[NBLUG/talk] August Presentations...

[ME]

Hello List Members,

A big thanks to our own NBLUG members for a fast-paced introduction to
many applications.

Thanks to Ron for his presentation to us on some of the features of xv for
displaying images. In addition to the many features he showed you, I would
like to emphasize three points:
 * Small system memory footprint for images being displayed
 * Great advantages to older machine with limited video memory
 * Powerful and compact

Thanks to Troy for his presentations on xmms (audio player for CD, MP3 and
other formats including streaming), gaim (an instant messenger application
that combines all major instant messaging into one client), and OpenOffice
(a very nice Office Productivity Suite that does a pretty good job at
importing and exporting MS Office Docs as well as others.) I'd like to
emphasize a few things stated by Troy:
 * xmms is a great audio playing tool!
 * xmms is fully-functional, vivid eye candy.
 * xmms does streaming.
 * gaim combines several instant messenger systems into one app!
 * gaim permits you to do clever things like automated actions
 * gaim permits you to join our irc channel
 * OpenOffice is _BIG_ and can do many many things
 * General work with OpenOffice is excellent in most cases
 * On rare occasions, more complicated layout/computations may be difficult

Thanks to Kyle for his presentations on Xine (a video/dvd player that can
play most of the popular formats), mplayer (another video player that has
other options and can play even more formats (such as real audio), and
laptop-net (a system tool primarily for Debian, but being ported to other
Distros to make configuring your network interfaces to dynamically set
your network resources as you change networks. A few things to point out
about these that were discussed in the presentations:
 * Xine looks great and has many features
 * Xine is often easier to install for most distros (available packages)
 * Xine has multiple interfaces and skins
 * mplayer is primarily a command-line controlled
 * mplayer is often not as available and as feature filled in packages
 * mplayer can often do more but requires more user knowledge
 * A web client plugin for Mozilla (et al) permits mplayer to play in
browser windows.
 * mplayer can also work with ascii-art and can do subtitle text files
 * laptop-net can make life with a laptop that change networks easier
 * laptop-net can automate many tasks you would normally perform when
connecting to different networks
 * laptop-net is primarily for Debian, but is being made available for
other distros.

Thanks to Andru who provided us with a presentation on bc (basic
calculator.) This is a very useful tool. I have used it many times from
within shell scripts. It is very powerful. Some other things to point out
with bc:
 * input and output base can be modified for dealing with different bases
 * arbitrary precision for many operations
 * scaling of precision with decimals is possible and easy

Again, a big thank you to Ron, Troy, Kyle and Andru for their
mini-presentations and introductions to some very cool tools that often do
not come pre-installed in distros.

-ME