The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

OK, there are several hundred (thousand?) members who do not have a Melb PC Associate account. So here is the temporary address of the forum: http://www.pcupdate.org/forum. The forum is being managed by Committee member Lyn Goodall. The final location of this forum might change, as will its software platform.

We are trying the free and popular phpBB, which does not have some features of its likely commercial successor that we intend trying, namely, vBulletin. Over 80 members have signed up for the forum, so we hope to see you online soon.

Our Blog

We have implemented a blog at melbpc.blogspot.com (also linked from the MOTD) and it too will probably move to our own server, probably as part of a revamp of our Web site. This blog enables us to post timely articles and photographs as they occur and the maintainer does not need to know Web page design. Check it out from time to time.
Our Newsgroups
A newsgroup is an electronic discussion medium that resembles e-mail, except that you are not sending your comments to an e-mail address. Your message (called an article) reaches others who subscribe to the specific newsgroup. There are thousands of newsgroups, covering as many topics, and Melb PC has some of its own.
Thanks to a tip (posted in a newsgroup, of course) from member Malcolm Miles, here is an easy way to set up your newsreader (which is probably Outlook Express for most members). Call up this address from your Web browser: news://news.melbpc.org.au/melbpc.general (but don't add "http://"). If you are connected to our Internet service, this will open up Outlook Express and download the newsgroups that are received by our machines. Be sure to subscribe to all the ones beginning with "melbpc." and see what members are discussing. Join them and make your own contributions.

Mozilla FireFox

A relatively new browser is FireFox, which has origins in Mozilla, and Netscape before that. A growing number of users are switching from Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) to FireFox because of vulnerabilities in IE. See http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ for details. It is not perfect, so don't plan to remove IE from your machine, but it is very good.

At the time of writing, the latest version is Firefox 1.0 PR (Preview Release). It has over 178 third-party Extensions (add-ons) and I can't imagine someone would want to load them all. I don't even understand what some of the extensions do, but this is part of the learning experience and so I have started using Firefox on a regular basis. It is gaining momentum among users and you should definitely give it a go.

Mozilla has also released an accompanying e-mail program called Thunderbird. It has received some acclaim but I have no plans to use it. In a business environment I prefer Microsoft Outlook 2003 (part of Office, not the free Outlook Express), as it integrates with many applications and my PDA. However, for e-mail usage, you should see what people are saying about Thunderbird and perhaps give it a try.

Checking MessageBank from Abroad

I am in the US as I write this and use an American mobile phone, but I also carry my Aussie one, which is not switched on. I decided to check the latter phone and found that three MessageBank messages were waiting for me. Calling 101 proved futile, as did a Google search for the procedure. The Telstra site was equally useless (try finding this information there).
I rang the Telstra Roaming Help Desk and the first operator confused me, so I will skip that tale. I rang back and got the following easy instructions, which work perfectly:

• Send a blank text message to 101. (Just 101)
  
• Your phone will ring within seconds, and your messages will play, just as they do back home. You can reply to a call using the Australian notation, that is, 02 1234-5678 and there is no need to enter any prefix.