Dorchester — Apr 29th 2008

The Dorchester group meeting on Tuesday 29 April, was ably hosted by John, who succeeded in navigating his way through a cornucopia of interesting items in the face of a lively audience, which included Euan, so recently liberated from the burdensome shackles of Administration, whose plangent joy at this release it was a veritable pleasure to behold.

Lionel opened the bowling, using the new WAGS projector, and showed us the merits of Mpegstreamclip, which can be downloaded from www.squared5.com. This useful programme appears to be the video equivalent of Graphic Converter. It appears to be able to read movies in many different formats, and save into most, can crop them, and convert from landscape to portrait format. Now how many videos have you seen in portrait view? It could well catch on!

We then held the draw for the two magazine subs, with which WAGS had been presented on account of two of the MUGs Photographic Competition winners being from our membership. The impartiality of the draw was guaranteed by having Euan pick the lucky tickets, with much conspicuous closing of eyes, and averting his gaze from the box. The winning entries can be seen on www.macusersuk.org, and the draw winners and their prizes will be announced in the WAGS Weekly Bulletin.

This was followed by Mark, who demonstrated the time saving benefits of using Data Detectors in Mail to populate iCal and Address Book, even if to obtain the most flexibility, it could be necessary to send e-mails to one's self. (This doesn't work with Snail Mail.) We also heard about Busysync, (www.busymac.com) which, for a small fee, allows multiple iCal and Google calendars to be synchronised over a network without recourse to •Mac.

After replenishing ourselves at the Colliton Club's welcoming bar, Mick was last man in, and explained how, with Garageband, and a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone and mac, it is possible to cause great irritation to innocent bystanders by the simple expedient of creating cacophonous ring tones, mixing Garageband music loops, microphone recordings of car crashes, and any old audio files which might come to hand. Although one might envisage this leading to an ASBO, if taken literally, his presentation gave a helpful, if brief, overview of the capabilities of Garageband.

Who darste say our meetings in Dorchester be melancholy occasions?
SR

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