Bournemouth — May 20th 2014

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The main event of the evening was a talk by John Hooper on FaceTime, including a comparison with Skype. John started by outlining what is needed to use FaceTime. It works over a wired or WiFi internet connection (although can now be used over 3G with some carriers). It is really aimed at Apple devices (Macs from Snow Leopard onwards, mobile devices from iOS7).

You also need to ensure that your Address Book… Read more…

Dorchester — May 13th 2014

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John opened the meeting with 21 members present.

Trevor gave an account of Audacity, the freeware sound editing programme. He illustrated this using early vinyl recordings of New Orleans Jazz, and how Audacity is used to remove faults from old vinyl recordings. Audacity Help is good and a useful guide to how to use the programme. Trevor explained the rather complicated main screen and demonstrated how to remove blank spaces. The Effects menu… Read more…

Beaminster — May 6th 2014

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favourite iPad apps was the theme for this months meeting. John and Robin showing us a varied range of their most used apps. Despite a low turn out there was a good exchange of info between members with their favourite iPad uses!
… Read more…

Salisbury — Apr 30th 2014

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Salisbury Group Meeting
30/04/2014
Number of members present 9

This meeting’s theme, Utilities, where they are, what do they do, the ones you can alter and those you should not touch., John, Mick and Brian participated in the explanations with lots of questions and feedback
There was also some discussion on movies in ‘Aperture’.

The Utilities disscussed were

Grapher, Have… Read more…

Fareham — Apr 26th 2014

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Andy introduced to the 6 members the techniques available at system boot time to help diagnose and solve problems (not that there are any problems with OSX - honest).

What is involved is pressing a combination of keys during the boot up or IPL process.
This then enables the user to perform various diagnostic actions to either remove the problem or to bypass the problem.
Apple have provide description of the process… Read more…

Bournemouth — Apr 15th 2014

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Lionel surveyed the different ways of doing backups, confident in the knowledge that we all do regular backups one way or another, said he with a knowing smile! A common method is to use Time Machine, or 3rd party software such as SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner to back up to an external hard disk. While reliable in use, there were hazards such as burglary, fire and flood as well as accidental deletion of a vital… Read more…

Dorchester — Apr 8th 2014

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The meeting was opened by David with 22 members present.

Martin began proceedings with a discussion on Mavericks and reasons to upgrade to this. All but five present used this. Security is a good reason to upgrade, but there are many others. The features of each version are summarised on Wikipedia. 29% of Windows users are still using Windows XP. Windows is difficult to update. Mac only so if users customise software, or… Read more…

Beaminster — Apr 1st 2014

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The April 1st meeting at Beaminster was, by the standards of the group, quite small with 15 people attending. We were given another of Mick Burrell’s crystal clear presentations, showing us how to set up both iCloud and Dropbox on Macs and mobile devices and then how to synchronise or swap files between any of our machines. Saving files in these locations allows them to be accessed not only by their owner, but… Read more…

Fareham — Mar 29th 2014

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John Hooper gave a talk to the five other members on the use of keystroke shortcuts and other techniques to improve productivity when using the Mac.
The Mac UI (User Interface) enables the user to achieve a given function in several ways and given the number of attendees we all had our own preferred way of achieving a given result. However on several occasions John introduced us to even more efficient ways of completing… Read more…

Salisbury — Mar 26th 2014

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A very lively meeting where Annie gave us a splendid demo of an really useful OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application and how she is able to make a good use of it to help her work Annie is now using one of the latest - PDF OCR X = and put it through its paces for us where she explained how it can be used to word search a PDF file or convert to a text file to… Read more…