Dorchester — Oct 13th 2009

John welcomed everyone to our meeting on 22 October, which was attended by 22 members. He was the first to present, and gave us a view of some of the features of Preview which were new to many of us. In addition to using it to view pdf files, and pictures, which seems to be how most use it, Preview has simple but powerful editing features. These enable pdf files to be annotated in various ways with the aid of a tool bar. Pictures can also be manipulated in a way which, whilst not providing Photoshop capabilities, enables operations such as re-sizing, cropping, and changing brightness and contrast, to be accomplished easily.

This was followed by Doug, who introduced us to Pastor, a donation-ware programme, which is designed to hold all of those passwords which it is so easy to forget. It can be used to generate new passwords as well. The passwords are stored in a file which is stored in any convenient place, and can be backed up, and also moved to, and used on, another computer. In use, the passwords are copied from Pastor, and then pasted in to wherever they are needed. As a competitor with Apple's Keychain, clearly it is a matter of judgement as to which to use, but Doug feels that, at least for him, Pastor is to be preferred.

Following the adjournment to the Colliton Club bar, Lionel then exposed us to a meticulous examination of his driving habits - at least the environmental impact thereof. The latest Fiat cars apparently come with a USB socket, data from which can be analysed by a computer (Mac or PC). The software is called EcoDrive, and is intended to identify faulty habits in areas such as gear changing and use of speed during the course of a journey. It can then make suggestions as to how improvements might be made. The impact of this over time can then be displayed by the programme.

The final presentation was by Euan, who, with the aid of smoke, mirrors, and some colourful slides, exposed us to the wonders of LightPeak, which, we were assured, would completely revolutionise things over the next year (or at most, decade) by using technology related to fibre optics to increase the rate at which information could be transferred between computers and also with other devices. Intel are developing this new technology, which is looking towards data transfer rates of 100 gigabytes per second over the next ten years, and anticipate that it will make existing network systems, such as USB and Firewire obsolete. It is Multiplexing which both enables these remarkable rates to be achieved, and also characterises the state of mind of those initiated into these mysteries.

The Q&A discussions were around the recently identified problems with guest access to a Snow Leopard account, the question of whether a mac benefits from some sort of regular maintenance routine, and, likewise, whether a laptop's batteries benefit from such a routine. On the first, people seemed to feel that Apple had things in hand, and would come up with a solution to this very rare problem. On the second, opinion was divided between those who thought maintenance unnecessary, and those who favoured the use of Onyx, or of the routines which it includes. On the third, the advice was to ensure that the battery is completely discharged, then recharged, about once per month.

JSR

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