Computer Info – September 17, 2003

This Week’s Meeting

            This week will we take a look at saving information that is sent to us via email – pictures, animation, sound, etc.  And, of course, we will start the meeting with our usual question and answer session.

            The next meeting is October 1^st.

Hurricane Tracking

Hurricanetrack.com  (   http://www.hurricanetrack.com)

            This is a very good site for watching the progress of a hurricane.  Right now the one to watch in Isabel.

Mime

            MIME means Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, and refers to an official Internet standard that specifies how messages must be formatted so that they can be exchanged between different email systems. MIME is a very flexible format, permitting one to include virtually any type of file or document in an email message. Specifically, MIME messages can contain text, images, audio, video, or other application-specific data.

            If you have registered a MIME type, your browser will decode the file and launch a helper application.

            You can read about mime at

                        The Mime Information Page  (  http://hunnysoft.com/mime/)

Saving Email and Web Page Pictures and Sounds.

            Everyone wants to know how to save the attachments that they are sent via email.  There is no one way to do it – each attachment can be a different story.

            Pictures are probably the easiest ones to save.  You can right-click on the picture and choose SAVE IMAGE AS from the menu – the difficult part is knowing where to save it and then remembering where.

            Animated pictures should be no different.  Right-click on the animated picture – and you should be given a menu choose of saving the image (SAVE IMAGE AS).  An animated picture is always a GIF file.  Again you have to remember where you are saving it.

            How about the Walking Man (made out of text) – have you tried to save that.  When I tried from my email – it didn’t know what the extension should be.  But since it was an animated picture, we knew that it should be a GIF file.  So it is a learning process.  Even after saving it, it did not view correctly in ACDSee – but it does view correctly in the Windows Viewer.

            How about a sound file that is attached to a greeting card that someone sends you?  How do you save it?  The most uniform way is to determine the web address (the URL) of the sound file.  We do this by choosing VIEW – SOURCE.  It takes a little looking, but you should be able to find the web address – highlight it – and copy it.  Now you can PASTE it into your web browser and it should open something for playing the file (In the case of Internet Explorer 6, it looks like it opens Windows Media Player).  Now you can choose FILE – SAVE AS.  But, we demonstrated this one day at the library and discovered that certain versions of Windows Media Player did not contain the FILE – SAVE AS.

We will try to demonstrate these plus a few others at this week’s meeting.