Andy introduced to the 6 members the techniques available at system boot time to help diagnose and solve problems (not that there are any problems with OSX - honest).
What is involved is pressing a combination of keys during the boot up or IPL process.
This then enables the user to perform various diagnostic actions to either remove the problem or to bypass the problem.
Apple have provide description of the process…
Read more…
Lionel surveyed the different ways of doing backups, confident in the knowledge that we all do regular backups one way or another, said he with a knowing smile! A common method is to use Time Machine, or 3rd party software such as SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to back up to an external hard disk. While reliable in use, there were hazards such as burglary, fire and flood as well as accidental deletion of a vital…
Read more…
The meeting was opened by David with 22 members present.
Martin began proceedings with a discussion on Mavericks and reasons to upgrade to this. All but five present used this. Security is a good reason to upgrade, but there are many others. The features of each version are summarised on Wikipedia. 29% of Windows users are still using Windows XP. Windows is difficult to update. Mac only so if users customise software, or…
Read more…
The April 1st meeting at Beaminster was, by the standards of the group, quite small with 15 people attending. We were given another of Mick Burrell’s crystal clear presentations, showing us how to set up both iCloud and Dropbox on Macs and mobile devices and then how to synchronise or swap files between any of our machines. Saving files in these locations allows them to be accessed not only by their owner, but…
Read more…
John Hooper gave a talk to the five other members on the use of keystroke shortcuts and other techniques to improve productivity when using the Mac.
The Mac UI (User Interface) enables the user to achieve a given function in several ways and given the number of attendees we all had our own preferred way of achieving a given result. However on several occasions John introduced us to even more efficient ways of completing…
Read more…
A very lively meeting where Annie gave us a splendid demo of an really useful OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application and how she is able to make a good use of it to help her work Annie is now using one of the latest - PDF OCR X = and put it through its paces for us where she explained how it can be used to word search a PDF file or convert to a text file to…
Read more…
Tony (Still) gave us a master class on page layout. Unsurprisingly, he used Pages! He told us he was familiar with the 4.3 version and thought it very good, but at Alan’s behest he had used the current and recent 5.1 version for this talk. This is very different from 4.3 and lacks some its useful facilities (eg. Roman numerals) that could be critical to a particular project; he hoped…
Read more…
John introduced the meeting with 21 members present.
Euan began proceedings by showing two films which he had prepared, the first taken at the Dorset County Museum of a demonstration of a 3-D printer, which formed part of a PhD research project exploring the application of this technology to enhance the museum experience, and which was being used to reproduce archaeological artefacts using a plastics medium.
The second film was…
Read more…
There was an excellent turn-out for the meeting at Beaminster on Tuesday night. Twenty three people came to listen to Lionel and Diana.Three new faces plus Barry Welch usually seen at The Dorchester meetings and one unexpected one - Andy Banks who is normally at the Fareham meeting drove three hours to be with us, and it is a pity that he had so short a time at the meeting.
Lionel woke up…
Read more…
First up any problems and queries
Brian presented an introduction to iStudio Publisher a low cost page layout application priced under £30 starting with setting up the document then placing shapes entering text into a shape filling the shape with a picture and text
Text can be made to runaround any shape along a curved line and a spiral
Creating a page layout with text and pictures
Mick…
Read more…