Beaminster — Mar 4th 2014

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 many members to the need to have more than one back-up and told us of the various ways of achieving this. He dealt with physical storage - i.e. DVDs and external hard drives - together with the wisdom of having one back-up off-site in case of major problems such as fire, burglary and flood. He went on to talk about the convenience of backing up to the various cloud systems, starting with iCloud. The main disadvantage of using these was the slow speed at which data can be uploaded – it would take as long as two whole days to upload the contents of an average hard drive! So using such services would effectively limit what could be stored from a practical point of view. And of course with many cloud storage facilities being based in other countries there was no guarantee that the privacy of a persons stored material would be respected. Nevertheless we were all made very aware of the need to back-up!
Diana followed, showing us how she is dealing with failing eyesight with the aid of built-in items in the Mac OS, from a speaking clock to facilities for enlarging the cursor and text in any application. She also showed that it is possible to have text read back - ideal for proof-reading and particularly handy for checking the transfer of data to spreadsheets - and the converse, of being able to dictate to the Mac and have the dictation appear as printed text. This latter is available as part of Mavericks, but needs an external application, such as Dragon Dictate for earlier versions of the OS. It also needs some training to have oneʼs own voice and accent recognised and correctly translated, but Diana showed how it is possible to build a list of preferred words, and their spelling.
All in all a very good meeting!

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