Welcome to the
Model Engine News Collection
on DVD

The idea for placing all of the Model Engine News web site on a compact disk came from suggestions made by a number of my friends and readers. It was never planed this way, but over the years, the size of the web site has, like Busterfer Cat, grown quite uncomfortably large. Some day we'll all be blessed with permanent connections to the Internet at giga-bit bandwidth, right? But until that wondrous day arrives, many readers find browsing at modem speeds time consuming, expensive, and frustrating. Providing everything on optical media for "off-line" access means you don't have to fuss around (too much ) to locate a vital piece of information, and you don't have to think twice before clicking on a thumb-nail when you want to view the full size versions of a photograph.

A CD of the site was prepared in August, 2005. The web site content filled about two-thirds of a standard 800MB CD, so a "cookie" of extra pages and images was added to bring the disk to within 8KB of full. Less than 18 months later, the CD was barely enough to contain the web site, let alone the cookie! Time to move to a higher density media: DVD.

The CD or DVD also provides you with some insurance against the sudden disappearance of my web site from the Internet, or me from the earthly plane, if it comes to that. While I certainly plan to go on creating new pages every month, who knows what the future holds; that light I see before me in the tunnel may well be the approaching train!

At the time I last edited this page in July of 2010 while hospital-bound, the DVD contained 1,574 separate HTML pages and 17,087 images—although roughly 30% of the images are thumb-nail versions larger size ones. There are 28 complete CAD plan sets, all drawn by me (I must be mad) in printable PDF format, and we won't even talk about the " cookie". You can access most of this straight from the disk using the menu at the left. Some parts won't work unless you setup your own local web server to execute code that makes things like the Site Search work. I hope the Installation Instructions prove to be more of a help than a source of frustration to those of you who choose to do this. The DVD even includes the binary distributions Win32 users will need (Linux users don't need nothin'). Updates and corrections to the DVD content can be downloaded here.

Speaking of downloading updates, in case you forget how to get into the Members' pages on the Model Engine News website, the user name you are asked for will be the email address you used at the time you joined. As our server is Linux based, this is case sensitive, so enter your email address in all lower case. The password is the serial number of your original disc. This is printed on the disc, and encoded onto it as well. Upgrade discs will have new serial numbers, but your "password" will not change if and when you order an upgrade, or three.

Important Note for Microsoft Internet Explorer Users: Your browser will probably decide to disable "scripting" on pages loaded from the DVD. This means you won't see the navigation link to the cookie. Other things, like the Engine Finder, will appear to not work as advertised either. The cure is to click on the yellow bar that has magically and quietly appeared under the browser's tool-bar and select the "...allow blocked content..." option. Trust me, good things will happen...

Regardless, I hope you find enjoyment, information and the occasional smile amongst this tangled mess!

Ron Chernich, Brisbane, July 11, 2010.