2009 – June 10th. Minutes
Present: Cheryl Robertson, , Ray Mead, Lorna Mead, Betty McClellan, Barry Bamford, Judy Leong, Joe Leong,, Bill O’Donnell, Rod Aisthorpe, Dorothy Lucas, Christopher Griggs, Barbara Keen, Les Hyland, Penny Vastianos.
Apologies: Mick Devlin, Nicki Crowther
ANNOUNCEMENT
John Feltham – a new Apple reseller will be opening up in Townsville. More details available by next meeting.
ROUND TABLE
Chris Griggs
· Has received an offer from the people who sell “VUESCAN”. Groups can have a free trial copy which he will review and report on once he receives it.
Judy Leong
· What does the information about a new upgrade for OSX mean? Bill’s answer that 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is about to come out and the current/latest version of 10.5 which is 10.5.7 now only works with IntelMacs. Judy is using Tiger’s highest version 10.4.11, has Leopard too. As long as a Mac is Intel it can take Snow Leopard. If you have an iMac that means it is an Intel Mac.
· Received Bigpond enews which mentioned ‘something about disabling SSID broacasting’ and what does it mean? (Dorothy added that she had the same). Bill explained that it is for people who have a wireless modem, and especially if they live in a multi-unit place where others also have wireless modem systems. If you broadcast your SSID, others can see your network online and operate on it, using up your data allowance unless you secure your network.
Betty McLellan
· Wants one of the CDs Bill has with the 10.5.7 upgrade, which is 700Mb (too much for some members to download off the internet). Bill has several copies which he downloaded and burned to disk, quite legitimately as these are free updates.
· Has had a problem sending attached documents by email. The same documents sent to a number of people and were fine when opened by the recipient and yet some received the documents with the extension ‘dat’ and they could not open them. Bill explained that the problem was at the recipient’s end and most likely because they have a Windows mail program such as Outlook or Outlook Express. They should be able to open them by righclicking and choosing an application. These mismatches can occur when sending .doc items via email and iit can be avoided by sending them as PDFs. However Betty is sharing these documents and wants the recipients to work on them which they can’t with a PDF.
· When anyone receives files which won’t open, right click and you will get a menu box which gives a list of applications which you can try to open it and you will usually find one to open the document.
· There are 2 advantages to sending documents as PDF: a) the data is a more compressed format and makes a smaller file to send and b) if you have included any tables, graphics or columns of figures they will be seen exactly as you created it and won’t be messed up at the other end. Files will also display with the same fonts and colours you used whereas Word and other documents are not always displayed with the same ones on the recipient’s system.
· Bill advised not to send any files with the extension ‘docx’ as these are Office 2207/8 files and can not be opened by recipients who have earlier versions. Always save them as ‘.doc’ files when sending them out and there will not be any problems. He also demonstrated how to save documents as PDFs.
Barry Bamford
· Thanked Bill and John for helping him over the weekend, to sort out his email and some other problems. He now understands the difference between accounts, boxes and folders.
· Like most people has received large numbers of ‘Commonwealth Bank’ phishing emails and wants to do something about it. It was explained that he should go to his email Preferences and set up a rule to block those messages, although that does not stop his system downloading them, merely hides them in the junk. One can contact the Commonwealth Bank, they have a reporting email address hoax@cba.com.au but the Bank is already aware of the problem and will have been chasing the authorities to track down the server/s and block it. However these operators keep moving the operations and are almost impossible to stop completely. It is worth their while to operate this sort of criminal scam because there always some people who are foolish enough to respond and they end up losing money to these people.
A discussion followed regarding ways of minimising the nuisance. The ‘Bounce’ feature in MAIL gets rid of the message but has the disadvantage that it confirms your email address to the sender. You can get your spam filter to block them. Bill showed us how authorities start tracking the real senders. Go to Mail Preferences/Viewing/Show Header and select “ALL”. That will put the complete details of where the email came from originally. The short version only shows the truncated information and it looks like it came from some other address which is hiding the true origins.
The main thing to remember is NEVER open this sort of message and NEVER click on any links, even though on a Mac your browser will warn you that you are asking to go to a blacklisted site (if it has been investigated). If you think your bank may have genuinely contacted you by email, go to your bank, or phone their contact number off their genuine website to check.
Less Hyland
· Has been using Pages for a long time but in his current version he could not find the tool in Inspector to make a text box. Bill said to go to SHAPES from the icons on the top menu bar, then to Inspector. He demonstrated that you choose a shape for the text box, and can them customise it from within the Inspector to choose the colours, lines and other details. He also pointed out that Pages recognizes PDF documents and can edit them. John Feltham has tutorial for Pages.
Lorna Mead
· Wants to know if anyone has experience with the Apple program called Aperture. Cheryl Robertson has had it since it was introduced. It is really intended for professional photographers and particularly for working with RAW files.
· USB Broadband Wireless Modem - Wanted to know if she could use her USB modem with both the Mac laptop and her Blackberry, but it is not possible.
PRESENTATION
Bill O’Donnell demonstrated how convert movies on a VHS cassette (analog data) to digital to import them to iDVD using a digital camera as the link from video player to computer.
NEXT PRESENTATION
Chris Griggs will report on the software “VueScan”.
Meeting closed at 9:35pm.
