OVER 2 YOU 181 (18/05/04)

WINE LABELS

Can anyone suggest a way of making labels for bottles, including clip art and text, to make my home made wine look more professional?

Carol West, Welwyn Garden City

I have been making my own labels for several years using Microsoft Publisher and have found it very easy to use. You can add text (many different fonts as in MS Word), clip-art and pictures either direct from camera or scanner, or from file. All the above are inserted into 'Text' or 'Picture' boxes within the overall label frame and can be moved, rotated, enlarged or reduced. You can also use 'Border Art' to add decorative surrounds to the labels and of course a wide range of colours can be used for all the above options.

Mike Way, Rutland

I am a small-scale cider maker and use Avery Design Pro (www.avery.co.uk) to produce self-adhesive labels for my bottled products, printed onto inkjet address labels with a cheap Epson printer. The results have been greatly admired.I have tried a number of desktop publishing programs for this purpose and Design Pro is far and away the best. It will bring up templates of any of Avery's huge range of media designed for either laser or inkjet printing, or you can make your own custom template. There is a full range of text and graphics for importation, and useful facilities are one-touch centering in the frame - both vertically and horizontally - ready-made designs, print preview, and printer calibration for accurate line-up.Design Pro's only real fault is that there is no justification of text, merely left aligned, right aligned, or centred, but this is a minor drawback.
Roy Bailey, The Lambourn Valley Cider Company, Hungerford

One point that is worth considering if wine labels are to be produced on an inkjet printer is the question of waterproofing the ink if the wine bottles are going to be chilled. There's a useful article containing some ideas on this at http://www.grapestompers.com/

articles/wine_labels.htm#soggy

Michael Porter, via email

We bought some blank labels from the wine shop in Salisbury and then made a template in Word to create ‘Chateau Ogden 2004’ and then printed it off with a Citizen P-60 printer. I expect any simple printer will do the same with experimentation. It needed to be printed off a few times using A4 paper until I found the right positioning. The result was magnificent. We gave a bottle of our home made wine to a friend who was completely fooled and asked us where in France we were able to get ‘Chateau Ogden’. What fun!

Michael Ogden, Amesbury

POSTCODE ROUTE FINDER

My son needs often sends long hours travelling around districts by car looking at houses. His list of properties contains post codes and it would be wonderful if someone could suggest a computer program that could arrange the addresses in a sequence, to enable them reached in as short a time as possible.

Dr. Dale Beckett, via email

I use Travelmanager Great Britain by Andes BV (http://www.travelmanager.co.uk/) for all my route planning. It allows you to enter your point of departure, destination (for a round trip enter the same details) and intermediate points all by postcode or street address. When asked to plan the route, it will work out the most logical order and plot the route on the street level map. You can then print out the map, with all points shown and also print out a comprehensive set of directions. You can ask the software to plan the fastest route or the shortest route.

John Oats, via email

We provide solutions for this type of problem for the transport sector. If Dr Dale would like to get in touch I am sure that we could provide a cut down version of our routing software to suit.

Frank Jasper

NEGATIVE SCANNER

I have a large number of old black and white negatives, mostly 2 ½ x 2 ½ or 3 ½ x 2 ¼, which, although they are mostly over 50 years old, are in good condition and clearly defined.  They were taken before 35mm took over the world and I am trying to find a photo scanner, which will convert them on to my PC. So far all enquiries have led to 35mm only negative scanners, can anyone suggest a solution?

Tom Livingston

I have an Acer ScanPrisa 620UT scanner with an optional negative/transparency scan facility, and a range of masks. This particular item, originally at around £120, is now unfortunately only available on the second-hand market - with luck. It is a first class A4 scanner in all respects. 

Vic Hopkins, via email 

Make a screen of white card and illuminate it evenly with two halogen lamps. With a paper clip, support each negative in front of the screen. Take a photograph of the negative with a digital camera at highest resolution (using an inexpensive 'close-up' lens of about 2 dioptres if necessary). A simple jig to hold the negative in place will greatly assist matters. Import into photo software as above. I have dealt with thousands of such old photos - negatives and transparencies of all sizes - with great success.

Bernard Gerstein, via email

COMPUTER COLLECTION

It is my intention to start a modest collection of personal and home computers. Needless to say it will include early IBM and Apple models (which I already have) and simpler machines like the Sinclair Spectrum, but I would like suggestions for other less obvious but equally historic models, preferably ground breaking machines that were the first, fastest or most advanced of their day.  

Will George, via email

Simon Webb (Over 2 You May 7th) is mistaken saying that the ZX80 was the first sub £100 computer. It was preceded by the Sinclair MK14, based on the SCMP CPU chip. This came with 128 bytes of RAM, and you could build a cassette interface, which would read 128 bytes of data in less than one minute. It all sounds a bit laughable today.  SCMP machine code only, no BASIC, but when you added a bit more RAM and a keyboard, and a TV interface; it was, for me at the time, unbelievably marvellous!  And the cassette speed was much quicker than the alternative - typing it all in again.

John Wheater, via email

CAN YOU HELP

I want good quality white paper roll to use on my Epson 1270 (width 300mm) to print out family trees. The length of paper needed varies from tree to tree (typically 300mm x 850mm).  Photo quality paper roll is too expensive. So, where can I purchase 80g, 300mm wide smooth white paper roll to cut to length?
Peter Patilla, via email

I would like to put my company’s products onto a CD-ROM catalogue. I want to be able simply to put in the product data and pictures and then
have a program turn it into an easily browsed catalogue that will auto-start when inserted into a CD player. I expect to have to do some layout and graphic design, but I would prefer to avoid having to create the structure, produce a search engine and work out how to auto-start the CD. Is there such an application or possibly a plug-in for a web-authoring program that would do the job?

Colin Bignell, via email