2009 – May 12th Minutes

Opened: 19:00

Chair: Cheryl Robertson

Minutes: Cheryl Robertson

Apologies: John Feltham, Les Hyland

Present: Cheryl Robertson, Peter Neuhaus, Ray Mead, Lorna Mead, Mick Devlin, Betty McClellan, Nicki Crowther, Barry Bamford, Judy Leong, Joe Leong,, Bill O’Donnell, Rod Aisthorpe, Dorothy Lucas.

ROUND TABLE

Mick Devlin: Reports meeting someone who has just bought a MacBook, changing from PCs and he has let him know about our group. He said that IPod Touch and Itunes U are great for podcasts. He reports that certain lecturers like the iPod Touch for their course materials, but that JCU is banning use of iTunesU (which was confirmed by Bill O’Donnell). To access ITunesU go to ITunes store and find U where there are lessons on all sorts of things.

Peter Neuhaus: His optical drive failed. Of 50 CDs he has the Mac stopped recognizing all but 2 of them. Checked in a friend’s Mac and they were fine there. Spoke to Mac Doctors who suggested he was using scratched disks! But he ended up with a new drive, under warranty, and extended it to three years. His children enjoy using his MAC and do everything on it except their homework. They find that having to transfer their homework files to a PC to save to a flash drive is too slow. (They have to take them to school to use on Windows PCs).

  • Consensus of members, confirmed by Bill, is that you do not have to convert files and save them via a PC. Flash sticks are formatted for Windows anyway. Just download from the MAC to the stick and take that to school – it will work.

Dorothy Lucas: When she downloads video clips from the internet or emails, they start and stop and she wonders why, is she doing something wrong.

  • This is simply the data downloading and if your broadband speed is not as fast as the playspeed of the video it will stop and start. The answer is to click pause and watch the status bar – when the video is finished loading you can click Play and it will play without stopping. A discussion of data download speeds and bandwidths followed explaining how this works and affects your system when accessing videos. Useful point to note is that when comparing data speeds you have to know whether the rate is kilobytes or kilobits. If it uses ‘kB’ then it is kilobits. A kB is 10 times a kb.

Also has a problem with Photoshop when she asks it to save images. But without the exact message and steps it is not possible to give a definitive solution. Also finds that her Mac sometimes refuses to close down unless she uses the off button. All these problems could stem from Photoshop as she has updated from CS3 to CS4.

  • Should go to the Home Folder, find Library, Adobe Photoshop Preferences (plist), delete that, empty trash, and do a Restart. This will revert CS4 to default preferences and clear out any confusing preferences files from the previous program. You will have to set up your preferences again, and you will find that anything that was already working for you such as the way you arrange your screen will have reverted to the default but once you use it again that will be set up again.

Judy Leong: Entourage email system closed unexpectedly a few times lately and has changed some of her settings. Bill said that again this was a case of corrupted preferences files. Judy had resolved it herself.

Joe Leong: Joe has been sorting years of images into folders by year and had some on an older computer and some on another. He wanted to put them all together in iPhoto on one computer so he used a firewire but it would not let him transfer the required files.

  • Bill said this was because he was trying to transfer by Library instead of by image files themselves. The older Library could not go to the new system as a Library. The answer is to open the Library and select the image files and then they would transfer by firewire to the computer with the newer iPhoto.

20:20 Tea break

PRESENTATION

Barry Bamford presented a demonstration on using linked text boxes in Pages to arrange text and images. The presentation generated a lot of interest and discussion of various methods of wrapping and arranging text around images and objects. Thank you Barry.

Presentation for June

Bill O’Donnell will do a presentation on using Garage Band.

WORKSHOP

Judy posed a query re workshop for next week; do we need the computer room or could we do it in this room (our meeting venue), as we use our own computers not the school’s? If we do the workshop there we need a password as well as the key so it is easier to use this room.

  • As long as we email everyone and let them know it is this room that would be fine.

Meeting Closed: 21:10