Dorchester — Aug 12th 2025

David M showed a few simple uses of spreadsheets, starting by suggesting a list much more convenient than typically Word. With a bit of help from David P. and Mick, Dave even managed to get a 2D line graph showing changes in the fuel consumption of his car, rather than his earlier opt-out of using a 2D scatter chart. Whilst, for many, MS Excel is the default spreadsheet, the built-in Apple Numbers is very user-friendly and has more advanced features than most of us will need, though Mick showed a group of spreadsheets working together to demonstrate this point.

We compared Apple’s iCloud/iCloud Drive with Dropbox and whilst the conclusion, reached with the aid of Deep Seek, is that Apple is the best choice for us typical personal Apple users, several members praised the benefits of the Dropbox free version. Earlier uses seem to get 5 Gb of storage, though the current offer is only 2Gb.

David gave a brief explanation of his installation of Fibre to the House, where the fibre is brought to the house in the same underground tubing as the original phone line. Following advice from Trevor Craven, he had connected the VOIP telephone output to the redundant phone network so that all the phone sockets in the house can still be used.

John Cadd, tall ship photographer, ended the evening by telling us how the very beautiful tall ship Shtandart had been refused entry in the Tall Ships Races in Aberdeen, Scotland and the European port in July, because the captain is Russian. The language flying between the captain and race organisers was colourful to put mildly and the ship sailed the course anyway.

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