Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
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6-23-05
One aspect of the team that is somewhat forgotten to our readers is that we can, and often do, give out live help through a chat room that we have set up. To some of our long-time readers, we had this chat room going every Sunday while the show used to go on and it was the major way we communicated between ourselves when we all were in different places. To this day we still man the chat room every night in order to talk with other members of the team and to help anyone that comes in and has a problem to be solved or question to be answered.
As of late, with our current site going through redesign and testing, we have had to disable the module that allowed you quick and easy access to the chat room and because of that, our numbers have dwindled significantly. We apologize for not having this service back up and running for you but tonight we are making it up to all of you as we will explain how to get into the chat room so that our lines of communication are open again.
First we’ll cover IRC, the system that our chat is built on, then we’ll look at different programs that you can use to get on the network and lastly we’re going to invite everyone to try it and we want to see how many of our readership will join us in the chat so that we can talk about tech news of the day and help with any problems that you might have. So… here we go!
IRC, the system our chat is based on, is an abbreviation for Internet Relay Chat. It was developed in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen of Finland and built to replace a chat protocol called MUT. How it works is that users join a server or set of servers and pick a nickname, or nick, to be identified with. Two users with the same nick cannot be on the same server or server group at the same time to curb confusion and prevent “virtual identity theft”.
My challenge to the readership this week is to come visit us in chat. I’ll show you how to do this in a program and an extension that you can add to Firefox. Some basic info that you will need to know before we start this little venture: The IRC server will be irc.ucanweb.com. You will also need to pick a nickname that you will use in the room. Make it anything you wish but try to pick something unique. The room you will be joining is #pcgurus (it’s important to leave the # symbol at the front).
The first program that I will go over is Trillian. Trillian is available as a free download from www.ceruleanstudios.com. It’s a program that allows you to roll all your chat programs into one, including AOL/AIM, MSN, Yahoo and IRC. Today we’ll focus on setting up IRC. Download the program from the site, install it accepting all the defaults and when it gets done installing you will get a launch button. Hit it and pick Trillian Basic at the first screen that pops up. Pick a name for Trillian to recognize you as and then one of the two icons and hit next. Hit next until you get through all of the different account setup screens and the program launches. From there go to the Trillian menu, Connections, Manage My Connections. In that box hit the Add a new connection button and pick IRC from the menu that comes up.
For the first two boxes type in the server as described in the paragraph above, for the last three type in whatever nick that you have decided to use. Put a check in "Automatically connect on startup" then hit the change button. In the middle of the box that comes up check next to “After Successful Connection…” and in the box that lights up enter the following line without the quotes:
“/join #pcgurus”
This will throw you right in the room as soon as you load Trillian. If you do this you will have successfully have joined the chat!
The second thing to go through is a Firefox extension. *Cue Firefox extension of the week theme music*. The extension we will get today is called chatZilla. As usual get it from here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=16
Do the usual bit of installing it. After you install it and restart Firefox go to Tools -> ChatZilla. When the window opens up go to Tools -> Options. You will see an identification box where you need to set description, nickname and username. Type your chosen nick into all three fields. Hit okay and you will be out at the main ChatZilla screen. There will be a box at the bottom and in it type:
/attach
irc.ucanweb.com/pcgurus
This will make you join our server and automatically come in the room.
Now that you are here what do you do? Start talking of course. We try to keep a good lively conversation going in the room. We try to say hi when people come in, but hopefully enough of you will come in that we won’t be able to say hi to all of you! Just watch the conversation for a minute and then hop on in with anything that you have to say. We just let things flow from one end to the other in the room and have a good time of doing it.
Notes on the room: If you have any problems while in the room, please let any one of team members know. You’ll know us because we are listed under the Ops group in Trillian, or we have a green ball or an @ sign by our name in chatZilla. Some of the familiar faces from the newsletter, such as myself (deezil), Kevin (MicroDome), Art (`Artman) and more of the team frequent it on a semi-nightly basis. Usual chat hours are from 8-10PM ET, but I’m known to stay signed into the room 24/7.
IRC etiquette: DON’T TYPE IN ALL CAPS. It makes the room extremely hard to read. If you are addressing one person in particular please put their name at the start of the message so that everyone in the room doesn’t think that the message is for them.
Don’t get too heated, it’s just the Internet. The team members can keep the peace if we need to, but we don’t like doing it all that often. Just try to moderate yourselves.
Again, my challenge is for all of you to pick one of the IRC solutions, get it, use it and come in the chat room with us so that we can get to know our readers a little bit better, and you can get to know us too. An addendum article to come next week explaining a little more about the room and other things that don’t fit inside my two pages. Until I see you in there, have a good one!
Daniel A. Williams
Haven't you
always wanted a $600 video card? I sure have, and now it
looks like
nVidia is granting my wish...now excuse me while I go light
a cigar with a
Benjamin:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nividia-7800-GTX-releases-the-graphics-demon-3568.shtml
The
debate over violence in video games has once again come to the
fore with the
upcoming release of "25 to Life". With a title like
that wouldn't
unsuspecting parents know that violence might be
involved?:
http://www.techspot.com/news/17900-25-to-Life-game-under-attack-for-being-too-violent.html
Microsoft
helps Chinese government censor MSN Spaces. Chinese bloggers
calls MS
evil. Whodda thunkit?:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67957,00.html
And
finally an interesting factoid: if you had bought Yahoo! stock
on the
day it went public in 1996 every $1.24 you invested would now
be worth
$37. No wonder the company name ends in an
exclamation
point.
Copy us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew
Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
Actually this isn’t so much a site as a reminder of the power of the Web in general.
I, and some of our other writers, often ask people to contact their Congress Critters directly to oppose some onerous legislation that the entertainment or computer industries are trying to ram through the legislative process and this week I have an example that shows this virtual activism actually works.
Early this week a rumor spread that some unnamed Critter was going to add an amendment to a huge appropriations bill currently in a Senate subcommittee authorizing the “broadcast flag”, which would require broadcasters to send a “flag” signal which would disable recording devices like VCRs and TiVos when a digital broadcast begins.
This idea was shot down by the courts as being beyond the purview of the FCC so organizations like the EFF (www.eff.org) predicted the entertainment industry would try to buy off some Senator so it could be snuck into some other unrelated bill.
When the rumor started many technology websites and blogs trumpeted the danger to our fair use rights and, as a result, the members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received a deluge of emails, faxes and phone calls opposing the amendment. Of the 27 members of the committee Diane Feinstein holds the record with more than 100 emails and faxes per hour opposing the broadcast flag. The phone calls weren’t counted.
This was after the EFF posted the warning and it was picked up and re-posted on influential technology blogs like www.slashdot.org, www.boingboing.net and www.instapundit.com.
The Internet and we as users DO make a difference folks. When you see a story about some legislation that infringes on your rights or just “smells funny” you can call, fax or email your Senator or Representative and possibly make a difference.
This is a government that is supposed to answer to the people. Make them do that very thing…
Q: I take care of the computers (2) at my
church. We were given a Dell
computer with windows 2000 and Office 2000
already installed, and we
have original CD-Roms for these programs. The
problem is, we do not
have the password for the "Administrator", so we cannot
add anything
else to it. Everything there seems to work fine, so it isn't
critical,
but it does limit us. I really don't want to try and back
everything
up, re-format the disk, and re-load all the software and files, if
I
don't have to. Is there a way, (or a sneaky utility program) to
either
find out the Administrator password, or change it without knowing
what
it is?
A: Here is a link that may help:
http://www.petri.co.il/forgot_administrator_password.htm
Hope
this helps!
Ed Engelking II
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