You may find that the following e-mail-to-fax services are a little funky, sometimes unreliable, or downright unusable. But the upside is, they're free! (To be honest, you'll probably find that they all work pretty well, but I do hear the occasional complaint about unreliable services. I just thought I'd warn you.)
The fax machine, like electronic mail, has helped revolutionize how we work. Businesses large and small send and receive faxes (short for facsimiles) any time a copy of a document is needed quickly on the other side of town, or the other side of the planet. Faxing has some advantages over electronic mail—you can easily send images and, more notably, your recipient doesn't need to be wired to the Internet to receive a fax. A phone line and an inexpensive machine or fax modem is all it takes.
Fax machines are devices that can send a copy of a printed page over a telephone line to another fax machine. Standard faxes work by "scanning" the page to transmit for light and dark areas. The machine converts the tonal values to sounds and sends them over a phone line to a recipient machine that converts the sounds back into light and dark tones and prints them on paper.
Although fax machines have been in popular use since the 1970s, the technology for turning the printed page into sound was invented hundreds of years ago. Not until the invention of the telephone and the proliferation of computers and microchips, did fax machines become a practical method of information exchange.
Here's the best part: because you're on the Internet, you don't even need a fax machine to send faxes. That's right—you can send a fax without using a fax machine or one of those fancy New-Age fax modems. There are several services for sending a fax via electronic mail. So, if you need to send a note to a friend or an associate who's not online, you can do so without logging out of your Net account.
Note: Although you may think fax machines are just a staple for big business, small offices and home-based businesses have also discovered their usefulness. If the current trend continues, by 1995, 30 percent of all U.S. homes will have a fax machine.
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Some of these services are free, run as experiments or by hobbyists. Others are commercial services that charge a fee for every fax you send. As you might expect, the quality and coverage of these services can vary considerably. The free services all have limited coverage areas: most span only a city or a few area codes. The commercial services often cover wider areas, but are (of necessity) more expensive.
So, how do you send a fax via e-mail? Read on. The following information discusses eight services that will let you do just that. And, since this is e-mail, you can send your fax to multiple destinations, or even a combination of fax machines and regular e-mail recipients. Be sure to notice that the procedure is not standardized because each service operates a little differently from the rest.
All of these services let you send plain old ASCII text. Some of them can even handle PostScript documents, should you want to send a fax with fancy formatting or graphics. But unlike a "real" fax machine, all of these services can only send information that is stored in your computer: that hand-written letter from Aunt Zelda and your kid's finger-paint artwork just can't be sent in this manner (unless, of course, you scan it in to your computer and convert the graphic to a PostScript document—I don't even want to think about that.). If you just want to send unformatted documents created with your word processor, you've got it easy
Ping uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to send messages across the network.
Most of the Internet tools (Telnet, FTP, Finger, Gopher, World Wide Web, and so on) communicate across the network using the Internet's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP is a complex protocol that breaks messages up into packets, sends them over the network, and puts them back together again at the other end. During transmission, packets may be lost, duplicated, or delayed, and TCP also includes mechanisms for detecting and dealing with these conditions.
Some applications, however, don't require all the complexity of TCP, so the Internet supports two other, simpler protocols: User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
Ping requests, for example, always fit into a single packet, and it is no big deal if that packet is lost, because the originating application can always try again a few seconds later if no response is received the first time.
Ping checks to see if another host is reachable by sending it a series of ICMP ECHO_REQUEST messages, and listening for the responses. All Internet hosts are required to respond to ICMP ECHO_REQUEST messages, so if you can't get through to a host with Ping, then it is pretty much guaranteed that none of the other Internet applications (such as Telnet) will work either.
Ping is one of the most basic Internet tools. It checks to see whether another machine on the network is reachable from your own host by sending it a message and waiting for a reply.
The original BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) version of Ping is quite terse in its output
Here is a camera that knows when to capture smiles. The Olympus µ820 will help you record smiling faces of your loved ones with its unique Smile Shot Scene feature.
The Smile Shot Scene mode can trigger the shutter button when a smile on a human face is detected. During testing, the mode takes just a couple of seconds to scan the frame of your face and snaps right after you show your teeth. While a smile has to be wide and curvy for the Olympus µ820 to recognize, with a little teeth bared, it quickly reacts.
The special feature also seems to work better when the subject is closer or zoomed up close. Otherwise, the camera might take a bit more time to find the face in its frame.
Another cool part about this feature is that it works for shots with multiple subjects in it, though it does trigger the shutter when only one of the people in the frame smiles.
Apart from the Smile Shot Scene feature, there are many other cool features aboard the Olympus µ820. With any µ series, you can expect each model to perform in rugged conditions with its weatherproof body. The same goes for the Olympus µ820, which works well come rain or shine.
The Olympus µ820 design is further enhanced by the eight-megapixel charge-coupled device and Olympus lens that comes with 5X optical zoom, as opposed to 3X which is considered a standard offering by cameras in this class.
To access menu items and review your digital files, the Olympus µ820 comes with a 2.7-inch HyperCrystal liquid crystal display.
As far as form factor goes, the camera is easy to grip. And with buttons grouped to one side, you can even operate it single-handedly.
With the Image Stabilisation mode and Shadow Adjustment technology, getting sharp, rich pictures is easy with the Olympus µ820. Shadow Adjustment technology is great for photographing dark backgrounds while another technology, BrightCapture, enhances the images taken under low-light conditions by adjusting the sensitivity level. Try taking photos outside at night under a full moon with no flash, you will get a good sense of how well the camera reproduces the different hues of shadowed and dimmed areas.
Also, the TruePic III image processing engine enhances photo realism and at the same time makes the camera work faster even when capturing photos as big as 3,264 by 2,488 pixels. Indeed, you can record shots one after another swiftly, or make use of the Sequence Shot mode which snaps at seven frames per second (fps).
For still shot recordings, there are many Scene mode options to choose from. Just a little bit of time is needed to get familiar with what each setting can produce. Otherwise, items such as ISO setting, white balance and focusing system can be set according to your preference.
A mode that will be useful for close-up shots is Super Macro, which lets you point the lens as close as three centimetres towards the subject. And there are post-capture features which allow simple editing.
You can also shoot video clips and get output of 640 by 480 pixels at 30fps. At such a high setting, you will find little jarring as you play back the files on the computer monitor or TV set.
The supplied software is a standard offering that will help you download, edit and organise your photos and videos easily. Interface cables are supplied as well, so the only extras you might want to ask from the vendor should you buy the model is a big-capacity xD-Picture Card to match the camera’s eight-megapixel capability.
