OVER 2 YOU, 025 (11/04/01)

SAILING  

I intend to sail -- mainly in the Med -- with my laptop and mobile phone, and wonder if anyone has any advice of how to access Internet and E-Mail on the boat?

B. H. Portsmouth, via email

Method 1 for Short e-mails while sailing.

This is for sending and receiving short e-mails (eg half page of A4). The facility is provided courtesy of the WinLink 2000. For information, visit http://winlink.org/wl2k.

Method 2 for Internet Access and e-mail while sailing

Consider use of satellite link. I guess that terminals and antenna will be very expensive, maybe £1000+.

Method 3 for Internet Access and e-mail when moored in a marina

This method is to prepare any e-mails and other files on the boat and then send them by plugging the laptop into a telephone socket in an "Internet Cafe". You can also receive e-mails etc. Contact a provider such as AOL for details of subscriptions, physical connectors to be used etc.

John Middleton

If your mobile phone is a recent Nokia model then I suggest getting Nokia Data Suite 3 or 3a for your laptop. You can then access your email account and the net from wherever you are via your mobile (as long as you are in range). Also see if your ISP supports GRIC-Dial which will enable you to call ISPs in towns local to you.  I also have an account with EFAX so, whilst travelling, all my faxes are turned into email so I can download everything in one go.
Mark Zipin,

I have used different service providers abroad before (mainly in the US), and I wasn't impressed with any of them, except AOL. AOL was good enough, the only problem with AOL would be connecting it to a cell phone, because it's modem options are a real pain to configure. However, If you tell me the make and model of the phone you are using I will happily guide you in the correct direction. But, otherwise, dependant on the amount of time you are going to be sailing for, I'd sign up with another ISP abroad, considering the international charges the British ISP's charge are quite a lot.
Edward Cory,

CARAVAN SITE BOOKINGS

Has anyone any experience of a software package, which would enable me to arrange the daily bookings for a 50-pitch caravan and camping site? Each pitch can be booked daily throughout the year. We are new to the business and have found that we really need a quick and easy system in place.  At present I use Excel but I would appreciate it if I could find a system whereby dates and pitch numbers do not need to be put in manually as at present. A reasonable amount of space if required for the visitors name and a hard copy on A4 paper would be helpful.
Joan Barratt, via email

A program is available - primarily for booking classrooms and equipment, but it can be used by camp sites - called Wallchart (see www.wallchart.co.uk).

Viv Fletcher,

I would suggest a relational database such as Microsoft Access.  Set up one table with all the dates in it, another table with the pitch numbers and a third table for customer names and addresses.  It's a little bit complicated to start with, but once you've established the relationships between the tables you can query it in a number of ways, print reports, send out invoices or booking confirmations, etc.  It's much more powerful and flexible than Excel.

Incidentally, you shouldn't have to manually input all the dates in Excel.  If you put a date in one cell, you can tell the software to continue the sequence, so that if you drag your cursor down a column all the subsequent dates will be automatically filled in.  If you want to use Access, you can then copy this information and paste it into an Access table.  I did a similar thing for an appointments diary on my own computer, and it didn't take me long to set up a 10-minute appointments diary running all the way through to 2004.

 Julian Le Saux, cranesurgery@netscapeonline.co.uk

Re the request for information on booking software, visit: http://www.csyvisitor.com/about.asp there you will find a product called Visitor. You can view progressive samples of a complete booking and although it is primarily intended for Hotels it can probably be altered to suit.
Colin Gibson,

FAMILY CREST

I am trying to find a website that can help me identify a family crest and motto contained within a painting owned by family interests. We believe the painting to be of Flemish origin. Can anyone suggest an appropriate website?

J. N. Davis, via email

You might find what you are looking for on an Internet site called Heraldry in Belgium, which has links to a number of related sites. The address is: http://www.heraldica.org/topics

/national/belgium.htm

J. D, South London

A good place to start is the Heraldry on the Internet web site, which has links to many heraldic resources. It can be found at: http://www.digiserve.com/heraldry/

C. Wilson,

Have a look at http://www.family-crests.com/, mind you, you have to pay for it…

Dave McDonald, Sutton, Surrey

JULIAN DATES

One of my retirement hobbies is researching aspects of local history. Is there a source on the web for annual calendars for the Julian calendar in use before 1752 to help me put a day of the week to the dates of events or software to create such calendars? There are ways of manually working out the days to match dates but mistakes are easily made.

Barry Redfern, via email

If Barry Redfern can run DOS programs, perhaps in a Windows DOS box, he can use my program "mjd_date" obtainable from http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/

programs/00index.htm

; if given a date as Y M D on the command line it will give the MJD and the day-of-week, on the British calendar.

If run without parameters, it will do other things, such as Julian and Gregorian Easter, over the range BC32000 to AD32000 or thereabouts; the "Cal" sub-option will display a month's calendar, including Sept 1752. It also knows about ISO-8601 Week Numbers (as in a good diary), UK IR
week numbering, EU Summer Time rules, etc. There is other date-related information on my Web site at:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/index.htm, including a list of Critical Dates for computing; the next non-trivial one listed is Sunday 2001-09-09, at 01:46:40 GMT - the UNIX gigasecond.
John Stockton, 

SHADES OF GREY

I have 60 photographs of black and white handprints. I would like to know what area consists of black and white (and also different shades of grey)? Is there a program that can do such a thing? This is for my dissertation experiment, taking 60 Kirlian photographs. I need to measure the change in the corona electrical discharge around the handprints.

Mr.Preston Lee, via email

Have a look at an application called NIH Image. It is free to download from National Institute of Health in the US. There is a link to the NIH site on: http://www.bopa.org.uk/links.html This is a very useful program for analysing images. It was written to run on a Mac but a PC compatible version has been produced. It is free, the source code is available and there is a mailing list.
Colin Clements, West Wickham, Kent

CAN YOU HELP?

I have taken my ten-year old daughter out of school and want to educate her at home. Can anyone recommend web sites and resources for home schooling?
J. Condon, via email

I want to protect my articles and books by offsite data storage. I don't want to have to carry round disks, or even CDs and Zips. Can anyone suggest any reliable low cost online storage services, which I could zap my work to at the end of the day, or is there another route I have overlooked?

Linda Wain, via email

Is there any software available to create a photographic mosaic using only one image so that each single tile is a miniature of the complete picture?

David Paul via email