Dorchester — Oct 9th 2012
Martin started the proceedings by telling us about 'Maintaining your Mac' and asking us why everyone else had more trouble with maintaining their Macs than he did, and wondering if it was because they were making life to complicated for themselves. His guiding principle was KISS - Keep it simple, stupid!
This, for him, means:
Don't run 3rd party maintenance applications, and be wary of 3rd party software that installs kernel extensions.
He is wary of clearing all caches, and of purging RAM if things appear to be running normally. He is also very wary of 3rd party software to enable customisation of the desktop. Many things can also be done which are more of a placebo than anything truly beneficial.
When things do break down, he advocates use of Disc Utility for OS10.4 onwards, rather than using Single User mode and the fsck command in Terminal.
He recommends starting with Repair Permissions, and then using Activity Monitor to quit any (non Root) processes which appear to be hogging resources, and then restarting the Mac.
If things are still not working properly, that is the time when it may be appropriate to go Techie, and search remedies using Google and/or the WAMUG or Apple forums. If the Techie impulse is otherwise irresistible, then the best thing is to run Windows or Linux software, which offers plenty of scope!
However, none of the above should be taken as an excuse not to make regular backups, using Time Machine and/or making a clone. The backups should be checked to see that they contain that which they purport to. Fitting more RAM was also advocated as an inexpensive means of improving sluggish performance.
After the break, Tom gave the results of a survey on slide scanners for use in converting 35mm slides into digital images. Some of these were not true scanners, but rather cameras which took a picture of an image formed from the slide. These were quick to operate (~2 sec.) as opposed to scanners (including flatbed scanners with slide adapters) which could take upwards of a minute. Most of the scanners have a USB connection to the computer; some scan directly to a memory card. In either case, editing can be done on the computer. He showed a table (which will be displayed on this website, when available) comparing different types of scanner, and had concluded that suitable scanners would cost in the region of £100-150, if bought for Club use.
Steve then showed some results from a (true) slide scanner, and from a setup to photograph slide images conventionally projected onto a screen, and compared these with the originals. Although the scanner was a rather old model, the results from this, and from the projection method were surprisingly good. However the former was slow, and the latter suffered from distortion.
Euan then illustrated how using Photoshop or iPhoto could correct for picture faults, either due to colour casts in the original slides, or as a result of the copying process. One recommendation was to capture the image as a .tiff (which is either in mac or PC format) or in .png format which is cross-platform. These formats are lossless, whereas the popular .jpg format uses lossy compression, which can produce visible artefacts, as he demonstrated. A sharpening filter can also help to improve definition.
It was also pointed out that an air blower can often be used with advantage, to remove dust from slides before scanning.
JSR
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