OVER 2 YOU 171 (09/03/04)

SUBSCRIPTION SITE

I'm developing a website to run from home in my spare time for Italians learning English. While confident enough to put together a simple but functional site I have no idea how to set up a subscription system that would allow say six months' access for £20. Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced, reliable and easy to use method to accomplish this?

Gerard Dorrity, Turin, Italy

I have a similar website to the one proposed - mine is a course for older students (teenage to adult) who need help with spelling. I charge £20 for a year's access. This is handled by WorldPay who take credit or debit cards on its secure site (http://www.worldpay.co.uk/). It charges an annual fee of £150 plus around 5% of each transaction for card handling and fraud screening. It has a support system to guide you in integrating your site with its payment system.  It has all worked very smoothly for me.

Shireen Shuster, Linton on Ouse, York

If you are looking for an inexpensive solution I would suggest using one of the scripting language based membership and subscription programs. I use DreamAccount from www.dreamcost.com that claims to be the most feature
rich of the genre.  An example of this can be seen at www.Company-in-Site.co.uk. Others include Member Pro, Membership Client Pro, Locked Area Pro, Account Manager Pro.  All use the PHP scripting language that needs to be available on your server and I would suggest that you need a minimum level of programming skill in order to implement them. You also need to consider how payments are to be made; accepting credit cards is costly and PayPal, though individual transaction costs are high, offers a low-cost entry point.
Quentin Brodie Cooper, Camberley, Surrey

SQUARE DANCING

We are interested in American Square Dancing. At times, with people of varying aptitudes -- especially beginners, or when learning a new set of steps -- we need to be able to vary the tempo of the music by between plus or minus 5 to 30%.  This was easy to do with cassettes, Philips produced a deck with variable speed playback, but CDs present a problem with their essentially constant speed playback. Can anyone provide a solution, possibly by modifying a CD deck or transferring our music library to a PC?
Roger Avery, via email

All professional teachers of dancing have the same problem, and the solution is very simple. We teach Modern, Latin American and Old Time/Sequence as well as Freestyle dancing and it is often necessary to adjust the playing speed of a CD to allow for dancers' proficiency.  

The Portogram Company will supply a powerful unit, which plays CDs and cassettes, has a microphone facility and offers speed variation for CDs and cassettes over a very wide range, more than enough for any dancing style.  My wife and I have a Panasonic unit which offers exactly the same features, but such a modified unit will need to be bought from a Dance School Accessories Shop, such as DanceSport International or, by email, contact: wobbledanceenquiry@hotmail.com (Tel 01472 826267 or www.wobbledance.co.uk.

Dennis Tavener, East Grinstead.

SCRAP PARTS

Further to previous questions about disposing of old and obsolete PCs and piles of unwanted CD-ROMs, I am seeking creative or ecologically sound suggestions as to what to do with a growing collection of mice, speakers and keyboards. The chap at the local charity shop said they already had more than enough of them cluttering up the place and I am reluctant to throw them away in the general rubbish at the amenity tip. Are they good for anything, can they be recycled?

Kelly Michaels, via email

There are several charity organisations that would be glad to take your old
kit. Try Recycle-IT at http://www.recycle-it.ltd.uk/
David Raison, via email

FOODWARE

My wife is a school nurse, and healthy eating is 

a regular topic of interest. I used to have an old DOS 

program, from around 1990, called Dietplan. This was 

a database of foods, meals and ingredients, together 

with their calorific values, fat, carbohydrate and sugar 

contents etc. Ingredients could be combined to make 

meals, and the totals for that meal could be printed 

and also stored in the database as a new entry. 

New ingredients could be added using the information 

on their packets. I've looked everywhere for a 

Windows equivalent – can anyone help?

Mal Denny, via email

Your correspondent probably has a sizeable store of data, which he has collected for his Dietplan program.  If he is using Windows 98 or earlier, he can continue to use this program and run it in Windows.  Provided the

program is installed on his hard drive, he has several options:

1.  Double click on the Dietplan.exe icon, then (most likely) maximise the window which opens;

2.  Create a shortcut to the Dietplan.exe program and put it in a handy place on his desktop;

3.  Or, if he is feeling adventurous, he can set his Windows Start Menu to run his computer in DOS only.  As a dyed-in-the-wool Luddite who first became involved with computers when every byte of memory counted, this is my preferred option!

To do this, he needs to:

a.    Set his Windows file options to "show all files"

b.    Find the file MsDos.sys on the C: drive

c.    Left click on it, select "Properties" and clear the Read Only and Hidden boxes

d.    Open MsDos.sys using Notepad

e.    Under the [Options] heading, include the following lines:

        BootMulti=1

        BootMenu=1

        BootMenuDefault=1 or 5

        BootMenuDelay=5

        BootGUI=1

f.    Save and close MsDos.sys

g.    Reset the Read Only and Hidden properties.

The next time he starts his computer he will get a Windows Start Menu in DOS. The default option will be highlighted - 1 give straight into Windows, 5 gives DOS. The menu delay of 5 gives him 5 seconds to make his decision; he can set the time to any value, which he finds convenient. 

Julian Lee, via email

CAN YOU HELP

Can anyone recommend any animation software available as a download or reasonably priced package that would suit my 14-year-old son?  He is a gifted artist and particularly enjoys drawing cartoon characters. He uses an educational program called "Interactive Physics" to create objects and then animate them but really he would like something a bit more appropriate
for the job.
Henry Glasse, via email 

I am a very frequent traveller and like to record the distances I travel. I used to use my old Psion 5MX, enter my location and destination and it would give me the total distance in miles. My new iPaq does not have this function. Can anyone suggest any suitable software, or a web site, that can calculate the distance between 2 locations, worldwide?
David Hardy, via email