Page 12      Diablo Blue      September, 2000

Ever run out of ports on your machine? With all the new toys and dongles to hook onto our machines, I seem to always be fighting either the port or IRQ war. USB is nothing short of a godsend! Being able to plug and unplug devices into my machines without worrying about ports and interrupts is almost asking for too much. (Okay, things don't ALWAYS work, but it does mostly!). I love being able to move peripherals around to different machines or to put them away when I don't need them without the terror of re-cabling, etc.
So, when I learned about he Keyspan USB Parallel adapter, I was very interested. You see, I have a few printers and I like to use different printers for different applications. This cable allows me to hook a parallel printer to the USB port on my computer. What's the big deal? For those of us with parallel zip drives or Clik drives or other parallel (legacy) devices that demand and don't share a printer port (i.e. no pass through), this allows me to keep both devices up and running. I can hook up multiple printers without running out of interrupts, and I can keep my port stingy devices running as well. The cable provides bi-directional (IEEE-1284) compliance. You need a windows 98 or 2000 machine and a compatible printer. The list seems to cover most HP printers and many Epson, and Canon machines. There are a sprinkling of other machines on the list but the web site has a growing list of printers. Just because your printer isn't listed doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just may not have been tested. Installation is a snap with the provided CD and manual.
I tried it on my HPs and Epsons and had no problems. In fact, it works perfectly. My computer and printer never knew the difference. For $39.95 MSRP this thing is great.

At the August Windows SIG meeting Walt Parsons presented MailKing, an ageing but still useful e-mail client. While many e-mail clients such as Outlook and Eudora allow sending e-mail messages to groups of addresses, MailKing is the only one that allow the user to personalize the message and to send out the messages individually unless you buy a much more expensive program. This is especially important if you are sending out 20 or more messages. Some internet providers, and AOL in particular, have SPAM filters that will vaporize an incoming e-mail if there are more than a certain number of addresses for that provider in a group e-mail message. In the case of AOL the number is something less than 18. The sender is not notified that the message has not been delivered. This is very disconcerting if you are sending out meeting notices or an e-mail newsletter that people are waiting for. Ron Ogg sends out a notice to people who subscribe to the Internet version of Diablo Blue with the password for the current month's issue. He uses MailKing, which interfaces to the DVPC membership database which is in Access 97 format.
Each message can be personalized using information from the mailing list database such as the person's first and last name.
There is also a method for inserting text if certain conditions are met. For example it might be possible for Ron to include the notice to a person whose dues are due that month in his monthly Diablo Blue message.
The mailing list can be imported from various common database programs and from the contact list of programs like Outlook and Eudora. This mailing list then can then be filtered to tailor the message to a certain group of people. For example if the dues paid field show that the person has let their dues expire their e-mail address could be removed from the mailing list.
There are some shortcomings to the present version. The main one being that it can not read the current version of some database programs. For example Microsoft Access 2000 data base will not work. In these cases, the user has to export the mailing list as a comma-delimited text file.
The 3.0 version of the product is available from Message Media for $199.00. BUY.COM has version 2.0 available $39.00 and the upgrade to 3.0 is free by accessing the MessageMedia site. For further information go to:
www.messagemedia.com/solutions/mailking/