September 2006 Issue

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September Meeting Delayed 1 Week

VHS Videos to DVD

Not a lot exciting has happened to me, I am still plodding away recording DVD's from my large collection of VHF movies. I have transferred about a hundred now leaving about two hundred to go.

One quite exciting thing for me has happened. About 45 years ago I moved into my house and at the same time purchased an 8mm movie camera to record some of the building together with work in the garden, my son's 4th birthday party etc. A few years later I had my shop rebuilt and recorded that. The shop is now quite large and during the building I arranged for part of the side of the building behind to be removed so that we could get a digger in to excavate for a basement. All is shown in the film. No sooner had the work been completed than I purchased the property next door and repeated the rebuilding there. This time the neighbours had had enough of building and refused to have their wall knocked down again so this time I had to dig the basement by hand. I dug a hole 30ft x 13.5ft x 7ft deep. 2ft down I encountered water and so had to have a pump working all of the time. The earth, or rather clay, that I dug out was put in large plastic bags, carried through the shop, put in the shop's van and then dumped in a friend's garden. The job took months to do but was well worth the effort. It is all I can do these days to pick up a bag of cement. I must have picked up dozens of the old hundred weight bags during the job. All is recorded in the film.

About 20 years ago, a friend purchased a video camera. We hung a sheet up on the wall and projected the film on to it, recording it with the video camera. The quality was not wonderful but quite good under the circumstances. Over the years I lost the video cassette but recently bought a camera for my PC and intended recording the film again but sorting through my video cassettes the old one came to light. I have now re-recorded the film from the video cassette to DVD and in spite of some fading, the DVD is remarkably good.

More Boot Sale Bargains

I have an old 386 computer that has been laying around for years. Some years ago the monitor went on the computer that I had purchased to replace it so I used the monitor from the 386. I dug the old computer out a couple of months ago and bought an excellent monitor at a boot sale for £5. I have set up the computer in a spare room and use it from time to time. Last month I bought a new looking printer complete with new cartridges at the same boot sale for £7. Both are working well and in use. Who said computing is expensive, it certainly can be but not necessarily so.

I am kept very busy on my computer as there is always someone wanting me to do something. The last job I did about a couple of weeks ago was to design and print several hundred bar code labels. I cribbed a bit by scanning in a bar code, cleaning it up in a graphics program, adding text to the same width as the label and spacing out 64 per sheet to be printed on sheets of labels. I found that doing the bar code was not too bad but it was quite a fiddly job spacing them out to print accurately on the small labels.

I have also had to design and print fixture lists for my golf club.

I also help with computer problems for a charity. Nigel King often assists with this.

Then there are frequent requests from neighbours to photo copy something or other.

They say that you work harder in retirement, I won't go that far but I am certainly kept very busy