In the course of newsgroup surfing, you may find yourself wanting to access some of the pictures uploaded to the various newsgroups. Since binary programs cannot be stored in a newsgroup, they must be encoded into ascii text for transmission. This means you need to decode them if you wish to view them. To start you will need several programs to set up your decoding scheme. Do this first and you will always have it. Depending on your system, go to the Public Download Area 'gpda' and look under the various systems' compression and conversion files. You'll need one called 'PKUnzip' and another called 'UU-Decode/Encode'. Download these files to your computer and run PKUnzip.exe and it will create the necessary unpacking programs for the future. Use PKUnzip to unpack UU-Encode/Decode. This will create the necessary decoder that you'll need to decode the files from the newsgroups. Download a good viewing program from 'viewers' in which to see the picture when you're done. Now go to your files directory (gfiles) and enter 'News'. From there, type gnews and go to the newsgroup with the pictures. Press 's' for save and name each file you want. It will ask you if you want a filetype added to the end, to this answer 'no'. For multi-part files, save them as the same name and the system will ask you if you want to append the file (add the parts together). Answer 'y' for yes. When you get a file or files, quit the newsreader and you'll be back in the 'News' directory. Tag each file (if more than one), press 'f', '3', [ENTER/Return], 'd'. This will zip the files up to save time and space for downloading to your computer. Save the resulting 'zipped' file to 'News/filename.zip. Use your left arrow key to move back one page to where your tagged files are. Type 'r' and 'y' to remove the tagged files as you no longer need them. Highlight the new zip file and press 'd' for download and send them to your computer. Try to use ZModem if you can because it works better, is automatic and if you get cut off in the middle of a transfer, it will pick up where it left off via ZModem Resume/Crash Recovery. Set this to 'automatic' in your comm program's options. Once you're ready, type 'UUdecode xxxxx.xxx (whatever filename) and it will create a GIF, JPeg, MPeg or .UUE program. If it's .UUE, you'll need to decode it a second time as sometimes they double encode files, if they're adult material. If it's MPeg (Motion Picture Engineering Group), you're going to need a lot of memory in your computer because these are actually mini-movies. JPegs (Joint Picture Engineering Group) are the most common and display the most quality but many viewing programs have difficulty with them. GIFs were the most common until JPeg came along. CompuServe, which owns the GIF format, recently slapped a duty on all GIF creating software and the world has moved towards JPeg. You may also run into Mime and Base64 encoding in which you will need MPack, available in the MS-DOS and OS/2 PDAs. Some files are zipped besides encoded so you will need to use the PKUnzip program as well. HINT: To make life easier later on, rename PKUnzip.exe to zz.exe and UUdecode to uu.exe and then hide them (attrib +h - in MSDOS). Then when you want to decode something, you simply type 'uu picture' or whatever it's called. To unzip something would be 'zz picture' or whatever. It shortens the commands you have to remember. If you using Windows, then these files can be modified to fit your desktop.