Dorchester — Apr 9th 2019

Mick showed us how useful and flexible Apple’s voice assistant Siri can be. A simple request about the weather in Andover was easily answered but so also was the rather more indirect question “do I need to take my umbrella if I go for a walk this afternoon in Andover. Siri can be used to control many aspects of the Apple Device; sticking with the Mac, Mick got Siri to open an application. He invited Siri to complete mathematical calculations, currency and dimension conversions etc. Siri speaking the answer aloud. Given a general question Siri offered a number of relevant web pages. Mick encouraged everyone to have a go.

We watched a short and surreal stop-frame movie Andy Prendergast had made with his Father as an introduction to the Andy’s demonstration of how to make a stop frame movie. Andy involved all 20 members in making the movie. He used (and strongly recommended) a good tripod-mounted camera and a remote or cable shutter release to minimise camera shake. With each photo being taken against a fixed background for this movie, it was important to avoid any changes to the background. The first shoot was based on six people sitting on a row of chairs in front of the camera. Between each shot a simple change: a hat, hands on knees, hands raised together etc. Then with everyone moving along a single seat, one person left the last seat while another took the vacant seat at the start of the row. A second sequence followed with everyone in a line disappearing one by one through the wall and then reappearing further along. We broke a for a well deserved drink.

After the break, while Andy worked on creating the movie from the still photos taken, Euan explained the use of Tags, a Finder feature often ignored by users. Any document or folder can be given a tag or tags. Plain coloured tags have existed for many years, but now we can use words too. The left sidebar of the Finder window includes tags with the usual show-hide option. Click on say, the red tag and all documents and folders you have tagged red will be displayed. But Euan was keen to explain is that you can create as many alpha-numeric tags as you like and can tag any file/folder with as many tags as you want. Tags are easily modified by control-clicking to bring up an editing menu. As you save a file you can insert an existing or new tag. To add a tag to an existing file of folder control click, select tags and either choose an existing tag or create a new one. You can chose, and add as many tags as you like each separated by a comma, but avoid adding a space after! Opening the ‘Get Info’ window for a file or folder shows “Add Tags” at the very top which works in just the same way.

Then it was time to see the results of the stop-frame experiments which were excellent and very entertaining!

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