OVER 2 YOU, 139 (22/07/03)

HAZARD WARNING

Following on from the media and newspaper reports regarding the potential health hazard of living close to high voltage power lines and mobile telephone masts, I want to know if there are any measuring instruments available to the general public, that would allow me to monitor my exposure to this radiation.

D. Clements, via email

Telstra, the Australian equivalent of BT may have a potential answer.  Software it has developed to measure these emissions has been adopted by the WHO as the international standard. While this software is available commercially (http://www.telstra.com.au/

ememanagement/softwr.htm), at a high cost to telcos and the like, I understand that they provide it at a hugely reduced cost to community groups, governments and so on. It runs on a laptop and overlays a colour coded emission reading onto maps of the local area, enabling people to see, street by street if necessary, how emission levels vary.

James Tutt

You need an EMF (electromagnetic field tester), which you can purchase through Philip Harris at: http://www.philipharris.co.uk./

Hayley Wood, Carshalton High School For Boys

An excellent site is: http://www.powerwatch.org.uk/. They give a mass of information about a very complicated subject and you can even hire monitoring equipment from them.
George Galitzine

Test meters and instruments may be obtained from:

Coghill Research Laboratories,

Lower Race,

Pontypool,

Gwent, NP4 5UH

Tel:  01495 763389

http://www.cogreslab.co.uk/

Roger Coghill is a renowned expert on the hazards from power lines etc. and has published a number of books on the subject.

Michael Guest, via e-mail

LICENCE DODGING

I read recently that new television detector vans are being deployed to track down licence fee dodgers. I can see how they might detect emissions from larger TVs with picture tubes but does anyone know if they can detect newer display devices like LCD screens, video projectors and plasma panels etc. and if so, how?

Nigel Sutton (a fully paid up licence payer by the way)

The display type or size is not relevant, it is the TV’s tuner that picks up the signal from the aerial. Inside the tuner is a variable-frequency oscillator.  When you tune into a television channel this oscillator is set to a frequency very close to the frequency of the desired channel.  The tuner mixes the incoming signal with the local oscillator output and is able to extract the video and audio signals and pass them onto the rest of the television circuits.

Some of the local oscillator signal passes back up the cable to the aerial. The television detector van has very sensitive and directional antennas that pick up the signal from the local oscillator. By measuring the frequency they can tell which channel you are watching and confirm that it is the television,  PC tuner or video recorder that is generating the signal. The van has a computer on-board which lists all the addresses that do not have a license.

David Procter

CARTRIDGE CONTAINERS

A few years ago, when I bought my Hewlett Packard printer it came with a small storage box for part-used and refilled cartridges, which keeps them upright and stops them from drying out. My local HP dealer can’t get hold of them any more so can anyone recommend either a source of these boxes or a suitable alternative?

Tina Bradley, via email

I have successfully stored part used cartridges for several months using the following technique. I put some sticky tape over the ink outlets to stop them leaking and another small strip over the vent holes on the top I then keep them in a small airtight ‘sandwich’ container, which I leave in the fridge. The low temperature seems to help prevent the cartridges drying out. You should allow the cartridges to reach room temperature before using them.

Emily Taylor, via email 

I can offer Tina Bradley one such box for HP printer cartridges. Included are two cartridges, one black (?half full) and one colour (51625a) which is

95% full.  My printer died just after this was put in and I failed to ruthlessly junk them. If she emails me her address I can send then to her. 

William Hooke

GOLF NEWS

I prepare a newsletter for my local golf club using Microsoft Publisher and we have attempted to despatch copies to 200 plus members, who are on e-mail. Because of the wide range of recipients' computer systems, from Windows 95 to Windows XP and more, to date this has had to go out on a text-only basis with the resultant loss of our Castle logo and the clipart pictures I insert. Can anyone recommend a method that each and every recipient will be able read?

Paul Middleton, via email

Could I offer another solution to the question about newsletters? Most of your respondents took the pdf route, which is a good idea if you have to distribute the actual document. We decided to let the readers come to us.I am the Webmaster for the site of the Association of British Airways Pensioners. We have a Newsbrief distribution requirement but decided not to send the actual document to each member. By definition few of our members are on business links to the Internet. Therefore sending potentially large documents that basic e-mail programs like Outlook Express oblige one to download before other mail can be retrieved from the server could be inconvenient. Instead we created a basic Web Site - nothing flashy or clever, really very simple; it'll win no prizes - uploaded it to free space and now place the Newsbriefs there. The e-mails to members are sent using a licensed version of Infacta Group Mail and of course these are very short messages - simply telling members there's news to read.  That leaves the members free to browse the site at a time convenient to them.
Philip Howells

CHOIRWARE

Can anyone suggest software or a spreadsheet solution to help allocate rooms? We have a youth choir of 50 who visit other choirs (or host them). We always seek to place them in pairs in home stays. They are invited to list up to four friends with whom they'd like to share, in order of preference. There must be an easier way than named pieces of paper on the floor! Occasionally we want to allocate rooms of three so if it could cope with that, so much the better.

Phil Dunford, via email

I suggest the best way would be to using a language called PROLOG further details can be found in a book: Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence. Ivan Bratko, published byAddison Wesley.

This would be a good starting point and is used for setting out routing of airlines, and selection of goals. The key concept is to set out a Goal Required, i.e. a set of conditions that have to be satisfied and a routine to eliminate choices. Eventually you either get a solution (or several) or no result.
David Draper, Cardiff

CAN YOU HELP?

Can anyone help with scanning items from a supermarket checkout slip into a Psion pocket computer? My wife enters each item from the till receipt by hand recording the items into the appropriate sections. Does anyone know of a scanner that can read the bill then transfer the information into the Psion?

Stephen Payne, Menston, Ilkley

We are a small church charity with a website. I want to know: (a) the hit-rates on our pages; and (b): hit-rates on the individual audio selections on a particular page.

I know I could put counters on each page, for all the world to see, but I just want a sheet of management info for our internal use. Big companies must be able to buy the software but we don't want to get into that. Is there any way of doing it free/very cheaply? As an added bonus - would it be possible for me to specify users I don't want to be included in the counts?

Dick Gammage, via email

We own a small car rental firm – about a dozen cars -- and we are looking for software that will tell us what cars are available and when. All of the
systems we’ve looked at are far too sophisticated for our purposes.  Can anyone suggest a simple program that will tell us who has our cars and on what dates?
Keith Chapman, via email