On the Web : December 2005

If you enjoy reading 'On the Web', your ham radio club can publish this column on an exchange basis with SJRA. Contact Ted, , for the exchange details.		Our contributions to the South Jersey Radio Association club bulletin "Harmonics" includes lengthy Web addresses. As the URL's can be difficult or a nuisance to type into your Web browser, the postings here should make it easier to get to the Web sites SJRA members are interested in. Look for the posting at w2xq.com at the time "Harmonics" is scheduled for delivery in the south Jersey area. Questions, suggestions or contributions are always welcome.
		Solar X-rays  Geomagnetic Field  N 3 K L

The 2006 Field Day Rules
The SJRA Field Day Site entrance is on Lower Main Street, Marlton, opposite the Indian Springs Golf Course.
GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates are N 39° 53.162', W 74° 53.486', or use these maps.
Mapquest is almost a 'net standard, but the newer beta Google map looks very good.

AIM Mail

Do you have an AIM (America Online Instant Message) ID but you are not a member of America Online itself? Many of us have AIM IDs, and now you can have a free 2 GB e-mail account (AOL members' maiboxes have no size limit). As the URL is rather lenghty when it loads into the servers, first I suggest you manually create a bookmark yourself, entering a name and URL, e.g.:

My AIM Mail
http://mail.aim.com/

The sign-up process is quick and painless. Your new e-mail address takes the form of user_ID@aim.com and there is a free fringe benefit to your new e-mail account.

America Online has been struggling with the competition of the free portals -- Excite, Google, MSN, Yahoo to name a few -- and the business models are changing. The bottom line? At the very upper left corner of the screen is a link to "AOL Main" -- a customizeable front page into the AOL grab bag of goodies.

MSN Search

Google's search engine and other gadgets for accessing the Web has meant that Google has pretty much dominated the search engine "industry" of late. Microsoft has now responded with a search engine of its own, placing it within its MSN portal. The URL is simply search.msn.com. Not bad, in my opinion, but you can get lost after exploring in the pages and it is difficult to get back to the top page; set a bookmark (favorite) before using this site.

From the top search page, you can additionally search news and images directly. That's not the case, at first glance, from the interior pages.

The "Local" search is beta and that's probably a good choice. The results show distances from your selected starting point but the software didn't recognize Vincentown with the state abbreviated or spelled out. I wound up saving the ZIP code in the setting. That's faulty too. In the case of 08088, the center is presumed to be just about at the crossroads in Tabernacle about 5 miles from here. The directions in the routing, obviously, are always wrong. I'd like to be able to set GPS coordinates.

Is MSN Search worth adding to your tools for searching the Web? Yes. Every search engine, large and small, has a different twist on retreiving data. If you are looking for an uncommon subject or topic, it may just surface in one search engine result and not another.

Let's Get Organized

Often I will find something of interest for my writings or research or photography when I am not home. I used to grab a notepad, but I would lose the pieces of paper. I'd write the comments or notes into a PDA, which was better, but I still would have then go through the notes and sort them out. If I didn't have the PDA with me, I would send an e-mail to myself... and hope I could find it amongst the spam that I get. Last month I found a different solution that is, in my opinion, quite striking.

Backpack is a personal and small business information manager. It is a private Web site where I can create pages containing notes, lists, reminders with alarms, and (optionally with the paid accounts) upload images and files. The beauty of this system is that each page has its own e-mail address. In my methodology, I have separates page for Radio Netherlands, Monitoring Times, Web site notes, and so forth. When I'm ready to sit down and prepare an article, I dial up the appropriate BackPack page and copy my notes.

Another option is collaboration. If several persons are working on a project, you can give those persons access to the BackPack page and share notes and feedback all in one spot. There is no need to bicycle the e-mail around the circuit and hope that all receive the mailing.

The free account, which I am using, gives one five pages. Paid accounts of $5 and $9 a month give much more. The Web site has many interesting examples and is well worth a read if you are swimming in yellow sticky notes and scrap paper in your wallet.

Dial up backpackit.com and have a careful read. It might be the ticket to organizing your piles of notes.

Quickies

If you use an Apple Mac with OS X 10.4 or greater, you know there are thousands of widgets free for the downloading from Apple. (Widgets are tiny applications that run in a Dashboard pop-up over the regular applications.) For those interested in world affairs, radio amateurs and shortwave listeners, the "Widget for World Listener" is a world map widget displaying all the countries in the world. It gives you the country map, the national flag, country coordinates, country background information, the capital, the continent and photos from the countries. It is really nicely put together. Download the application from www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/travel/worldviewwidget.html and follow the directions to install it into the Dashboard.

The first significant snowfall with accumulation occurred overnight on December 3-4. It was less than 3 inches, but stuck around for the day. This is just a reminder that I have an extensive collection of weather links at trsc.com/links_weather.html and you may find it useful. Recommendations for new sites are welcome, as are corrections and updates.

Merry Christmas to all!

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Revised 5 December 2005

Read the previous month's column or the next month's column.

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