Dorchester — Mar 11th 2014
Euan began proceedings by showing two films which he had prepared, the first taken at the Dorset County Museum of a demonstration of a 3-D printer, which formed part of a PhD research project exploring the application of this technology to enhance the museum experience, and which was being used to reproduce archaeological artefacts using a plastics medium.
The second film was a 30 minute rapid survey of 3-D printing technology, including its place in the general history of printing technology and its applications to many areas of life, including veterinary and medical science, and also architecture. 3-D printing may make use of a great variety of materials which form the finished product, including plastics, metals, and concrete. It may also rely upon scanning processes to provide a 3-D representation of what is to be printed, and Euan’s film showed a number of ways of achieving this. Alternatively, his film also showed that Computer Assisted Design techniques can be used to generate a ‘master’. He drew on a very wide variety of sources to illustrate the various aspects covered, and the film was very informative, as well as visually appealing.
He then showed how iMovie 10 was used to produce the film and the various tools which are used to edit the material.
Mark then gave an overview of the WAMUG website. - including new Chat page and various Calendar features. When a member logs in to the website, a link is revealed below the Calendar which enables the member to subscribe to the WAMUG Calendar.
David and Euan then spoke about backing up, and of the utility of having a ‘clone’ back up in addition to that provided by, for example, ‘Time Machine’ - and also the importance of having one or the other if there is material on one’s Mac which is thought worthy of preserving! Two programmes are available to make a clone. Super Duper can be used, and is free if the Smart Back up facility is not used, otherwise it is chargeable. (Essentially, Smart Backup is simply a device for saving time.) Alternatively Carbon Copy Cloner has a free 30 day trial and is then chargeable. Discussion followed on how clones compare with Time Machine backups.
Q&A Session:
Pages is now missing the ability to link text boxes and flow text from one text box to the next, which is regretted. The good news is that Apple is now gradually incorporating those features which had disappeared into new versions of iWork.
Question posed for a friend who is thinking about the iPad, and is asking about PC compatibility. This was not fully answered, as there is a lack of experience in this area!
SR
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