and local network with tiled live video feeds from each. Several tips, though: invest in a good quality headset (headphone/microphone) to make PC Problem? video or phone calls; mute your microphone when you walk away from Bring it to the PC Clinic! your computer or don’t need to talk. Likewise, don’t forget that you are June 18 on “candid camera,” so mind your appearance and anything behind that you that might not want visible. And if you are doing a Skype demo Table of Contents with two systems in the same room with a speaker system like we Lloyd’s Web Sites...............2 were, definitely use headphones or mute your mikes – our apologies to User’s View of the iMac.....3 those who experienced the thrill of audio feedback when Mel joined the Linux News........................ 3 Skype video call with Paul across the room! GNU/Linux Distributions...4 The Skype demo was particularly timely, given Microsoft’s May 10th Linux Software...................5 announcement that it entered a deal to acquire Skype for an estimated Word Tips........................... 8 $8.5 billion, the biggest deal in the company’s history. The question Excel Tips...........................9 remains on what Microsoft plans to do with Skype, and the future of Review: Power Friending...9 Skype support for nonMicrosoft platforms. Skype already announced Win7 Desktop Gadgets.....10 it would not renew its licensing agreement with Digium, the company behind the Open Source Asterisk telephony system (see http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/SkypedumpsAsterisk/). Only in the Download During the main presentation, Gabe Goldberg provided a detailed look Edition at the variety of addons and customization options for both the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Gabe previewed some of his favorite addons (available through the program Cleaning Your Startup...... 13 menu or directly from the web sites for Firefox and Thunderbird. Just Sync Your Bookmarks......14 note that enabling too many addons can slow down your application; you can disable addons without uninstalling them. Gabe also showed how to use the Advanced Configuration option to tweak Firefox’s Continued on page 3 Lloyd’s Web Sites for June 2011 by Lloyd Johnson Columnist, Washington Area Computer User Group NCTCUG Visit www.wacug.org for past issues of Web Sites with hyperlinks. 1. Family Health History — http://familyhistory.hhs.gov/. From Visit our “sister” user group. The the US Office of the Surgeon General. National Capital Technology and 2. Bring back File, Edit, View, Insert and Format to Word and Computer User's Group meets the first Excel 2007 and 2010 — www.find.pcworld.com/70218 and fourth Wednesday of the month. They meet in Carlin Hall in Arlington 3. Find duplicate files — www.easyduplicatefinder.com at 5711 South 4th Street. Visit their 4. The Museum of Hoaxes — www.museumofhoaxes.com web site for more information, a map 5. There has been a lot of media about Wikipedia — and directions: www.wikipedia.org. Check it out. 6. Want to know how much that cute hill secretary you saw on http://www.nctcug.org/ TV is making? — www.legistorm.com 7. RiskyRoads.org — http://riskyroads.org/. Find out if you live or work near a Fatal Accident Hot Spot. The Risky Roads map Meetings start at 7:00 PM shows which roads and highways have the most traffic fatalities. 8. Social Security Benefit Calculator — www.ssa.gov/planners/benefitcalculators.htm. Use any of the calculators on this Social Security site to estimate your potential benefit amounts using different retirement dates and levels of future earnings. The calculators will show your retirement benefits as well as disability and survivor benefit amounts if you should become disabled or die. Washington Area User 9. Scores of original comedy series — www.superdeluxe.com Group Partners 10. Family fun: Brain teasers, riddles, etc — www.funology.com Working Together for Our Members NCTCUG WACUG OPCUG The Cursor — Page 2 — June 18, 2011 Continued from page 1 Bio: Stan has been active with personal computers behavior. There was a question about the popular e for over 40 years, starting out with single board mail client Eudora using Thunderbird as its core computers with 1K of memory and graduating to the engine, which we could not answer. As it turns out, first commercial version of the IBM PC (no hard Qualcomm’s Eudora commercial version was retired drive and only 256K of memory). Stan has developed and replaced by an Open Source version built upon free amateur radio related software apps for the PC the Thunderbird codebase. For more information and that are used still used by thousands of hams download, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_OSE. worldwide. Stan currently operates both Windows Our guest presenter for the June 18th WAC meeting and Linux servers in support of ham radio activities, will be Stan Schretter, who will demonstrate features and has several other Windows machines. But over of the Apple Macintosh and compare these available the past few years all of his personal computing has on Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. See migrated to Apple machines, except for one lonely Stan’s writeup and bio below. Windows computer used by his wife Judy. Also on June 18th, WAC will cohost the semiannual PC Clinic with OPCUG. If you need handson help with personal computer hardware or software, or installation of a new Operating System (including licensed Windows and GNU/Linux distributions), Linux News please email your support request before June 17th to by Geof Goodrum pc_clinic(at)wacug.org or leave a voice message on [email protected] the WAC AnswerLine, 7033707649. For complete Washington Area Computer User Group participation guidelines, see our web page at http://www.wacug.org/clinic.html. See you there! Statement about Oracle’s move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation Filed under: Community — Florian Effenberger @ 15:15 An Enthusiastic User’s View of the The Document Foundation blog iMac The Internet, June 1st, 2011 – The Document by Stan Schretter Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the I am not an salesperson for Apple, but just a very LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We pleased user and will discuss and demo that in some are governed by an open, and meritocratic detail. I will focus on a few of the things that I community headed by a diverse interim Steering believe are unique (as compared to Windows) to the Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Apple suite of integrated equipment (iMac, Steering Committee overseeing development. Macbooks, iPhone — I do not have an iPad). These include, but are not limited to, the quite inexpensive Today we welcome Oracle’s donation of code that 27 inch iMac with its very high resolution display, has previously been proprietary to the Apache the video conference tool Face Time whose unique Software Foundation, it is great to see key user algorithms works over almost any network (as features released in a form that can be included into opposed to Skype’s video), the built in features of the LibreOffice. Mac OS including but not limited to the very easy to The Document Foundation would welcome the use Time Machine backup (just plug in a USB drive reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice and off you go!), etc, etc. projects into a single community of equals in the The Cursor — Page 3 — June 18, 2011 wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has and transparent community. TDF will protect past taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but investments by building on the achievements of the does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The first decade, will encourage wide participation within Apache community, which we respect enormously, the community, and will coordinate activity across has very different expectations and norms – the community. licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret Media Contacts for TDF the missed opportunity but are committed to working Florian Effenberger (Germany) with all active community members to devise the best Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – Email: possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org. [email protected] On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is Olivier Hallot (Brazil) the potential for futureproof licensing. The Apache Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – Email: License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and [email protected] MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to Charles H. Schulz (France) move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – Email: license versions. The Document Foundation believes [email protected] that commerciallyfriendly, copyleft licensing Italo Vignoli (Italy) provides the best path to constructive participation in, Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – Email: and growth of the project. [email protected] Thus, the event is neutral for The Document GNU/Linux Distribution Releases Foundation, which – as always – remains open to GNU/Linux distributions are bundled collections of every company, individual or foundation that wishes software including a set of applications and an to participate in codevelopment.