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Sector Sources of more info

• Computanews from LASA. Site includes extracts from bi-monthly magazine, . Targeted mainly at those involved with advice work, but much of it is of wider relevance.

• Circuit Riders. Lasa are closely involved in developing this concept in Britain (the terminology is American but the idea has been around here for a while - IT support shared amongst a range of voluntary organisations). There's a UKRiders discussion forum which those with this responsibility may well find useful.

• Co-operative Systems do a monthly IT InfoBulletin that is aimed at the NGO sector, emailed to their user base, and also available online.

• The ICT Hub's knowledgebase (taken over from Lasa) provides advice on various IT and internet issues

• See the Functional Support bodies listed under IT.

Issues raised

The following have been sourced from email lists as UKRiders, NACVS's ITnet. Currently in order of processing:

• Bristol Wireless A community network using wireless technology, in Bristol. See Links page for resources.

Other useful stuff

NB Mainly American in origin.

TechSoup ('a comprehensive collection of information available for nonprofit staff') a professional and focused resource with sections on developing and managing a Community Technology Centre, relevant news and a monthly email newsletter. Pages noted: Total Cost of Ownership - The hidden costs of technology.

Global eRiders (see Circuit Riders above) have released the first version of their eRider Starter Kit. Aimed at sector IT support organisations and consultants, it could be of wider use given the wealth of checklists, forms, and guidance.

Nonprofit Tech You may find particular tech tips more quickly on this site, but not as well-produced info.

NetAction's explanation of why data encryption is of relevance, and how to use it.

Software Technology Review is from an educational institute. Contains "the latest information on more than 69 software technologies", and is useful to get to grips with issues those with marginal technical knowledge hear about in the trade press etc.

TechTarget is a good place to find explanations of techie terms.

Text related Services

Translation and language services

Translation facility Babel Fish is now on Yahoo. This was for French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (both directions) and Russian to English when we checked (Mar 01). Put in the address of the web page you want to translate, or it can also translate (a limited amount of) plain text (do a copy and paste from a document).

We are reliably informed that ajeeb will translate into Arabic - you will need Arabic fonts installed, and select the English option. Will process whole pages and web sites apparently.

Braille HotBraille As the web site no longer seems to function, this is probably out-of-date. Was a free Braille service , using the US Postal "Free Matter for the Blind" Service (sends items Third Class - 2 to 15 working days worldwide). Up to 2 pages of Braille, approx 250 words, can be converted free.

TechSoup has an excellent round-up of facilities and issues on language translation (Mar 01). They mention Japanese and Chinese online services, as well as email translation. Another fascinating place to look is the Open Road directory: "a community resource providing a starting point for surfing web pages in different languages" from an Australian library service.

Displaying different alphabets/languages

The following have been suggested on a charity forum:

It is now possible to display pages in multi-byte and bi-directional languages, for example Japanese and Arabic, by selecting different character sets. Unicode includes practically all the characters for every language, but results in larger file sizes. Also see WorldWideWeb Consortium International section and Microsoft.

See Multikulti as an example of a multi-lingual information service.

Text Reader ReadPlease 2000 is free text-to-speech software for PCs running Windows. The download is 6.9Mb. We've tried it out a little - acceptable quality, although it didn't recognise accents (maybe Pro version does).

Adobe has a downloadable MakeAccessible Plug-in that creates a tagged Adobe PDF (Acrobat) file from an untagged PDF file which makes it readable by a screen reader.

Use and checking of IT equipment

Using basic PCs LowEndPC was a useful web site for those with, or considering accepting donations of, old computer equipment, but seesm to have gone, summer 05. (LowEndMac has existed for some time). Information on available software, for example the Arachne web browser which works on DOS (pre-Windows) machines. A little knowledge of the jargon (with a US flavour) may be necessary to get the best from the site.

Check your connection There's a good set of tools for measuring your Internet connection speeds at PC PitStop, alogn with others to check out PC performance.

Check your systems to see how open they are to attack via the internet. Qualys (used to provide BrowserCheck) has some free tools to check system weaknesses that would enable somebody to gain access your computer - probably best to be selective on the tests and resulting action. SecuritySpace - a more thorough check of internet access in terms of how somebody could get entry to your network/computers.

Check Software Identify odd files when trying to sort out hard disk problems. Filext gives you an alphabetical list of file extensions and which programs they are associated with. Windows/DOS only from a quick look.

Check Virus Hoaxes at Sophos.