Dorchester — Jun 9th 2009
Mark then demonstrated Yep! from www.yepsoftware.com This useful programme costs $34, and searches for all the pdf files on a Mac, and identifies them in a searchable archive. It will even read a scanned in document to enable a search of words in the document. As if that was not enough, Yep enables web pages off the internet to be downloaded using Safari as pdf files.
After a short adjournment to the Colliton Club bar, Euan demonstrated that he had made good use of his new broadband connection by showing a movie which explained some of the impressive results which Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine which uses numerical computation to respond to queries, can provide. (Remembering, as was several times reiterated, that this is still a work very much in progress.) Although Wolfram Alpha is able to provide the answer to 'the meaning of life, the universe and everything', it was unable to provide information about the weather at the time and location of Euan's birth, this data being, as one would expect, highly classified, and therefore available only to regular commuters on the 17:34 to Bognor Regis! See www.wolframalpha.com and try it out for yourself.
Euan's presentation was followed by informal discussion. A highly ingenious programme called Prey http://bootlog.org/prey was mentioned, which appears to be able to trace a laptop which has been stolen, with a photo of the thief, and other data which may enable the location of the machine to be identified. There was also mention of a programme called Memory Maker, which allows photos and graphics to be arranged in such a way that the accompanying text can be written around it (as for a book, or magazine article). Unfortunately, I do not have a web reference for this programme - maybe someone can provide one in a comment.
JSR
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