Dorchester — Jul 10th 2012

Mark opened the meeting. 15 members were present the floods having prevented many from travelling.

Tom told us about motion induced blindness - Drivers advised to keep moving eyes and not become fixated on one spot, otherwise danger of losing peripheral vision. This can be a danger for elderly motorists, and Tom wanted to show us a computer simulation to demonstrate this. Unfortunately, the Colliton Club network proved unequal to the task, and so we had to take his word for it.

He then tempted fate by telling us about FaceTime (which supersedes iChat). This is a free Apple download which works with PCs as well. However this could not be demonstrated 'across the table' on the Colliton Club network, although Jim was successful in achieving an international connection with Spain at the meeting.

Mick then spoke on iCal. The Lion version is missing one or two useful features (e.g.mini calendars in side bar). He discussed sharing calendars, and creating new ones. He explained about Subscriptions, Birthdays (from Address Book), and the automatic entry of events foam email. There are also some useful third party apps on the App Store. Calendar app shows summary calendar viewable from menu bar. Calendar Bar app lists simply the next few days, also Calendar PA and QuickCal have similar functionality.
There followed some discussion about Reminders. These appear as a separate app on ios, but are integrated with iCal on OSX, where 'Show To Do List' in the View menu opens a sidebar where reminders can be entered, viewed, and managed.

Euan then explained how his virtual meanderings around Norway were sometimes brought back to the real world by crashes of Googe Earth. When this happened, he found that the Activity Monitor showed one unexpected process using a lot of CPU. Activity Monitor can select and delete this process, which he has found, cures the problem. However, this is not all! Activity Monitor has also a 'show memory usage' option which shows a pi chart of usage on that app's icon in the Dock, permitting the situation to be continuously monitored. Another option for rectifying matters is to open Terminal and 'purge' which frees up memory and can stop problems of this type. Jim told us that he had also experienced problems with Image Capture and HP research processes impeding Shut Down. These, when stopped in Activity Monitor, allowed things to proceed as normal.

Mark told us about Metadata. This can be defined as Structured data about data - eg the data on publishing and copyright found on the fly leaf of a book. Metadata can reside with the data, or as an attachment. On the Mac, Resource Forks are sometimes used in this way. The data can often be viewed; in iPhoto can click on i to display metadata. In Preview click cmd-i. Preview also shows EXIF data on images produced by a camera. Picasa also has a display window showing extensive data, and allows geotagging using map (as does iPhoto, but at a lower spatial resolution, and also add tags, which can be picked up by Spotlight. Aperture has a tooltip which shows metadata.

The meeting closed with a discussion on reproducing 35mm slides in digital form, by scanning the slide, by using a device which integrates a projector and a camera, or by taking a photograph directly of a projected screen image. The question of whether it would be useful for WAMUG to purchase some equipment was also discussed, along with the question of equipment type, cost, and quality. The Treasurer identified that such matters as insurance would also need to be considered, and the concision was reached that more information was required, and would be sought to inform the next meeting which is in September.

Steve R

Comments

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Mark Ford said…

During the meeting someone asked about metadata standards and I said I would send them .. but I am blowed if I can remember who. In case they should see this then a good place to start is here.

Eleanor Spenceley said…

I am concerned about running 'purge' to clean up your Mac RAM. I would argue the Kernel knows better how to manage memory from applications which it has freed without the user having to monitor RAM usage and running 'purge'. It reminds me of OS 9 when memory had to be managed, we've come a long way since then.

There's a good description about 'Inactive memory' at the bottom of this thread by 'Camelot'.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2446150?start=0&tstart=0

I would argue any gains in memory and performance are more like placebo effect rather than any real (short/medium term) benefit.

If your Mac is running short of memory all the time, then it would be better to quit unused applications (with large memory footprints, like Safari) or better still, for you to get more RAM than trying to out do Mac OS X own memory management routines...

Euan Williams said…

Two points:
1. CPU overactivity had nothing to do with Google Earth but was probably more to do with the Thunderbolt Software 1.2 Update which caused everyone some grief (just before the WWDC this year). It has never happened before nor since. However sometimes extra fan noise is due to a runaway PID which is easily fixed by using Disc Activity to close it, and this worked for me.

2. I found that my Google Earth crashes tended to leave some corrupt code in RAM which caused GE to crash again when it was re-opened. The use of the terminal command > purge < has always cleared this problem, and is very useful in this context. I agree with Martin's remarks about not clearing RAM under other circumstances and Camelot's discussion remarks are useful. However I do find it interesting to see how RAM usage alters under different software loads.

Perhaps it was the weather… or the Euro… or something… Anyway a big thank you to Steve for doing the meeting minutes ;~)
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