Dorchester — Aug 9th 2016

A quick check round the 17 members present showed a good level of backup procedures. Quite a few use Time machine on a non-continuous basis and others had secondary backups of photos and other files. Some members used drive partitions for clones and Time Machine backups on external drives. Mick who has business documents on his computer keeps a backup off-site in case of fire or other disaster. There was a discussion about cloud storage and the fact that applicable leglisation depends on the juridical location of the servers. There have been instances where the FBI have shut down servers and refused access to users. However systems like Dropbox with huge coverage are unlikely to become inaccessible and your Mac keeps a full duplicate of all Dropbox files.

Referring to a question raised by Gill last month, David pointed out that in Photos App on the Mac (in the “All Photos” folder) photos are sorted by the date they were added but in the “Photos” folder they are sorted by the date taken. However that did not answer Gill’s problem since, whether taken on her camera or her iPhone, the photos were not sorted anywhere by the date taken.  While discussing Apple’s Photos App, David showed how to include additional adjustments by clicking on the (blue) ’Add’ button when editing with the Adjustment function.

We took a look at ‘Mondo’ one of a number of new Challenger Banks operating through Apps on smartphones in Beta phase. It is necessary to preload the card but the App provides instant information on your balance, listing transactions and allocating them to specific expenses e.g. Groceries, Transport, Eating Out.  (Mondo was granted a UK banking licence two days after this meeting.) Various other Apps coming under the general heading Fintech were discussed. We also looked at ‘JustPark’ and ‘CityMapper’ for planning journeys by Public Transport in London. TFL also offer a good similar App. Users can have more than one fingerprint sample on an IOS device, and Georgia pointed out that it is recommended to have more than one sample of the same finger.

Back to the Mac, David showed how to add pdf documents straight from the Finder or from their thumbnail sidebars either complete or selected pages to the thumbnail side bar of the assembled document. Photos can also be quickly converted to pdf using Preview so that they can be added as pages.

Euan completed the evening by encouraging the use of Tags which are much more flexible than the simple six colours shown by default. By opening the Get Info window on a document one can enter a Keyword as a tag. These are added to the 6 colours as a findable tag for any file. A document can have multiple tags. Revealing tags in the Finder sidebar will list some (or all) current tags and clicking on any tag keyword will produce all the documents given that tag when a simple tap on the spacebar will reveal the contents. Very useful.

Comments

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Michael Corgan said…

"add pdf documents straight from the Finder or from their thumbnail sidebars either complete or selected pages to the thumbnail side bar of the assembled document." - Can't quite follow that! Could it be re-phrased?
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