Fareham — Jan 28th 2012

Our first meeting in the New year saw the Fareham section meeting in a new location, the Portchester Community School in White Hart Lane, Portchester.

We also were pleased to welcome two new people so that we had 11 people participating in the meeting.

The meeting kicked off with Alan Clemmy helping the group to setup so that we could contact the internet by introducing some of us to the concept of Locations.

Mick Burrell then introduced the topic of FTP and hosting of web pages, this issue has to be addressed by the sunsetting of the MobileMe iDisk storage facility later this year.
Mick describe how he hosts his web sites with a company called Easily who also registered the domain name he uses. He advised the attendees to check with their ISPs to see if they would provide any web space as part of the service.
He uses an FTP and file synchronizing program called Transmit to maintain his web site.

Other hosting companies are available

Lionel Ogden then shared his experiences of the new iCloud. The demise of MobileMe later this year is forcing iDisk /MobileMe users to adopt new strategies.
He has used the iCloud for syncing of contacts, bookmarks and calendar. He found that limitations with data backup as the document were not continuously backed. The use of Dropbox was found to be a more useful back up solution for documents being updated.
Lionel has not used the photo sharing facilities.

iTunes has quite extensive use of iCloud syncing all bought tracks to the cloud and has a fee based offering for other sourced music.

iCloud is based on a premise of fast internet connections with large or unlimited bandwidths to enable the user’s data to be cloud centric rather than laptop located.

iCloud requires the Mac to be running Lion and IOS devices to be at IOS version 5

The meeting then reviewed how well the room work for us and how we would arrange it for future meetings.

In the February meeting we are planning to look at the key programs in the Utilities folder and also spend some time demystifying Terminal.

Comments

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Andrew Banks said…

Derek

I have been though the Utilities, and listed what I think are the most useful.

Bluetooth File Exchange
Disk Utility
Grab
Keychain Access
Network Utility
System Information
Terminal

Out of these my top 3 would be Terminal, Keychain Access, and Disk Utility. The others I have listed as they might me helpful to some of the other members. At the next meeting I intent to talk about the Terminal Application, and using it to access the Darwin backend of OS X. I intend to show how to use commands to access, manage, and work with files and folders in terminal. We all now and again seek help, and sometimes the answers refer to using commands in terminal. I know this can be daunting to some of us, as it takes us away from the comfort of the Finder and other graphical applications. However this talk is about giving us the confidence to embrace the terminal, without been scared. Yes it very powerful, but unix will not allow us to destroy our system easily, even when using the terminal window.

There is enough material here to be useful for other talks though out the year, and should provide us with useful information. I am more than happy to do Disk Utilities later in the year, and maybe other members would be happy to show case any that they use. I recently used this application to get me out of a hole caused by hardware failure, and will be prepared to pass on these experiences.

Regards
Andy

Derek Wright said…

There has been a change of plan for the February meeting. Andy will be required to go into work and so will not be able to give a talk on the use of Terminal. The talk will be rescheduled to the March meeting.

WE will still discuss Utilities.
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